Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay is no stranger to controversy. He’s made a career of having strong opinions on food, like his passionate hatred for truffle oil, and a fiery temper that’s famously displayed on television shows like “Hell’s Kitchen,” where he’s often brutally berated contestants. Even when it comes to pasta, Ramsay has some contentious views. For example, he’s of the opinion that you should add a little olive oil to pasta water to keep it from sticking, a practice other chefs disagree with.
Perhaps the most controversial of Ramsay’s cooking-related opinions revolves around swapping out lettuce for spinach in pasta dishes. Yes, lettuce. He believes it adds vibrancy to pasta dishes. “It sort of gives a really nice lightness to the pasta,” Ramsay said in a recent video on how to make a pasta dish in under 10 minutes on his YouTube channel. He believes lettuce tastes better in pasta dishes than fresh spinach.
How Gordon Ramsay incorporates lettuce into pasta dishes
Gordon Ramsay uses a green leaf lettuce for his dish that incorporates spaghetti and pancetta, a cured meat similar to bacon except that its salt-cured rather than smoked. Ramsay came up with the idea of using lettuce in pasta from his time cooking in France where he ate fresh peas with bacon and lettuce. While it’s true that spinach is slightly healthier than lettuce since it contains a bit more vitamins and twice the amount of certain minerals, like calcium and iron, Ramsay’s recipe includes other healthy vegetables and herbs, like peas, parsley, chives, and basil, to help make up for whatever nutrition his lettuce swap might have removed.
Ramsay’s tips for adding lettuce to pasta dishes is to incorporate it at the very end because lettuce is 50% water, and you don’t want it negatively impacting the dish’s sauce. In his recipe, Ramsay gently folds the coarsely chopped lettuce in with the finished pasta dish in the pan. He then immediately takes it off the heat. As he says in the video, “What started off with a really nice humble bit of bacon in the pan got elevated to this beautiful, rich, spring, delicious pasta dish.”
