Food Network star Ree Drummond reveals which recipe she regrets sharing on her show

Celebrity chef Ree Drummond has identified the recipe she most regrets sharing with viewers of her long-running Food Network series The Pioneer Woman.

Named after her popular lifestyle and recipe blog which she launched in 2006, the cooking show has been airing since 2011. During that time, Drummond, 56, has shared hundreds of recipes.

Still, there have been a few misses, including a chicken strip pizza that she feels was the “worst thing” she’s ever seen in her life.

“The production company would come out five times a year. They would stay three weeks at a time and we would film eight episodes, about 40 shows a year,” Drummond explained at a recent promotional event for her latest cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: The Essential Recipes.

“Usually by the end of the shoot, everyone is tired of cooking, tired of food, and really racing to get everything done before [the production crew] goes back to London,” she continued. “So the very last episode of the shoot, I had this idea that it would be really cool to do a chicken strip pizza.”

She noted that her original idea was to make a fried chicken pizza, reminiscent of an early California Pizza Kitchen dish. “In my mind, I was going to make these little popcorn chicken nuggets and make a homemade crust,” she said.

However, because it was the final shoot of the season and the crew was on a time crunch, she was forced to make several shortcuts, using frozen chicken strips and a ready-made crust.

“The chicken strips were way too big, and this pizza was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Drummond added. “After I put the chicken strips on there, they just fell like bricks. Then I inexplicably poured pickles over the top.”

Drummond was joined by her adult daughters, Alex Drummond Scott and Paige Drummond Andersen, with the latter recalling that the fried chicken pizza recipe went viral on TikTok for being The Pioneer Woman’s worst recipe.

This isn’t the first time the Food Network star has acknowledged her fried chicken pizza mishap.

“The vision I had was of big, beautiful pieces of homemade fried chicken and thick-cut pickles with a drizzle of honey” as a pizza topping, she said in 2019 when asked by a reader of her blog about whether she had any on-air mishaps.

“I wound up using frozen chicken strips — and they had not won any chicken-strip beauty pageants. Then, we threw coleslaw into the mix and it was just a sea of confusion,” she added. “I wish I could undo (and unsee!) it.”