Rachael Ray says it's strange to film cooking show during coronavirus quarantine: 'I'm alone in the kitchen except for the cameras'

Megan Sims
·4 min read

Racheal Ray has, like the rest of us, found herself having to adjust to this new normal during the coronavirus quarantine. And with the filming at a studio in front of a live audience is not possible, the cooking show personality has been bringing her energetic cooking style to fans through other means.

In an interview with BUILD Series, Ray talked about how different it has been posting videos of herself cooking on her Instagram from her kitchen.

“It’s so weird for so many reasons,” she admitted. “It's not weird that I talk to myself when I cook, ‘cause I did that for 20 years and I still do it on 30 Minute Meals. I'm alone in the kitchen except for the cameras and that's why I could never work with a director that says ‘Camera one and camera two,’ that he would have to say, or she would have to say the name of the person because I couldn't get used to like working without humans.”

With just her husband John Cusimano and their 15-year-old pit bull, Isaboo, as her audience and crew, Ray spoke fondly of her time in the not-so-distant past working nonstop at the studio.

“I never leave the floor, we shoot three shows a day, and I would spend all my time hanging out with people, telling jokes and just doing behind-the-scenes stuff and they’d be like, ‘Rachael, we do have other shows to do,’” she says. “But you know, it was so fun and it was so energetic in a different way. Now, the trippy part for me is ... there’s no applause, there’s no Joey Kola, our fantastic comedian, who’s our warm-up guy, egging people into cheering. Nothing I say is funny.”

The talk show veteran said that she donates excess food to City Harvest and Food Bank every week during her regular tapings. She recently announced that her organizations were giving $4 million in donations to help food banks and animal welfare programs.

And speaking of food, the chef went on to make a surprising admission – that she rarely eats the things that she cooks on the show.

“One day, John and I taped seven different things,” she said. “So we did seven meals and I didn't eat any of them because when you teach it or you perform it, you lose interest in it ...It's truly blurring the lines between my private time that I would have at home and what always felt like work, and my job was to get other people excited about going into the kitchen, not to get them excited about what I was going to have for dinner.”

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