The Truth About Jennifer Lawrence’s Kitchen Skills Will Make You Love Her Even More

Jennifer Lawrence has built her Hollywood reputation on raw talent, relatable humor, and an almost superhuman love of food. But when it comes to what actually happens when the Oscar winner steps into a kitchen, the answer is more surprising than you might expect. Is she a natural chef, a disaster with a spatula, or somewhere deliciously in between?

A Self-Proclaimed Junk Food Devotee

Ask anyone what they know about Jennifer Lawrence and food, and the word “pizza” will come up almost immediately. She has claimed she can eat an entire pizza by herself, and her appetite has become something of a pop culture legend. During interviews, she simply cannot stop herself from mentioning food, whether she is on a red carpet, doing press junkets, or sitting across from a journalist at lunch.

Her most iconic culinary “invention” says a lot about her relationship with cooking. In a 2016 interview with Glamour, Lawrence described her greatest creation as a chili pizza sandwich, made by layering southern chili with noodles between two slices of pizza and eating it like a sandwich. It is chaotic, carb-heavy, and somehow completely on brand.

But She Can Actually Cook

Here is where things get interesting. Despite her reputation as a junk food queen, Jennifer Lawrence does have real skills in the kitchen. During the pandemic, she called into Amy Schumer’s cooking show and shared her personal roast chicken recipe, which calls for lots of butter, olive oil, lemon, and thyme spread all over the bird, including inside the cavity.

The recipe got a professional stamp of approval. Dan Jackson, director of culinary at Fields Good Chicken, told The New York Post that Lawrence’s recipe is “great” and called her flavor profile of lemon, thyme, and white wine “perfect.” He only suggested scaling back slightly on the butter, since she uses a generous one and a half sticks.

A Palette Shaped by the Best

Her taste in food goes well beyond pizza and comfort food, too. Lawrence has said that Robert De Niro helped broaden her culinary horizons, particularly when it comes to Italian and Japanese cuisine, and that her favorite Italian restaurant is Bricco in Boston, where she orders pumpkin-filled tortelli with butter and sage. That is not the order of someone who has never thought seriously about what they are eating.

Her foodie credentials were also on full display when she appeared on ‘Hot Ones’ in June 2023, where she casually mentioned she watches the show regularly and held her own while eating increasingly spicy wings, even managing coherent conversation despite visibly suffering through the heat.

To sum up, Jennifer Lawrence lands somewhere most of us can relate to. She is not a trained chef and she will never pretend to be. But she can roast a chicken with enough butter to make a French cook nod approvingly, she has a handle on classic Italian flavors, and she invented a pizza sandwich that has inspired food journalists and home cooks alike to actually test her recipe. That counts for something.

Maybe the most honest thing about her cooking is that it reflects exactly who she is: bold, a little chaotic, and genuinely delicious on a good day.