Giada De Laurentiis Says Boyfriend Once Challenged Her to a ‘Sauce Off’

Giada De Laurentiis knows that in the kitchen, as in love, it always helps to add a little spice — something she promptly put into practice when she met boyfriend Shane Farley.

“It’s been 10 years now with Shane [and] he was a pretty good cook before he met me,” De Laurentiis, 54, told Us Weekly exclusively while promoting her partnership with Peroni Italian Beer Ice. “I think he did things a little differently than I do. But his mother was Italian.”

The Giada in My Kitchen star explained that Farley, 52, asked her to compete in a “sauce off” with him during the early days of their romance.

“[It’s] something he used to do with his friends,” she recalled. “I’m like, ‘You really don’t want to do a sauce off with me.’ And he’s like, ‘No, I really do. I used to win them all the time.’ ‘Yeah, but you’re not gonna win it with me.’”

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De Laurentiis eventually agreed, admitting “I had to doctor up his sauce because the thing that people miss a lot is seasoning. He wasn’t seasoning it.”

Giada De Laurentiis and Shane Farley Courtesy of Giada De Laurentiis/Instagram

The couple met back in 2013 while working at Food Network before sparking a romance two years later. Now, almost a decade into their relationship, De Laurentiis said they have come a long way in the kitchen together.

“Over the years, in the sweetest way, I have been able to teach him a few things and he makes an awesome sauce now,” the chef told Us. “The empowering thing for me is that when people come over and I’m working and I can’t make a full dinner because I’m not home, he does it, and he feels so good about it. He’s become so good at it.”

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Just like nurturing a relationship, DeLaurentiis told Us that helping a partner with their cooking skills takes time and patience.

“You’ve got to eat maybe some dishes that are not so, you know,” she said. “But we got there and now I have somebody that can help me in the kitchen and he’s really good at it and feels really empowered by it. It’s been a really fun journey.”

Shane Farley and Giada De Laurentiis Courtesy of Giada De Laurentiis/Instagram

This summer, De Laurentiis and Farley will be toasting their meals with boozy frozen treat Peroni Italian Beer Ice, which the TV personality created in partnership with the Italian lager.

“I loved granita as a kid, we eat a lot of granita in the south, in Naples and Sicily. I thought we could combine the beer and the ice together and sort of bring the cocktail with the dessert all in one for summertime,” she told Us of the new drink. “I think it’s clever and I think people haven’t really heard that before, and it’s got less alcohol than the wine does, so it’s a way for us to enjoy ourselves without having way too much fun and having a terrible hangover the next day.”