Gordon Ramsay says make sure the water is heavily salted when cooking pasta (Image: YouTube / Gordon Ramsay)
Pasta is a tea-time staple for many households across the UK because it’s simple, tasty and relatively quick to prepare.
says it’s possible to create a gourmet-style in your kitchen at home in as little as 10 minutes, using ingredients that you most likely already have knocking around in your refrigerator. But the top chef says the pasta will be delicious and bursting with flavour if you use one added ingredient at the start of the .
Ramsay says you should begin with a pot full of boiling water and the important thing here is to make sure the water is heavily salted. If you don’t add enough salt to the water then you risk ending up with bland tasting pasta, so it’s recommended you be generous with the ingredient so the pasta can absorb the flavour as it cooks.
Explaining the process in a video on YouTube, Ramsay says: “When I say salt that water, I mean really salt the water okay. It’s almost got to taste of the sea because you’re sort of basically, you’re making the pasta taste delicious as opposed to bland.
“Now, pasta straight in, get your tongs and then just twist it like that minutes in, and that helps break it up and stops it from sticking together. Lid back on and that’s going to take eight and a half minutes.”
Ramsay then turns to the pasta sauce, adding half a cup of diced pancetta and a dash of oil to a frying pan to render. Add in salt and pepper for flavour and stir in, along with slices of garlic and chili for an extra burst of flavour and heat.
Continue stirring until the fat is rendered down and then add a few knobs of butter and allow this to melt in the pan, before returning to your pasta to give it a good stir to stop it from separating.
Ramsay adds: “Really heavily salt that water. It makes a massive difference when you cook pasta in salted water.”
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Turn your attention back to the frying pan and add half a cup of frozen peas, along with a few extra knobs of butter. To freshen up the dish, Ramsay then adds some chopped chives, parsley and basil. Now add in a couple of tablespoons of vegetable stock and a dash of salt, and give your pasta another stir.
For the pasta sauce, add more butter to the stock and scoop out two ladles of water from your pasta pot as this will help to thicken the sauce. Grate in the zest of one lemon, along with a squeeze of lemon juice, and reduce the sauce down until it becomes thick.
After around eight and a half minutes, start removing your pasta from the pot and adding it to your frying pan. Ramsay says do this in stages, adding around a third at a time and mixing it into the sauce as you go, before folding in two chopped lettuces. Then grate some pecorino romance cheese on top along with a sprinkling of crushed red pepper flakes as a garnish to finish.
Ramsay adds: “I put the pasta in a third, a third and a third. Mix it round and then just grab the tongs, go over the bowl and look at that deliciousness.”