Normal Person vs ... Gordon Ramsay

So… hang on… you’re making a white sauce with some infused milk, adding some pureed sprouts, then folding in beaten eggwhites, right?

If so, what the fuck’s he doing telling you to make a fucking beurre manié and beating it in? That’s a fucking crap way of doing it. Make a fucking roux and strain the fucking milk into it, then fucking whisk until it fucking thickens. And fold in the fucking eggwhites with a fucking metal spoon. He should have fucking said that.

And do you do anything with the egg yolks?

I tried Gordon fucking Ramsay’s fucking simple fucking watercress soup once. It didn’t fucking work. And I can fucking cook. Fucker.

I love sprouts too. And yes, it was horrible.

@Calum – thanks!

@Stu – yep, that’s basically (fucking) it. Plus a big pile of goat’s cheese. It, erm, didn’t work too well.

You add the yolks with the cheese.

Yeah – it’s amazing the amount of stuff he failed to mention in what was supposed to be a recipe for someone who hadn’t cooked a souffle before.

Cheers, from Canada.

Caught the link to your blog/video on boing boing.

Fracking Brilliant vid! Are you going to try a Wolfgang Puck recipe next?

Fucking excellent video guys! We’re getting our fair share of Gordon here in California. He has a US version of Kitchen Nightmares. I’m a fan.

I’m also a home chef and would have tried the same recipe. You guys did ok with a difficult recipe! Well done.

It’s also great to hear you take a measure of what you accomplished. If it doesn’t taste great, then why bother?

Did I hear you right that it cost 20 British Pounds to buy the ingredients? I am continually amazed at how expensive it is to live in the UK!

-Frank

Entertaining as always, fellas, even though I don’t remotely like sprouts. Being hung over couldn’t have helped, especially at the cat vomit stage… :P

Fantastic stuff – the show, if not the food.

Will be back next week!

@CAIN – it was the vibration from the whisk that really screwed it all up. Johnnie was looking extremely green by the end.

@Michele – that’s a good point, and you’re dead right. I’m going to try pureeing sprouts with a food processor tomorrow and report back on whether it works.

Next time try a Grant Achatz or Ferran Adria. That should come out well.

I’ve cooked a couple of Ferran Adria recipes in the past (simple ones). I wish there was a full Adria cookbook!

I am intending to cook the entire Fat Duck (Heston Blumenthal) tasting menu at some point – all 13 courses, including the liquid nitrogen ones.

I should really buy the Alinea book at some point.

Wow, you guys are terrible.

About 10 minutes I was felling run down and unwell. Having watched this I feel brilliant. Thanks for making my day!

yo stu nathan, don’t try to fake the funk. yeah, gordan ramsay is a dick, but all respect must be given to him. all you “chefs” out there that try to talk shit on his style…you wish you were that good. you wish you came up with marco pierre white. the man has been around. he shits michelin stars. so suck it up and stop your shoemaking ways.

@boo: also “enamored” and “excelsior” (do Americans really say that?). I know Gordon’s making a fuckton of money over in the States, but I doubt he’s gone native just yet.

Also, since when is it our job to promote literacy? None of us are Jamie Oliver.

Bad example recipe for me, I can’t stand brussel sprouts so it’d probably be terrible even if Gordon Ramsay had done it himself.

Did you really spend £20 for this recipe? Seems rather excessive!

There is a significant difference between a true geek and a ‘chic geek’
a true geek doesnt buy clothes off of thinkgeek, jinx, or any of those other garbage sites
a true geek doesnt need to proclaim he is, indeed, a geek, at every stange he can
a true geek is versatile

Just to say, a friend linked to this on her blog, and now I’ve added your syndicated feed to my reading list. The power of not very subliminal advertisement at its best.

Thanks guys, this had me giggling out loud in the office.

I think a regular-sized food processor would be too big to blend that small an amount. A blender should actually manage it, as long as you can vary the speed.

I used a stick blender with the small blending cup, and that worked fine with about 80g of sprouts and a tablespoon of milk. Start blending slowly and build up. I still needed to push the mush down with a spatula a couple of times, but I did end up with a thick purée rather than a salad.

any chance of a vegan/food alergy special?

that way i can try something

@Ben – and me. Apparently technically the big round flat thing is a food processor.

@Undeadbydawn – we ARE actually planning some veganism in the future, maybe. Stay tuned.

Interesting points. (It may be noted that I wasn’t cooking here – the point of the episode was to see if Johnnie, our “normal person”, could understand and follow a celebrity chef recipe. Other celeb chefs have done fine. Ramsay didn’t.)

You may be interested by Stu N’s followup piece over at http://www.kamikazecookery.com/blogs/80

1) If I was writing a non-expert guide to building a computer, I wouldn’t tell someone to “seat” a card. I’d give instructions on how to do it. When I wrote a technical book (pluggityplug) I was repeatedly and firmly told not to use unnecessary jargon. I believe that’s pretty standard advice.

2) Where did Johnnie ruin the recipe by misunderstanding terms? Johnnie may have guessed on “scalding”, but he guessed right. He looked up other terms, exactly as you’re suggesting. Whilst there’s only a brief shot of it in the video, he knew what “folding” was. And I’m sorry, I don’t believe that using a food processor would have magically sorted out the sprouts.

3) The “Many recipes are crap” argument is kind of our point. Let’s find out who can write recipes and who can’t. Nigella can. Jamie can, although they may not be good recipes. Gordon Ramsay, it would appear, can’t. (And that applies even if it was ghost-written – you’ve got to be a moron to let someone ghostwrite for you and not check it.)

4) Assumptions much? Johnnie had read the recipe before starting, several times.

