The Grocery Staples Trisha Yearwood (62) Never Seems to Be Without

Two decades of hosting cooking segments and testing recipes on a husband with strong opinions tends to reveal exactly what a person reaches for without thinking.

Trisha Yearwood’s kitchen habits, pieced together across interviews, cookbooks, and behind-the-scenes details from her Food Network years, point to a short list of ingredients that show up again and again.

None of it is complicated or trendy. It’s closer to what a working Southern kitchen has always run on.

Real Butter, Always Softened

Yearwood keeps two sticks of butter, wrapped in paper, tucked in a drawer to the left of the sink on her studio set. It’s there because she almost always needs softened butter ready to go for whatever she’s demonstrating that day.

That habit extends past the set and into how she actually cooks. She’s said plainly that she doesn’t skip butter or cream in favor of lighter substitutes, treating both as non-negotiable rather than something to trim down.

Self-Rising Flour and Buttermilk for Biscuits

Her father’s biscuit recipe, a family staple she still makes and has shared publicly, comes down to just three ingredients: vegetable shortening, self-rising flour, and buttermilk. It’s a recipe she’s connected directly to her late father, Jack Yearwood, who first put it together.

Self-rising flour and buttermilk aren’t ingredients she treats as optional swaps either. Both show up as the backbone of a dish she’s described as something fans now make in their own homes every weekend.

Bacon, in Almost Everything

Bacon shows up often enough in her cooking that she’s said anyone walking through her kitchen while it’s cooking is going to grab a piece before it even makes it to the dish. That habit directly inspired a Bacon Straws recipe in her most recent cookbook.

It’s less a single ingredient than a running theme across her cooking, showing up on burgers and folded into dishes that wouldn’t obviously call for it. For Yearwood, it sounds less like a recipe choice and more like a household habit everyone around her has come to expect.

A Cast Iron Skillet for Nearly Everything

Cast iron has earned enough of a place in her cooking that an entire episode of her Food Network show was built around it, covering the kind of dishes that only really come together right in a well-seasoned pan. That’s not the kind of dedication a cook gives to a piece of equipment they reach for occasionally.

For Southern cooking specifically, cast iron tends to be treated as essential rather than optional, and her approach reflects that. It’s the kind of staple that outlasts trends because it does a version of the job nothing else quite replicates.

Heavy Cream Over Substitutes

Rather than reaching for skim milk or other lighter dairy options, Yearwood has said she sticks with the real thing. She follows an 80/20 approach to eating, where the full-fat version of an ingredient stays in the mix most of the time, with portion control doing the actual moderating.

That philosophy shows up clearly in how she talks about cream and butter specifically. Rather than swapping them out, she keeps both around and adjusts elsewhere instead.

Raw Cashews for a Dairy-Free Trick

For the times she is leaning lighter, Yearwood has said raw cashews blended into cream work better than she expected, turning into a smooth, rich substitute for traditional cream sauces. Nondairy milks like almond milk have become part of that same rotation.

It’s a small but telling detail, since it shows the ingredient swap isn’t about giving something up so much as finding a version that still delivers the richness she’s after. The cashews earn a place in her kitchen precisely because they don’t feel like a compromise.

Salt and Pepper, Nothing Fancier

Asked what feedback she gets most from her husband while testing recipes, Yearwood has joked that his notes usually come down to needing more salt and pepper, which she’s called her “exotic spices.” It’s a small joke, but it points to a real preference for simple seasoning over anything more elaborate.

That restraint tracks with the rest of her approach to cooking. Rather than leaning on complicated spice blends, she tends to let a few basic ingredients, handled well, do most of the work.