23 Underutilized Ingredients Celebrity Chefs Swear By

Celebrity chef stardom is a modern phenomenon. Our competitive nature chases thrilling cooking contest shows while our multitasking tendencies attract culinary demonstrations to de-stress from daily responsibilities. Celebrity chefs have the unique ability to bridge a gap between entertainment and mastery, bringing us into their own intimate and personal world with a passion so strong, it oozes through the television screen and establishes trust between chefs and their doting audiences.

As Time Magazine examines, celebrity chefs carry great influence. We look to them for advice, cooking tips, and ingredient explanations. We aspire to be experts just like them, so all it takes is one magazine feature or tweet to prompt a home cook's desire for the latest and greatest high-speed blender. Some chefs vouch for products and others for activism, but no matter the message, we listen. 

For the sake of time, we've done the research for you and constructed a thorough list of celebrity chef tips with revealing promise. Here is our top selection of underutilized ingredients that celebrity chefs swear by.

Made from ground-up sesame seeds, tahini paste imparts a seductive creaminess, upfront nuttiness, and pleasant bitter undertone to the beloved healthy chickpea spread, aka hummus. But hummus barely scratches the tahini surface.

Canadian chef and Top Chef Canada host Eden Grinshpan can't name an ingredient she loves more, and her tahini passion might just change the Middle Eastern condiment's U.S. trajectory. Full of praise for the sesame paste, Grinshpan shares, "Once you go down the tahini road, there's no turning back" (via Coveteur). Her most recent cookbook "Eating Out Loud" honors Grinshpan's tahini enthusiasm. Recipes for garlicky tahini, charred tahini, and green tahini push the established boundaries. But when it comes to sweet treats, Grinshpan tells Chatelaine that the salted halva chocolate chip cookies are her favorite creation. Made from sesame paste and honey, halva adds nutty, marshmallowy air pockets to compliment melted chocolate chunks, tahini-infused dough, and a flaky salt finish.

Just like any other ingredient, no two tahini pastes will taste the same. Ethiopian, Israeli, and Lebanese sesame seeds all impart a unique regional flavor that influences the final tahini product (via Bon Appétit). Effusive bitterness can overpower tahini's nuanced qualities, so finding a smooth paste with a pleasantly light bitter flavor is often a good quality indicator.

Simmering pots full of rusty orange-red tomato sauce have plenty of uses, but Rachael Ray has a go-to tomato product for all her saucy needs that doesn't get enough love, at least not here in the U.S. On The Rachael Ray Show, the chef explains that passata "is made from fresh, ripe tomatoes that are ground and put into a bottle." 

The main difference between tomato passata, or passata di Pomodoro in Italian, and tomato sauce lies in its uncooked nature. Although some cooks claim passata can also consist of cooked and pureed tomatoes, most agree that it stands out as being uncooked (via The Kitchn). It's also important to note that no added seasonings or vegetables are mixed into passata's tomato base.

If Ray is cooking with tomato product, odds are tomato passata is involved. Unlike many store-bought tomato sauces, Ray points out that passata doesn't contain any added sugar. Recipes such as her garlicky tomato sauce incorporate passata as the stand-alone tomato ingredient while her "You won't be single for long" penne alla vodka accentuates the puree's naturally sweet juiciness in conjunction with more toothsome canned tomatoes.

José Andrés is both a chef and a humanitarian, but feeding people is at the forefront of all culinary outreach avenues. As the founder of World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit organization that provides food disaster relief, Andrés knows a thing or two about the impact of a freshly cooked meal. Wasting any food at all goes against his benevolent spirit, so Andrés is sharing a passionate petition to save day-old bread chunks and use their aged character to create culinary magic.

Andrés shared one of his favorite ways to cook with stale bread inspired by his Spanish upbringing, as part of Earth Day's #NoFoodWasted challenge run by MSNBC in 2015. Migas is a typical Spanish dish made from stale bread, lots of olive oil, and onion. Andrés shared his rift on the classic, featuring migas with paprika-studded chorizo and sweet grapes (via Twitter). Stale bread chunks work to chorizo's oily advantage, soaking up all the flavorful greasy bits. 

