These Food Network Secrets Will Leave You Hungry for More

1. Chopped's format is clear cut: Chefs have a limited amount of time to compose a dish using mystery basket ingredients, and judges critique their plates to either eliminate them from the competition or advance them to the next of three rounds, with the last cook standing winning $10,000. However, the show almost had a completely different flavor.

"The show was set at a mansion in New Jersey," host Ted Allen said on Sway's Universe in 2012. "The chefs arrived in limousines, the host was the butler of the mansion wearing a tuxedo, holding a chihuahua—I'm not even kidding—and every time someone got chopped, they fed the dish to the chihuahua, which is problematic in all sorts of ways."

But after seeing the pilot, Food Network, uh, chopped that idea.

2. Ever wonder who cooks up the ideas for the mystery basket ingredients?

"The basket ingredients are chosen by a committee that’s led by our staffer Sara Hormi, and Sara’s job is to find us things that we’ve never seen before, which with chefs as great as our judges is a hard thing to do," Ted explained to Food Network in 2016. "Once in a while, the judges or myself will look at a basket and say, 'This is just too mean or just too hard,' and we’ll ask if something can be switched out, and usually they’ll do that for us if our concerns are legit, but there’s a lot of thought process that goes into choosing those ingredients, and by the way, they’re not chosen randomly. They’re designed to be possible but difficult."