Star Kitchen: Jeffrey Saad

Jeffrey Saad spends so much time in front of the camera — he was a finalist on Food Network Star and Chopped All-Stars, and he's the host of United Tastes of America on Cooking Channel — that even dinner at home in this Encino, Calif., kitchen can feel like a made-for-TV event. In fact, he once staged an Iron Chef-style competition with his wife, Nadia, and kids, Isabella, 15, and Sebastian, 12.

Other times, Jeffrey's kitchen is a lab where he experiments with flavors inspired by recent travels. He uses traditional cookware and techniques that he picks up from around the world, and he jots down notes on his successes and failures in a journal he keeps by the stove. Jeffrey cooks here two or three times a day when he's not on the road, but he admits he doesn't always serve the exotic stuff he makes and eats on TV. "Sometimes," he says, "the kids just want Tater Tots."

Jeffrey fell in love with espresso when he first went to Rome, his wife's hometown. Now he orders coffee beans from Blue Bottle Coffee in Northern California and grinds them to use in his Brasilia espresso machine.

Instead of a traditional fridge/freezer combo, freezer drawers are built into Jeffrey's counter. "I like this setup because I hate losing half the capacity of my fridge to a freezer," he says.

Below Jeffrey's six-burner Wolf range is a standard-sized oven and a smaller convection oven. When he's cooking steaks, he starts them on the stove and finishes them off in the convection oven; he says they are juicier that way.

This rack keeps all of Jeffrey's cookware within easy reach, but it also serves as a place to dry fresh herbs, like the marjoram here.

Jeffrey's kitchen is equipped for cooking all sorts of cuisines, and tools like this Thai granite mortar and pestle get lots of action. "I'm going through a huge Thai phase right now," he says.