Andrés also recommends using up extra bread in soups, such as sopa de ajo or Castilian garlic soup (via Today Show). Cold soups like gazpacho and Andalusian salmorejo resuscitate day-old bread with a little water before squeezing out the excess and blending in juicy summer tomatoes for an unanticipated creaminess.

Alex Guarnaschelli made headlines showing off her high-end kitchen to fans (via Food & Wine). Amidst the impressive gadgets and decor, she has an entire shelf dedicated to sauerkraut and pickles. With such a vast pickle collection, you can bet the chef makes a point of using up leftover brine. She doesn't limit its use to cocktails or consuming it plain for numerous health benefits (per Healthline). Instead, she incorporates the brine into upcycled recipe components.

Guarnaschelli shares an easy recipe for salad vinaigrette on Instagram, using leftover brine for an added touch of acid and salt. For her "door-of-the-fridge-vinaigrette," she combines one part each of pickle juice and balsamic vinegar, three parts olive oil, and a healthy spoonful of Dijon mustard for thickness. Guarnaschelli also notes that she uses the brine to re-pickle new vegetables or to add a splash of salt and acid to marinades (via Twitter).

Chef and former Top Chef contestant Richard Blais is known for his molecular creations. But according to Food & Wine, gellan gum and liquid nitrogen aren't the only two pantry staples Blais swears by. He believes everyone should have a hefty duck fat supply, claiming that "Anything cooked in duck fat has a flavor that you can't get from oil or clarified butter."

Blais recommends either roasting a duck and saving the rendered fat or buying it from the grocery store. Either way, Bon Appétit likens the excess oil to liquid gold and notes that it can be stored in the fridge for weeks or in the freezer for months. Duck confit is a classic French preparation, and Blais won't argue against cooking duck legs in their own fat. His San Diego Restaurant Juniper and Ivy features a rotating menu including items such as a kale Caesar salad with duck confit.

A well-stocked pantry isn't Blais' only endearing quality; he has a sense of humor too. On his website, Blais claims duck fat makes up half the secret to his perfectly coiffed and iconically styled hair.

Alice Waters is the brilliant mind behind Chez Panisse, but her impact echoes way beyond the award-winning restaurant's square footage. For over five decades, Waters has built a food empire with fresh local produce at the center of it all (via National Endowment for the Humanities). Among the abundant options, green garlic is one of Waters' favorite spring-time farmer's market finds. According to Food52, green garlic is essentially immature garlic. Pulled from the ground before the bulbs can dry out, it graces market stalls with great variability — some resembling green onion and others with identifiable cloves. A pleasant mild garlic flavor sets this early bird crop apart from its older siblings.

An excerpt from Waters' book "Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Book," highlights her deep respect for the simple intricacies of cooking with garlic. She discovered its range of flavors following a fleeting season of pre-mature harvests yielding young and delicious green garlic. It's a pivotal ingredient in Chez Panisse's potato soup, and she shares, "I loved the taste of that soup — it was so pure, a really gentle flavor," adding "You always want garlic to taste like that" (via The Daily Beast). James Beard was among the first to taste that soup, but the passion behind her green garlic appreciation lives on in the hearts of all who Waters fed.

Nigella Lawson's cooking philosophy is designed to fulfill and satisfy the cook — not just those who dine. British Food writer Bee Wilson praises Lawson's "How to Eat" cooking method, sharing "It was the first book to make the case so persuasively that home cooking did not need to apologize for not being restaurant cooking" (via The New York Times).

In 2014, an admirer wrote to the chef asking about a very particular UK ingredient — cold pressed rapeseed oil. According to Lawson's website, small batches of rapeseed are crushed with a stone to extract oil. The temperature cannot exceed around 80 degrees Fahrenheit to preserve the natural flavor in the final oil product. North American rapeseed oil, on the other hand, uses high-pressure machinery and high heat to extract the oil, resulting in a flavorless canola oil-like product.

BBC Good Food compares cold pressed rapeseed oil to "British olive oil." With the seed's natural pepperiness left intact, Lawson recommends using the "gloriously mustardy and nutty" oil as you would extra virgin olive oil — in a vinaigrette and drizzled on vegetables. Or try the satisfying breakfast she shares on her Facebook page: toast with cold pressed rapeseed oil and soft-boiled eggs.

