14 Of Ina Garten's Favorite Foods

You likely have your favorite recipes from celebrity chefs that you always make (or dream about making), but have you ever stopped to think about what those chefs like to eat? They have their own favorite recipes that they love to make for themselves, as well as go-to ingredients and prepared foods. Ina Garten has been very open about her favorite foods, from the condiments she may use in dressings to the particular fast food chain that she'll eat at when she's on tour.

While she leaves making coffee at home to her husband, Jeffrey, she has provided a wealth of information to fans on how to make the dishes she adores. She has favorite brands that she'll recommend before quickly noting what readers can substitute if they can't find her preferred item. Put simply, she has her favorites and wants everyone to enjoy them, too. With that in mind, here's a list of 14 of Ina Garten's favorite foods.

Everyone's got at least one favorite recipe to make regardless of meal type or course, and Ina Garten is no exception. She even has a favorite among all the recipes that she developed, and that's her French apple tart — and what a wonderful choice that is. In a 2024 interview with TODAY, Garten emphasized how "simple and elegant" the dessert was, thanks to the crisp texture of the crust and the sweetness of the apples. The recipe really is simple, especially if you have a food processor as you'll use that to mix the dough. After making the dough and letting it rest in the refrigerator, you'll cut up the apples, arrange them on the rolled-out dough, and then sprinkle everything with sugar and butter. Bake, brush the finished tart with some jelly, and that's it — you've got your apple tart ready to serve.

Of course, if you're not able to or not willing to bake the tart from scratch, there is a Garten-approved store-bought substitute: Trader Joe's French apple tart. This is a seasonal product, so you'll have to keep checking your local Trader Joe's to see if it returns toward the end of the year. When you can find it, Garten suggests warming it and then dressing it up with caramel sauce and vanilla ice cream.

Fans adore Ina Garten for her emphasis on using store-bought ingredients if preferred. She does have standards, of course, and has said that she is not into using plain canned tomatoes — she thinks canned San Marzano tomatoes are acceptable because of their better flavor.

San Marzano tomatoes are elongated plum tomatoes (think of them as longer, thinner Roma tomatoes). They're prized for their flavor and for having just the right amount of acidity. When canned, these tomatoes have a Protected Designation of Origin seal from the EU, or "Denominazione di Origine Protetta" in Italian. Only two distinct varieties of tomatoes grown specifically in the Agro Sarnese-Nocerino valley can get this seal: "San Marzano 2" and "Kiros." Like other foods with this seal, the food itself can be grown outside the original area, including in the U.S., giving rise to "San Marzano-style" tomatoes. This has created confusion.

If you want to be sure you're getting the actual product, do some detective work. True San Marzano tomatoes will be canned or in glass jars, carry both a "DOP San Marzano" seal and another seal from the Consorzio di Tutela del Pomodoro San Marzano dell'Agro Sarnese-Nocerino, and have a consortium number. Fake labels do exist, so once you see those seals, look at the description and the price. The tomatoes should be either whole or sliced (called filets), and never crushed, minced, or pureed. They also aren't going to be cheap.

Ina Garten's favorite appetizer is her tomato crostini with whipped feta, a simple combination of feta that's been whipped with olive oil, lemon juice, and salt and pepper, spread over toasted baguette slices, and topped with tomatoes, shallots, garlic, olive oil, and more salt and pepper. On her Instagram page, Garten wrote that the combination of the different textures and flavors was perfect, comparing the crostini's flavors to summer. If you have her "Barefoot Contessa Foolproof" cookbook, this is the cover recipe.

This appetizer looks a lot like bruschetta, but before you start calling it that, you need to know about a key difference: how the bread is prepared. Both crostini and bruschetta use slices of baguettes as the base for the dish, but typically, crostini is toasted, and bruschetta is grilled — at least that's supposed to be the difference. You'll find a number of food experts claiming bruschetta can use toasted or grilled bread. However, recipes on sites like that of the official Tuscany tourist organization specifically call for grilled bread in the instructions, even though the title they use has the word "roasted." When you next make something like this, if you use toasted bread, call it crostini and try Garten's recipe.

You'd expect someone's last meal to be a large one with all their favorite foods, ready for one last taste. Or maybe the meal would be a fancy one, filled with foods they'd never had the chance to try before. For Ina Garten, her last meal would be neither; it would be a hot dog from a shop that's unfortunately closed. And maybe that same shop's fries.

