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Every professional chef needs the right cookware to get the job done. Gordon Ramsay swears by Hexclad pans, and Ina Garten reaches for Wüsthof as her go-to knife brand. Bobby Flay stands by his Shun knives and GreenPan collection, and like many chefs, he started out with much more rudimentary equipment before working up to a top-notch toolkit. He’s known for throwing down fantastic food on the grill, but his culinary journey started with a classic childhood toy.
When Flay was a child, he asked his parents for an Easy-Bake Oven and received it as a Christmas gift. The small toy oven cooked food with a heat bulb and came with special recipe mixes — most famously, a cake. He didn’t expect it to lead to a culinary career at the time, as he was more intrigued with the device itself. In an interview with Today, Flay shared, “I was watching the commercials during cartoons and after school specials and stuff like that. And I could not believe that you could actually bake a cake from a light bulb. I needed to see it for myself.”
Read more: Why Michael Voltaggio Calls The French Laundry Cookbook His Favorite Cookbook Of All Time
Bobby Flay Defied Expectations With The Easy-Bake Oven
Hot pink Easy-Bake Oven – Matthew Simmons/Getty Images
The Easy-Bake Oven was invented by Kenner Products (owned by Hasbro today) in 1963 as a cooking device that was simple enough for children to operate. Unlike the popular wooden or plastic play kitchens some of us grew up with, the Easy-Bake Oven actually produced edible food. It resembled the full-size adult ovens at the time, including the candy-colored kitchen appliances popular in the 1960s and 1970s, such as yellow, red, turquoise, and avocado green.
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Easy-Bake commercials pretty exclusively featured young girls playing with the toy, but this didn’t deter young Bobby Flay from having his own, despite initial disapproval from his dad (who insisted on getting him a G.I. Joe action figure). As an adult, Flay was one of several professional chefs to sign a petition from a young brother-sister duo advocating for a more gender-inclusive Easy-Bake Oven, and he even contributed his own queso fundido recipe to an Easy-Bake cookbook as well. If an Iron Chef grill-master can grow up playing with a small toy oven and watching Julia Child cooking shows, then anyone can.
Read the original article on Chowhound.