Store-bought stuffing is fine, the Barefoot Contessa says. (But skip the lime juice.)

Key Points

• Ina Garten embraces store-bought ingredients like marinara sauce and sourdough bread for simplicity.


• Garten recommends enhancing store-bought items, like adding fresh toppings to bakery cakes or mashed potatoes.


• Some items, like lime juice and chicken stock, are best homemade for optimal flavor.

When it comes to cooking, it’s good to learn ways to maximize your enjoyment while minimizing the effort you put into the meal. In fact, many celebrities and chefs have shared their own kitchen hacks over the years, from Martha Stewart’s easy way to make mashed potatoes fluffier to Katie Lee Biegel’s genius way of making chicken cutlets extra-flavorful.

Among those who are quick to share their time- and effort-saving kitchen methods is Ina Garten, whose cookbook Simply Ina comes out this October. Garten recently appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbertwhere Colbert brought up Garten’s love of keeping things simple in the kitchen.

“You have a catchphrase that people just love, which is ‘store-bought is fine’,” Colbert says in the segment before introducing a rapid-fire game he wants to play with Garten. “Yes or no if store-bought is fine on the following items; are you ready to do a little lightning round here?”

Garten jumps right into Colbert’s lightning round, and her answers might surprise you. Turns out, the Barefoot Contessa really does feel that store-bought is fine for lots of ingredients. But even Garten has her limits.

Items that are OK to pick up in store? Marinara sauce, which Garten says is “just fine, as long as it’s good marinara sauce.” She’s also OK with buying sourdough bread from the store, since “sourdough bread is always good.”

Store-bought baked goods, like a birthday cake, are also Garten-approved, though she says she “wouldn’t get one at the 7-Eleven.” Instead, go to a bakery for a quality cake and dress it up at home, she recommends. “In fact,” Garten tells Colbert, “there’s a recipe in [Simply Ina] for a cheesecake where you go to the bakery and buy a cheesecake and then you make a fresh raspberry sauce with fresh raspberries and nobody even knows you didn’t make the cheesecake.”

Another store-bought item Garten loves? Stuffing. “You know what I use stuffing for?” she says. “What I do is make bread pudding out of it. A bag of stuffing that’s already seasoned, it’s already cubed, it’s toasted, all that’s done and then… you make a custard and you pour it over the stuffing. And you put in mushrooms and Gruyère and you put it in the oven. Nobody even knows there’s a bag of stuffing in there. It’s just a savory bread pudding.”

But there are some items Garten says to avoid picking up on your next grocery run. First up is chicken stock, which Garten says is OK store-bought, “if you have to,” though she adds that “homemade chicken stock is really great.”

Lime juice is also on Garten’s store-bought no-no list. “Fresh lime juice only,” she says. “You can’t buy it anywhere.”

Here’s the good news: It sounds like Garten will share plenty more hacks for cooking with store-bought ingredients in her upcoming cookbook. “‘Simply’ is different for each person,” she says of the title. “Some people want a recipe with only four ingredients, some people want something you can make ahead, but I love when you can take a store-bought ingredient—like mashed potatoes—you can buy mashed potatoes in the grocery store and add roasted garlic and sour cream and seasoning and nobody knows you haven’t even peeled a potato. So, a lot of the recipes are like that.”

Looking for more of Garten’s kitchen hacks? Read more about store-bought products the Barefoot Contessa loves, from frozen puff pastry to the grocery store tea bags she uses to make her classic herbal iced tea.