Photo: Dave Pullig · CC BY 2.0 · cropped · View on Wikimedia Commons
The move — SEASONING IN LAYERS
Gordon Ramsay
Season at every stage, not at the end. Salt added late sits on top of a dish instead of in it.
The thing I actually took from Ramsay is not a dish. It is the habit of salting four times instead of once. Salt the onions as they soften. Salt the meat as it browns. Salt the liquid as it reduces. Taste and salt again before it leaves the pan. Four small seasonings build flavour from inside the food; one big one at the end just sits on the surface and tastes like salt.
The reason it works is physical. Salt needs time and moisture to move into what you are cooking, and by the time a stew is finished the meat has already set. Anything added at that point never gets in. This is why an under-seasoned braise cannot be rescued at the table, and why a well-seasoned one tastes seasoned all the way through rather than salty on the outside.
It also changes how you taste while you cook. If you are seasoning at every stage you are tasting at every stage, and you catch problems while there is still time to fix them. Most home cooking goes wrong quietly, early, and is only discovered when it is served.
Three dishes Gordon Ramsay is known for
Beef Wellington
Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, and every season of Hell's Kitchen since
It is the dish most associated with him anywhere in the world, and the one his television career made a byword for pressure. Cooking it on camera, repeatedly, in front of people failing to cook it, fixed it to his name more firmly than any restaurant plate could.
What makes it work
The whole dish is a moisture problem. Duxelles cooked until genuinely dry, a crêpe or prosciutto layer between the mushroom and the pastry, the beef seared hard and chilled before wrapping, and the assembled parcel rested cold so the pastry does not slump. Every step exists to keep water away from the pastry base. Skip any one of them and you get the grey soggy underside that the show made famous.
Scrambled eggs
His own kitchen, and about a hundred million views of him making them
A three-ingredient breakfast that became one of the most-watched cooking demonstrations on the internet. It is probably the dish that has changed the most home kitchens, because unlike the Wellington, anyone can attempt it tomorrow.
What makes it work
Eggs go into a cold pan with butter, unbeaten, and the pan comes on and off the heat rather than staying on it. Stirring is constant. Crème fraîche goes in at the end to stop the carryover cooking, and the salt goes in last — salted early, the eggs weep and go watery. It is a lesson in controlling heat by removing it rather than turning it down.
Sticky toffee pudding
A fixture across his restaurants and books
The British pudding he is most closely identified with, and the one that turns up on his menus in some form wherever he opens. It is the counterweight to the reputation — a plain, generous, unfashionable thing done extremely well.
What makes it work
Dates soaked in boiling water with bicarbonate of soda, which breaks them down to a purée and lightens the sponge at the same time. The sauce goes over hot so some of it soaks in and the rest pools. Most failed versions are dry because the date mixture was not broken down far enough.
What I cook because of Gordon Ramsay
Three dishes where the seasoning happens in stages and would be unrecoverable if it did not.
A note
Everything above is my own writing about a cook whose work changed how I cook. None of it is their recipe -- I never reproduce a recipe here, only my own account of a technique I took from watching them. The photograph is a Creative Commons image, used editorially and cropped; see the credit above. Its appearance here does not imply any endorsement, affiliation or connection between this site and the person pictured.