And, FWIW, I believe quite a number of computer experts, including both Johnnie and I, subscribe to the “have a go and figure it out as you go along” school of hardware and programming. Some people read the entire manual before diving in, but it’s not a universal trend. That’s certainly the way I learned computers.

@Dan Abraham: But that’s exactly the point—in computing, there’s no entire publishing industry based on telling noobs how to flash their BIOSes. Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t have a primetime television show where he insists that anyone can build a Cray X-MP in their own home.

There are the For Dummies series, and the Complete Idiot’s Guide, and things like that, but those books tell you when something is difficult, they warn you if you might break something, and they tell you when it would be better to call in an expert. In computing, nobody is making money off the lie that anybody can do it with no prior knowledge.

With recipes and sleb-chef culture, that’s exactly the lie that they’re feeding us. And it’s that lie that we set out to test.

you used a frign blender!!! the recipe clearly states food proccessor. no wonder the sprouts didnt turn out. http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/food-processor-2.jpg

yes the recipe may suck.. but you did a pretty terrible job following what directions were there

Seasoning doesn’t usually mean also pepper actually. It just means salt, in my experience. But if pepper won’t hurt it, whatever.

“Your sprouts are pathetically small, or you’ve thrown away too many of the outer leaves. Throw away some, but not that many. And cut a cross in the base of the sprouts before boiling, so they’ll cook all the way through.”

“Your knife is horrible, as is your onion-slicing technique”

@KiwiSteve: could be a good point but is any of this in the recipe?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/recipes/article3263942.ece

Ohh we can check!

-The recipe assumes we have all the correct kitchen tools: it doesn’t mention what type of knife to use.

-Sadly there is no onion slicing tutorial in mr R’s recipe.

- No mention of what the size of the sprouts should be.

- Recipe doesn’t mention what sort of whisk should be used, be it weak battery powered, or MANLY electric sort.

- The recipe doesn’t mention the impliment needed to brush the ramkins. Of course ‘brushing’ implies a brush is involved but not necessarily!

How pedantic are normal people?

Are normal people going to follow the recipe to the letter and be satisfied with their hardened bullet (sorry Johnny)? Or are they going to look at it and say ‘cor this needs a bit more water to be a proper paste’

Cooking might be a science but of course it can never be an exact ‘follow this to the mole’ sort because your ‘reactants’ aren’t going to have the same composition each time.

So what I mean is if your sprouts are too sprouty then you’re going to get a very overpowering sprout sensation!

So my question is what are these ‘normal’ people? Are they unquestioning robots, pedants, or do they use a bit of common sense from time to time?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/gordon_ramsay/article3263832.ece

Oh look even The Times has something to say on sprouts. So what’s the science behind the ice-cold water?

I missed the bit where Ramsay or the Times claimed this recipe was for normal people. But I do know it’s not for me, because, like I said, I don’t have a nice enough kitchen.

And also because if I was going to get into souffles I’d probably seek out a recipe for one with ingredients I’m enthusiastic about in the first place, like dead pig or mushrooms or salmon or chocolate. I’ll eat brussels sprouts if they’re put in front of me but I certainly don’t pursue them. (Unlike Ramsay, who also says not to bother with cutting a cross in the bottom of sprouts. Since I think Ramsay knows a thing or two I’ll bear that in mind if I ever cook another sprout.)

Making food with ingredients you know you don’t like all that much sounds like giving yourself a handicap right at the off.

Still, I think anyone could have looked at that hopeless whisk and known it was crap. I mean, would you put up with an electric toothbrush as feeble as that?

By which I mean it wasn’t all Ramsay’s fault the recipe didn’t satisfy.

It’s hard to tell whether the colour of the sprouts affected the final colour. It was roughly the colour of your text box there, actually; if the sprouts had gone grey, it might have turned the whole thing khaki, I s’pose.

It’s not just to fix colour, by the way; it’s also to stop them from cooking by taking out the residual heat. That would be important in this recipe, because if you cook the sprouts too long, you’d end up with the nasty sulphurous flavour that everyone associated with soggy sprouts.

As I said, there wasn’t much sprout flavour — a slight bitter edge, maybe — but it certainly didn’t taste of overcooked sprout.

I usually do cut a cross in sprouts. I know you’re not supposed to need to, but I just think it looks nicer (and if you’re buttering your sprouts, it helps the butter sink in). I cut them in half for this recipe for two reasons — I wanted to make sure they cooked evenly and then quenched properly when I refreshed them, and it would help with blending them later.

For all those people questioning Hugh’s choice of a blender rather than a food processor — for a small amount of material, I think a blender is a better choice. Does your blender have a variable speed, Hugh? If so, you would have done better starting very slowly to chop the sprouts, then speeding up. A full-size processor would have been useless – it would just have chucked everything to the sides of the bowl. My little Braun blender attachment has the same S-shaped blade as a food processor, but smaller, only about 10cm across. I think it’s the perfect tool for this sort of job.

@Hugh,

you didn’t answer my question on the pedantic nature of normal people ;-)

So do you think Gordon actually wrote or tested the recipe himself. Because as The Guardian points out today, he doesn’t usually…

@Alison – If he’s so willing to lose his good name as a chef that he’ll let crap people write his recipes, then he deserves all the scorn we can heap upon him.

My hypothesis on this recipe is either a) He didn’t write it, and someone tried to write something using “sensational” ingredients in order to sound like him (and fucked it up) or b) It’s his recipe, but missing either vital ingredients or instructions (although common sleb chef habit, according to the smart people at Egullet.com).

I think I’m going to try a couple of recipes from * Chef, and see how they compare…