The Food Network Channel is trying to get its juice back and author Allen Salkin's new book gives readers the dirt on a few of their favorite stars like Rachael Ray, Guy Fieri, Giada De Laurentiis and Paula Deen.
According to the New York Daily News, Salkin's new book "From Scratch: Inside the Food Network" makes the case that food is no longer cooking with gas. The book describes the evolution of the Food Network over the past 20 years. Salkin conducted more than 200 interviews and took three years to write.
"This company which used to be in the star-making business seems to have lost the recipe," Salkin told the Daily News. "Trust me, they are desperately trying to find it. They just don't know what the new Food Network star looks like."
In the book Salkin, said he learned that some of the network's biggest stars are in fact divas. Salkin calls Rachael Ray the cooking version of Babe Ruth and said she is the opposite of diva.
[She is] incredible to watch," Salkin said. "The crew is almost asleep when she's on camera because they know nothing is going to go wrong."
Bobby Flay is also one of the more grounded celebrity chefs.
"He's got amazing street smarts if not deep sophistication," Salkin said. "He's managed to figure out the system and game it longer than anyone else. He's a perfectly evolved creature to survive at the Food Network. But if someone offered him a better deal, he would go there."
Salkin calls chefs Sandra Lee, Fieri and Deen divas.
"She wanted to be a star," said Salkin of Lee. "She didn't care how. She is a star."
Though Lee has claimed she doesn't have recipe writers, Salkin uncovered two during the process of making the book.
"There is so much that doesn't add up," he said.
Salkin said Fieri is a genuine "American original" but he surrounds himself with "7-foot-tall hulking bodyguards."
"They do what entourages do," Salkin wrote. "They walk him into the VIP section. They get him a drink."
In the book, Salkin said Deen has worked hard to lift herself up from poverty, but when the queen of bad-for-you food revealed she had diabetes for a lucrative drug endorsement deal, she was all but over.
"That was evidence she would do anything for money," Salkin said.
Add charges of racism, and she was cooked. Other chefs Salkin mention in the book are Ina Garten, Martha Stewart, Emeril Lagasse and Jamie Oliver.