Andrea Nguyen from Viet World Kitchen is a tofu connoisseur, as her cookbook "Asian Tofu" confirms. The book documents her long-standing dedication to uplifting the soybean product, and although her knowledge of Asian food is vast, she has a special place in her culinary heart for tofu.

The Kitchn interviewed Nguyen, not about tofu in general but with a specific focus on silken tofu — an underutilized ingredient in many parts of the world. According to Nguyen, unlike firm tofu, its texture is soft and pudding-like. Thanks to its production which uses extra rich soy milk, silken tofu has a unique fatty flavor and creamy consistency that's incredibly satisfying. 

With such a delicate yet luscious texture, silken tofu can present itself in many different ways. It can be cooked or not, served hot or cold, or blended to amplify its natural creaminess. Nguyen recommends using it in soups, purées, and even desserts.

An underrated Yemeni spice found its way onto Minnesota farmland as one of Food Network celebrity Molly Yeh's essential pantry ingredients. Hawaij — a spice blend consisting of cumin, coriander, black pepper, cardamom, turmeric, and ginger — features warm and peppery notes, linking the "multipurpose" spice to other seasonings like garam masala and ras el hanout (via Epicurious). Per Bon Appétit, hawaij translates to mixture in Arabic and refers to sweet and savory blends. Every hawaij mix is unique as different spice ratios lend to infinite variation (via Epicurious). For example, a blend used to flavor coffee is heavier on ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg, much like pumpkin spice warms trendy autumnal Starbucks cups.

Yeh uses it wherever she can, adding the cozy spice mix to soups, chicken pot pie, casserole bakes, and even carrot cake. Cookbook author Amjaad Al-Hussain speaks to the spice blend's versatility, proposing unexpected applications beyond savory proteins. Al-Hussain elevates pumpkin pie, fruit crisps, and gingerbread with the warm and complex mixture. 

Senegalese-born chef and cookbook author Pierre Thiam is introducing the world to West African flavors with passionate gusto. His fine-casual restaurant Teranga in New York City sources ingredients from West African farmers and his latest cookbook highlights a regional grain. Thanks to Thiam, fonio is now sold all over the country (via Fortune). 

The New York Times conjectures about fonio's trendy quinoa qualities, Bon Appétit awarded it the title of "America's new favorite super grain," and Fortune Magazine named fonio the "it" grain in 2020. Fonio is super nutritious and gluten-free with a cooked texture that resembles polenta or cream of wheat and welcomes saucy ragouts or meaty braises. The New York Times praised Thiam's roasted salmon with cheesy fonio grits while Bon Appétit applauded a fluffy fonio pilaf and duck plate.

Thiam pays tribute to fonio's 5,000-year history in his cookbook "The Fonio Cookbook: An Ancient Grain Rediscovered," but in 2017, he began promoting the ancient grain with a fonio product of his own (via Bakery and Snacks). Yolélé advocates for new markets for African-grown crops, propelling the "miracle grain's" retail presence. In fact, from May to April of 2020, Yolélé's fonio sales grew by over 600% (via Fortune).

At first glance, herring might not scream hip and current. After all, the ingredient is rich in history and cultural tradition. As Joan Nathan notes in a The Philadelphia Inquirer feature, herring is a well-established Jewish grandfather favorite. But Nathan argues that herring also amplifies refined restaurant plates, and for the last decade, chefs have re-evaluated a traditionally resolute ingredient and embraced its experimentation.

A piece in the Chicago Tribune identifies herring's notable popularity in Scandinavia and the Netherlands but admits that its American identity naturally hints to Jewish delis and Hanukkah feasts. But that is slowly starting to change. Nathan commends restaurant plates that showcase French smoked herring quenelles, herring with wasabi and yuzu kosho paste, and smoked herring Caesar salad (via The Philadelphia Inquirer). Last year, New York City's Aquavit resumed its annual summer festival for at-home consumption, honoring the underutilized fish and giving us all reason to give it a chance (via The New York Times). For the home cook, grilling, frying, or sautéing herring fillets in a generous herby butter pool are all great options.