Naturally, as a celebrity chef with a huge presence, Gordon Ramsay has had his fair share
of viral, hilarious, or otherwise noteworthy moments with all kinds of food.
But he’s had few experiences with food that were more memorable than his adventures in
cooking lobster.
He’s shown contestants how to properly de-shell a lobster, he’s gotten non-culinary celebrities
dining in his restaurants to kill lobsters for him - it seems Gordon Ramsay and lobster
go together like bread and butter.
Lobster is basically the king of foods.
Here are Gordon Ramsay’s 10 greatest lobster moments.
How to Extract All the Meat from a Lobster
In an episode of the show Culinary Genius, Gordon Ramsay offers up the perfect way to
prepare a lobster.
This is how to get all the meat out of there.
Some of the sounds it makes when things are snapped and twisted are pretty gruesome, but
just think of the juicy, delicious lobster that’s going to come at the end to get you
through it.
As it turns out, it’s all about hitting the right points.
If you snap the claw right on the knuckle and drain out all that nasty water, then you’re
going to get all the meat out of there.
No waste.
You wouldn’t think that the legs would have meat in them too, but Ramsay actually describes
those parts as “beauties,” so they must be pretty tasty.
It’s tough to get the meat out of the legs, which is probably why most people wouldn’t
bother, but as Ramsay describes, the meat in there is so sweet and rich that it’s
worth the extra effort.
You have to get a rolling pin to squeeze it out of thAere, but if he says it’s worth
it, then it must be worth it.
There’s a lot of great tips in this video for extracting lobster meat.
Was Gordon Served ‘Too Much Lobster’!?
Gordon Ramsay visits some really terrible restaurants on some of his shows.
The lack of care that some of them have for customer service or presentation or, most
egregiously, the food itself is pretty appalling sometimes.
The first thing the chef notices when visiting Barefoot Bob’s Beach Grill is that the menus
count the same meal twice.
How does that kind of typo end up on a menu?
You print out dozens of these things, at least do an editing check!
But this is even worse, because the waitress says the owner noticed it and didn’t bother
to fix it.
The first thing she recommends to Ramsay is something called “Bob’s Lobster Roll.”
The chef hasn’t had any training, but like they all do, he thinks his cooking is amazing
and Ramsay won’t find any faults with it.
The first thing he notices when the food arrives is that it’s so densely packed with lobster
that it’s basically inedible.
The roll has more than a whole lobster in it, totalling a pound of meat.
In Ramsay’s books, and most people’s books for that matter, that’s too much lobster
to go on a roll.
Still, the owner doesn’t think “too much lobster” is something to complain about.
Grilled Lobster with Bloody Mary Linguine
During this episode of Gordon Ramsay's Ultimate Home Cooking, the lessons learned are aplenty.
Gordon Ramsay makes chopping up onions into perfect slices and then doing it again the
other way look so effortless, but anyone who’s not a professional chef knows it’s almost
impossible to do that without having the whole thing fall apart.
All the layers slide off of each other and the slices come out uneven.
But it must just be a case of practice makes perfect.
Ramsay’s probably diced a million onions in his day.
The use of celery salt and Tabasco sauce and even sugar make this dish one of those things
that sound weird on paper and taste delicious in real life.
But it’s when the vodka goes in that this dish really becomes interesting.
In the words of Mac, the sheriff of Paddy’s Pub, “Eating your drinks?
That is genius!”
Then the chili butter goes in and Ramsay uses all the seeds from the chili pepper, which
is strange, but probably something to try.
Cutting through lobsters and snapping off their arms and legs always looks so gnarly,
but Ramsay has made an art out of it.
Seasoning the boiling water before putting in the pasta is an interesting touch.
The same goes for shaking pasta juice from the colander into the sauce.
In the end, we’ve got what looks like a beautiful (and don’t forget alcoholic) meal.
Cooking Lobster with Jeremy Clarkson
It’s a pleasure on its own to see British TV’s two kinds of outrage cooking some seafood
together.
Gordon Ramsay prefers the quick, painless way of killing a lobster (stabbing it right
through the skull) while Jeremy Clarkson favors the more brutal method of slowly and agonizingly
killing them (throwing them straight into the pot of boiling water and watching them
squirm).
It’s good to know that Ramsay has a little humanity, even if Clarkson doesn’t.
This episode of the F Word can be enjoyed for its simple joys like watching Jeremy Clarkson
eat a giant spoonful of very strong seasoning and then immediately regretting it, there
are also a lot of interesting factoids about lobsters in there.
They have, pound for pound, the most meat of any seafood, and the worst thing you can
do to a lobster is run it under some water.
The seasoning itself was an odd mix, with garlic and egg yolks and everything else,
but if Ramsay says it’s good, it must be good.
Plus, Ramsay recommends very little seasoning, as the lobster is delicious enough on its
own.
It’s refreshing to see these two guys mellow out as they cook Sunday lunch together, because
they’re usually going off on a rampage.
Gordon Reacts to Finding Dead Lobster in the Fish Tank
In this episode of Kitchen Nightmares, Gordon goes to the Spanish Pavillion restaurant and
orders the lobster bisque.
The bisque is too creamy and the lobster, he thinks, was dead before it was cooked.
So, he inspects the fish tank and, lo and behold, he spots a dead lobster.
The owner tries to claim that the lobster is “just sleeping,” but when Gordon takes
it out and has a look at it, it’s as dead as disco.
He cracks the lobster open and gives it a smell and it’s horrendous.
Of course, with a dead lobster floating in the tank with all the live lobsters that are
being served to people, the bacteria is spreading and it could make people very sick.
Suddenly, there’s a health and safety risk just from dining there.
