Rachael Ray Biography

Rachael Ray is the ultra-peppy hostess whose 30 Minute Meals program on the Food Network made her one of the best-known cooks on TV. She is the host of the long-running syndicated TV talk show Rachael Ray.

A background in restaurants and grocery stores earned Rachael Ray a job selling gourmet goods and teaching cooking classes in Albany, New York. Her specialty was putting meals together in a hurry, and in 1998 she published her first cookbook on making 30 Minute Meals. The success of the book led to a gig on local television, and by 2001 Ray had signed on for a national show with the Food Network.

A former high school cheerleader, Ray made her mark as a bubbly chatterbox whose middlebrow cooking incorporated packaged, prepared foods and other shortcuts; she was sometimes called “the anti-Martha Stewart,” an insult from critics embraced as a compliment by fans.

Her other shows on the Food Network include the travel-for-cheap program $40 a Day, the cooking-with-celebrities show Inside Dish and Rachael Ray’s Tasty Travels. Her 30 Minute Meals series of books have sold millions of copies, and in 2005 she launched a magazine, Every Day with Rachael Ray.

In addition to her Food Network duties, she started her own syndicated daytime talk show in 2006, titled simply Rachael Ray, which has continued for more than a decade.