Chef Anne Burrell attends Metropolis Harvest Presents The 2025 Gala: Carnaval, on April 22, 2025, in New York.
Andy Kropa/Invision through AP
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Andy Kropa/Invision through AP
NEW YORK — TV chef Anne Burrell, who coached culinary fumblers by means of tons of of episodes of “Worst Cooks in America,” died Tuesday at her New York dwelling. She was 55.
The Meals Community, the place Burrell started her two-decade tv profession on “Iron Chef America” and went on to different exhibits, confirmed her demise. The trigger was not instantly clear, and health workers had been set to conduct an post-mortem.
Police had been referred to as to her handle earlier than 8 a.m. Tuesday and located an unresponsive lady who was quickly pronounced lifeless. The police division didn’t launch the girl’s identify, however data present it was Burell’s handle.
Burrell was on TV screens as just lately as April, making rooster Milanese cutlets topped with escarole salad in considered one of her many appearances on NBC’s “Right this moment” present. She confronted off towards different high cooks on the Meals Community’s “Home of Knives” earlier within the spring.
“Anne was a exceptional individual and culinary expertise — instructing, competing and at all times sharing the significance of meals in her life and the enjoyment {that a} scrumptious meal can deliver,” the community mentioned in a press release.
Identified for her daring and flavorful however not overly fancy dishes, and for her spiky platinum-blonde hairdo, Burrell and varied co-hosts on “Worst Cooks in America” led groups of kitchen-challenged folks by means of a crash course in savory self-improvement.
On the primary present in 2010, contestants introduced such unlikely private specialties as cayenne pepper and peanut butter on cod, and penne pasta with sauce, cheese, olives and pineapple. The completed cooks needed to style the dishes to judge them, and it was torturous, Burrell confessed in an interview with The Tampa Tribune on the time.
Nonetheless, Burrell endured by means of 27 seasons, making her final look in 2024.
“If folks need to study, I completely love to show them,” she mentioned on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in 2020. “It is simply them breaking dangerous habits and getting out of their very own method.”
Burrell was born Sept. 21, 1969, within the central New York city of Cazenovia, the place her mother and father ran a flower retailer. She earned an English and communications diploma from Canisius College and went on to a job as a headhunter however hated it, she mentioned in a 2008 interview with The Publish-Normal of Syracuse.
Having at all times cherished cooking, she quickly enrolled within the Culinary Institute of America, for which she later taught. She graduated in 1996, spent a yr at an Italian culinary faculty after which labored in upscale New York Metropolis eating places for a time.
“Anytime Anne Burrell will get close to sizzling oil, I need to be round,” Frank Bruni, then-food critic on the New York Occasions, enthused in a 2007 evaluation.
By the subsequent yr, Burrell was internet hosting her personal Meals Community present, “Secrets and techniques of a Restaurant Chef,” and her TV work turned a spotlight. Over time she additionally wrote two cookbooks, “Prepare dinner Like a Rock Star” and “Personal Your Kitchen: Recipes to Encourage and Empower,” and was concerned with meals pantries, juvenile diabetes consciousness campaigns and different charities.
Burrell’s personal tastes, she mentioned, ran easy. She advised The Publish-Normal her favourite meals was bacon and her favourite meal was her mom’s tuna fish sandwich.
“Cooking is enjoyable,” she mentioned. “It would not should be scary. It is creating one thing nurturing.”
Survivors embody her husband, Stuart Claxton, whom she married in 2021, and his son, her mom and her two siblings.
“Anne’s gentle radiated far past these she knew, touching tens of millions internationally,” the household mentioned in a press release launched by the Meals Community.