Garten's favorite hot dog and fries come from Frenchie To Go, a.k.a. FTG, a Parisian cafe that closed in 2023 after 10 years in operation. It was run by Gregory Marchand and featured an American-style menu with sandwiches, pastries, and beer. The restaurant received rave reviews, was a trendsetter when it opened, and was sorely missed when it closed. The hot dog may no longer be available, but in April 2024, Marchand opened Altro Frenchie, which serves Italian-inspired food.

Many recipes call for unsweetened baking chocolate, but Ina Garten eschews this basic block of cacao when making chocolate desserts. Her favorite is bittersweet Lindt chocolate, which has enough sugar in it that you could use the chocolate both for baking and garnishing. She's been such a longtime fan of the chocolate that at one point, she admitted that she didn't remember why she had chosen to use it in the first place. As she told Katie Couric in an interview, however, she and her staff held a taste test for different brands of bittersweet chocolate, and Lindt won.

Lindt's bittersweet chocolate bar is available online and it's divided into smaller squares for easier use. If you're wondering why the dark chocolate bars you find in the supermarket are simply called dark and not bittersweet, that's because bittersweet chocolate is a type of dark chocolate, and not the other way around. Dark chocolate includes semisweet and other types that have higher percentages of cacao than bittersweet.

Ina Garten has a favorite cheeseburger — we're just not sure exactly which one it is. She has said that her favorite cheeseburger comes from a restaurant called Bourbon Steak, which is located inside the Four Seasons hotel. However, that restaurant has two different cheeseburgers, and she's never specified which one she liked to order. Some have tried to find out, but the restaurant apparently wouldn't say which one it was.

The two on offer are the Prime Steak Burger and the Wagyu Double Burger. One writer tried the cheeseburgers himself and wasn't impressed. He said the cheeseburgers tasted good, but there just wasn't anything that seemed to set them apart from other cheeseburgers — but that's his opinion. People have different tastes, and at least one of those cheeseburgers is something that Garten thinks is delicious. If you try them and decide they aren't your favorite, just remember that this doesn't mean they're bad. It just means you and Garten prefer different flavors and textures for cheeseburgers.

Bourbon Steak has got Ina Garten's favorite cheeseburger, but what about fast food in general? Garten has stated that she doesn't really eat fast food unless she's in California on a book tour. In that case, a trip to In-N-Out is in order — and she's not shy about it, either. In 2018, Garten posted a picture to her Instagram account showing her and actress Jennifer Garner at an In-N-Out in Costa Mesa, California, and both were eating burgers. Fans adored the shot, and both Garten and Garner looked happy to be there.

Garten hasn't been open about what she specifically likes to order there or if she gets any of the secret-menu items, but the burger she's holding in that 2018 picture looks like it might have some cheese on it. No fries are in the picture, by the way, so there aren't any clues about what she thinks of that widely criticized menu item.

Cauliflower has been one of the darlings of the cooking world for a few years, with everything from pizza crust to rice getting a cauliflower-based version. Ina Garten's favorite lunch is an open-faced cauliflower toast sandwich that she featured in her cookbook, "Cook Like a Pro." However, she doesn't use the cauliflower as a substitute bread base. Instead, she mixes roasted and chopped cauliflower with mascarpone and Gruyere cheese, prosciutto, and spices, places them on slices of toasted bread, and then broils everything for a few minutes.

Garten noted in the cauliflower-toast episode of "Barefoot Contessa" that the bread needs to be a hearty bread that can hold the toppings. She used a round country-style loaf and said that something like plain white bread would be too flimsy. She also warns in her recipe that broiling the toasts doesn't take long, and you'll need to keep a watchful eye on them at that stage.

Ina Garten has two favorite types of butter, and which one she uses depends on why she's using them. For eating on toast, Beurre de Baratte Demi-Sel is her butter of choice. This French butter contains flaked sea salt, although there's an unsalted version available as well. The butter is so highly prized that it's even sometimes given as a gift for foodies, and its maker, Rodolphe Le Meunier, was named the top cheesemonger in both France and the world in 2007.

Butter that you use for cooking and butter that you use for eating should not necessarily be the same. The butter you use for eating should be one that can stand on its own with little accompaniment. Beurre de Baratte Demi-Sel is a terrific — if expensive — example. The butter that you use for cooking is different. Sometimes, you want that buttery flavor shining through, but you also want to be aware of the salt content. Often, opting for unsalted so that you have better control over the level of saltiness in the final dish. Garten follows this rule and uses Cabot Creamery unsalted butter for cooking. On her website's "Ask Ina" section, a man from Alabama asked about her favorite cooking butter, and while she did say it was Cabot specifically, she also noted that using unsalted butter in general is most important.

