Oprah Explains Decades-Old Video: That Chicken Just Needed Salt And Pepper

By  Gwen Ihnat

This week, BuzzFeed writer Spencer Althouse dug up a years-old video in which Oprah Winfrey appears unimpressed while tasting a recipe for baked chicken and stuffing that won a million dollars. The Pillsbury bake-off winner, Anna Ginsberg, presented Oprah with her baked chicken and spinach stuffing on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2006. While chewing, Winfrey appears momentarily flummoxed, then says, "I like it very much. I think, did we add salt and pepper? I think we needed salt and pepper." Althouse's tweet featuring the video went viral, with 70,000 retweets and over 200,000 likes.

Oprah herself was so amused by the surfacing of the decade-old video, she responded with a new video statement, telling the writer, "Okay, Spencer, I don't know what ever made you pull that tape out of the vault, but, made me laugh."

Oprah goes on to explain that as a talk show host, while she always wanted her guests to have a good time and enjoy themselves, she also wanted to be authentic. During that particularly captured few seconds of video, "I was having a moment of trying to decide, Do I want her to have a great time? What is my real moment of truth?" And her truth is that she wanted some seasoning: "That's just the truth. That's what I was thinking: this chicken needs some salt and pepper."

We're with you, Oprah. We love to season our chicken. In fact, we here at The Takeout have a wide variety of suggestions to make your chicken better. Roasting right on the oven rack, slathering with butter, using a brick. And yes, as much salt and pepper as you like.

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