The chef, of course, doesn’t think there’s a problem.
There are a lot of stubborn chefs that appear on his shows who refuse to accept that their
food is bad despite the mounting evidence against them, but this guys really takes the
cake when he claims, “That lobster’s fresh.
Even though it died, it’s good.”
Is he trying to make himself a laughing stock?
It’s not fresh.
It’s not good.
It’s dead!
Rotten Lobster Almost Kills A Customer
What kind of chef would insist on putting bones in a tomato sauce?
On Kitchen Nightmares, a customer approaches Chef Ramsay at Mama Maria’s and tells him
that she found a little bone in her tomato sauce.
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, because no one wants to find a bone in their tomato
sauce, she was also a vegetarian.
Ramsay, outraged, brings this to the chef’s attention, and the chef simply shrugs and
tells him that’s how they do it.
That’s not how they should do it.
That needs to change.
The owner tell Ramsay that that’s how they’ve prepared food for the last forty years and
he doesn’t see it being a problem.
Of course it’s a problem!
That seemed like it would be the biggest disaster of the night, but then a man is taken ill
after eating the lobster.
The chef says it’s just “tough,” but tough meat is something you send back, not
something that sends you vomiting to the restroom.
That’s not just bad service.
That’s another level completely.
If you serve someone rotten seafood, the corpse of a lobster that has decomposed, then they
could die.
Ramsay goes to a lot of bad restaurants on his shows, but few where the food is so bad
it could kill someone.
Gordon Ramsay Gets Jonathan Ross To Kill A Lobster!
For a lot of people, an ethical concern arises from eating lobster.
They’re happy to eat it, but it’s when they have to be the one to kill it or they
pick it out of a tank when it’s alive that the moral issues begin to bubble to the surface.
Jonathan Ross is one of those people.
He’ll eat lobster, but if he doesn’t kill it, then for all he knows, it died of old
age.
So on an episode of the F Word, Gordon Ramsay decided to challenge that moral compass by
getting him to kill a lobster.
He says, “Listen, if you’ve got the b****cks to eat it, you should have the b****cks to
cook it.”
It’s a fair statement.
If you’re going to get cold feet about killing a lobster, then avoid it entirely.
Don’t get sad before it’s been cooked but then still eat it when it has been cooked.
Go big or go home.
Once again, Ramsay advocates jamming a knife into the little cross on the lobster’s back
to kill it instantly before putting it in the pot.
At least this is more humane than tossing it into the pot to be boiled alive.
Maine Lobster & Canadian Lobster
One of the main problems that come up on his shows is customers sending back food that
is raw.
How hard is it to cook something until it’s actually cooked?
It’s really easy to tell when something’s cooked, so someone who calls themselves a
professional chef should definitely be able to tell when food is fit for consumption and
when it needs a few more minutes on the grill.
That’s the first problem the customers have at The Black Pearl, but it’s not the last
for Gordon.
He inspects the kitchen and finds that they’ve been lying about their lobster.
They say they’re all from Maine, when some of them are from Canada.
Maine is one of the best states for seafood and it’s renowned for its high quality lobster.
Canada, however, according to chef Ramsay is not.
Ramsay says the lobsters sell for very cheap and he only uses them as a side for pasta
meals, rather than as a lobster meal on its own.
And the guy running this restaurant can’t tell the difference between the two of them!
As far as he’s concerned, it’s all in the North Atlantic Ocean, so it must all be
the same stuff.
But apparently, it really isn’t.
Freshly Caught Crayfish Salad
OK.
We know crayfish aren’t exactly lobsters but they are related.
Both might look super creepy when they’re alive and crawling around, but when they’re
dead and cooked and seasoned, they’re pretty darn delicious.
Crayfish are also known as crawfish or crawdads and are very popular in Louisiana style cooking.
During this episode of the F word, Gordon Ramsay says there’s a bunch of crayfish
out there and they’re like tasty mini lobsters.
The guy he’s fishing with says that fish is actually the best bait.
A lot of people use worms, but worms don’t exist in that ecosystem.
At least fish belong in the water and whatever you’re trying to catch will be used to the
taste.
This clip also sees some father-son bonding between Gordon and his son Jack as they embark
on their fishing trip together.
Then they head back to the kitchen to cook them and eat them together, so there’s a
nice family element.
When they’ve just been caught and they’re wiggling around in their cage, the crayfish
look nasty, but once they’ve been boiled and seasoned and presented on a plate in a
salad, they look juicy and delicious.
The best thing about this meal is that it was completely free.
You can go and fish for your own crayfish, completely free of charge, and this video
acts as a sort of how-to guide to get you started.
Gordon Ramsay Demonstrates How To Cook The Perfect Lobster
Cooking lobster is difficult.
In culinary terms, it’s one of the most difficult things to do.
But with the right instructions, anyone should be able to do it at a professional level.
So, that’s why in this episode of MasterChef Gordon Ramsay shows the contestants what amounts
to the ultimate instructional video on how to make the perfect lobster.
If you do exactly what he does, step by step, then what you should have in the end is the
perfect lobster.
And you can do it again and again, as long as you don’t stray from Ramsay’s instructions.
You’re welcome to play around with the seasonings and spices, of course, and in fact, that would
be encouraged.
But the baseline of a perfect lobster tutorial can be found in the guidance he is giving
the contestants.
There are some great tips in there, too.
Stay away from the claws before the lobster is dead, because they will grab you.
The removal of the head seems to be the trickiest part, because it involves cutting the neck
with a scissor at just the right angle for it to stand up on its own.
As always, Ramsay finishes by brushing on some olive oil.
He loves that olive oil; he puts it on everything!
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