Breakfast can be a simple affair or one that contains total comfort food. For Ina Garten, one of her favorite breakfasts is a combination of the two, and it's a cinch to make. As she mentioned on her website in the "Ask Ina" section, she loves taking quick-cooking oats and microwaving them with a cup of water. Once the oats are done, she adds a little salt and milk plus butter and maple syrup. She then wrote that this was her favorite breakfast.

If you want to make this yourself, try to stick to Garten's ingredients as closely as possible — especially with the type of oats. You can make rolled oats in the microwave, too, if you don't have quick oats. However, rolled oats will take longer and need more water to achieve the same consistency that you'd get with quick oats. Garten microwaves her quick oats for 4 minutes, which is a long time; normally, you'd need only 1.5 to 2 minutes. To achieve the same consistency using rolled oats as you'd get with Garten's 4-minute quick oats, the rolled oats likely would have to be cooked for several minutes more.

If you'd like to see an amazing video of Ina Garten's favorite French dessert, check out her Instagram post on profiteroles. These light pastries — also called cream puffs — can contain anything from pastry cream to whipped cream to your choice of soft, sweet filling. Garten's preferred filling is vanilla ice cream, and the profiteroles are topped with chocolate sauce.

While store-bought is no doubt fine — in fact, Garten recommends Häagen-Dazs ice cream for these — you really want to make the chocolate sauce from scratch. Garten's version contains not only the basic cream and chocolate, but also honey and coffee. Coffee helps bring out the chocolate flavor, and honey adds more sweetness to the sauce. Regardless of what you use for the chocolate sauce, the dessert is a luscious combination of cold and warm, and creamy and crispy. Add a garnish of whipped cream like you see in her Instagram video, if you want.

Instead of baking cookies, Ina Garten sometimes needs to use already baked cookies in her recipes, such as her mocha chocolate icebox cake. Layers of thin, crispy chocolate chip cookies and mocha cream form an amazing dessert. While you could use your favorite cookies if you wanted to, Garten is clear in her recipe that she recommends Tate's Bake Shop chocolate chip cookies. She not only recommends them on her website, but also in her book, "Barefoot Contessa How Easy Is That?"

Tate's cookies are easy to find, but if you can't get them for whatever reason, Garten suggests using any thin, crispy chocolate chip cookie — preferably one that's 2 inches in diameter. However, the crispy texture of the cookie is more important than the diameter. You can add more cookies if you're using ones with smaller diameters, but you won't get as good a result if you use soft cookies. In icebox cakes, the cookies absorb moisture from the creamy filling, and that causes the cookies to soften. If you start with already soft cookies, the final result isn't going to have the best texture (You may still like it, but it won't be what it's supposed to be). A crisp cookie like Tate's will soften, but still have great texture.

Cooks often have preferred spices and herbs that show up in their cooking again and again. Sometimes, they'll have a favorite condiment as well, and for Ina Garten, that's mustard. In an exclusive interview with Bon Appetit at Garten's home, she names Grey Poupon Dijon and Maille whole-grain as her two favorite types.

In fact, Garten stated that both mustards work well together in recipes like vinaigrettes, and she doesn't appear to favor one over the other. Both use similar types of mustard seeds, with texture being a major difference between the two. She told Bon Appetit that she liked the flavor of mustard and appreciated whole-grain for its natural look, when foods look like what they actually are. Grey Poupon is available in most stores, and while Maille may not be as common on shelves, you can easily find it online.

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In that same interview with Bon Appetit, Ina Garten calls Texmati rice her favorite, particularly from the RiceSelect brand. She notes that she uses a number of rice varieties from this same brand, too. Texmati is a domestic rice that has the same fragrance as basmati rice — that toasty, popcorn-like smell that rice fans adore.

Texmati is a variety of rice that's a cross between basmati and American long-grain varieties. It was created at Louisiana State University and further developed by a Texas-based rice company called RiceTec, and it's well-suited to growing in North America, where the climate isn't good for growing traditional basmati rice. It was controversial when introduced because basmati fans considered it appropriation of rice that was part of India's culture, rather than an agricultural innovation for a different climate. Regardless of how others see it, Garten says she loves the flavor and quality of Texmati, and you'll find it in many of her recipes.