Carla Hall Reveals What’s Really Inside Her Fridge [Exclusive]

Carla Hall is an open book. When we asked if we could take a tour of her fridge, the celebrity chef happily obliged. Just don’t expect a perfectly curated refrigerator because Hall would rather keep it real. “I was like, I’m not going to stage anything. This is what it is,” she tells The Kitchn. 

Plus, who has time to maintain a neat fridge when you’re as busy as the TV cooking personality is? Hall is currently partnering with Quaker Oats and recently presented a donation of $250,000 in support of their efforts to help tackle hidden hunger in schools across America. “I’ve been the unofficial Quaker Oats girl for decades, and I can honestly say decades,” Hall continues. “We all share the belief that a person’s life circumstances shouldn’t dictate whether they can eat or not, and understanding food insecurity and trying to do something about it.”

She’s also eagerly anticipating viewers to watch all the episodes of her brand-new Max show, Chasing Flavor, which is airing now. “It’s about the dishes, but it’s also the people who made the dishes,” she explains. “I’m really celebrating those people and the ingenuity and how when a culture moves to a different place, things change. You really see that story in the Al Pastor episode. If you don’t know the culture, you really don’t know the dish. This show is all about people understanding the cultures who had a hand in these dishes. So when we’re eating them, it’s not just the latest thing that we’re eating — it’s like all of these different people and cultures who changed the dish as we know it today.”

For our first-ever edition of Fridge Diaries, Hall walks us through what she keeps in the fridge she shares with her husband, Matthew Lyons. Expect drinks, snacks, and lots of homemade treats.

We have a smaller beverage fridge, so none of our beverages are in the main fridge. There’s some chocolate oat milk. We do have sparkling water and then a lot of plant-based milks, because I make smoothies. We just have water and milk. [Laughs.] I go to some friends’ houses and they have a lot of juice. We don’t really do a lot of juice. Every now and then we may get juice, but it’s really water and milk. 

We love Waterloo. We have grape and we have peach. And then we just started drinking the ginger citrus. I think we just got that one. Waterloo has been our sparkling beverage of choice. 

We have the bottom drawer full of cheese and deli meats. We also have olives because we like that with our cheese. I also have a lot of condiments in my fridge, so I’m always doing a mustard. I’ll make a honey mustard with mayo, yellow mustard, and honey. I dip the meat and the cheese in it. 

We do what my husband calls the cutting board salad bar. We always have romaine lettuce, and cucumbers, radishes, and carrots. We’ll cut up a bunch of stuff and put it on our big cutting board, and then you just go about and you make your salad. We do that all the time. He will do a creamy dressing. And my dressing of choice: I always have lemon juice, lemon zest, balsamic, and olive oil. That’s my go-to for the salad.

I have a lot of eggs. I eat eggs a lot. I’m always making omelets. My go-to meal is an omelet or just scrambled eggs with tomatoes and avocado. 

So on the second shelf down, there’s caramel sauce that I’ve made, chocolate sauce, and wet nuts because I love sundaes. That’s all the stuff that I would have for sundaes and then the whipped cream. 

I’m mixing things into my heavy cream and right now, it’s malt. I’m mixing malt powder into my heavy cream and chocolate cocoa powder into the heavy cream. I use it for my sundaes and hot chocolate — I love hot chocolate.

I always have these simple syrups that I’m making to sweeten tea. I have them with my cardamom cinnamon tea and chamomile lemon.