Clearly Incorrect

Summary

Clearly Incorrect Gordon Ramsay is a funny guy. Sometimes, this humor is intentional. Most of the time it’s not. Four years ago, he posted a grilled cheese sandwich recipe video in which he somehow managed to burn the edges of the bread without (seemingly) even warming up the cheese inside. It’s one of the worst grilled cheeses I have ever seen. “Oh my god… Goodness me… Oh my god, that’s incredible,” Ramsay says, as he bites into a sandwich that would have gotten someone fired on Kitchen Nightmares. Chef Ramsay must know this is a bad grilled cheese. He is not an idiot. On paper, Ramsay is one of the great living chefs. His restaurants have garnered 18 Michelin stars. So you kind of wonder how the grilled cheese thing happened. I can take a baseless guess: there was a tight shooting schedule, they rushed through it, and Ramsay thought, What the hell, just ship it. Who cares? It’s grilled cheese. There’s another Gordon Ramsay-ism that I find less funny and more frustrating: Take your steak out of the fridge at least 10 minutes before cooking it. You may have heard this advice because there are leagues of skilled professional chefs who repeat it. But why does Ramsay tell you to take your steak out of the fridge? The justification, in this video and this article, is that the steak needs to warm up so that you get a better sear and more even cooking. It makes sense if you don’t think very hard about it. The truth is that Ramsay’s steak advice is total bullshit. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, a chef and food writer, put Ramsay’s (and others’) wisdom to the test. The even cooking rationale is plain wrong: a steak’s interior barely warms up at room temperature, even after hours of resting. And the searing justification is inaccurate, too, because that’s not actually how the physics of searing a steak work (read Kenji’s piece for the more detailed explanation). So why does Ramsay keep giving this clearly incorrect advice? And why do people believe it? * * * Some people may read the ab...