Gordon Ramsay gets his hands dirty for new travel food show
NEW YORK — For his latest TV show, famed chef Gordon Ramsay has definitely left the comforting familiarity of his kitchens.
On “Uncharted,” Ramsay visits global destinations to explore flavors far from routine. He eats guinea pig in Peru, fishes for eel with his bare hands to make a Maori dish in New Zealand and forages for hearts of palm in Morocco.
“It’s a million miles away from my high-end, three-star Michelin kitchen,” he says of the show airing on the National Geographic Channel. “It’s straight to the source.”
After spending a week learning about the ingredients, Ramsay ends each hourlong show with a cooking competition, pitting himself against a local chef.
Ramsay, who is also a host on Fox’s “MasterChef,” told The Associated Press about being a fish out of water for once and how kitchens are changing.
AP: For the new show, you’re climbing trees, fishing for eels and rappelling down cliffs. Are you having fun?
Ramsay: I’m definitely having fun. It’s an extraordinary journey of discovery and peeling back those layers with cultures that in this ever-moving foodie world — of London, New York and Paris — [that] don’t tend to focus on what’s going on with Maori cuisine. So it’s traveling to great lengths to dig deep.
AP: A more humble side of you comes through. You aren’t often out of your element, are you?
Ramsay: I find joy in being vulnerable, in a way. It’s about gaining knowledge and that’s never left me in two and a half decades. There’s a lot of chefs with one Michelin star, or two stars or even three stars that want everything perfect everywhere they go and I’m the opposite. I want to go there and get stripped of those highfalutin accolades and become a local.
AP: What’s it like to get up close and personal with the ingredients?
Ramsay: For the last two decades, I’ve spent thousands of hours in kitchens with produce arriving at my fingertips. So, to do the opposite and get straight to the source, it’s actually been, to be honest, more of a therapeutic journey because I’m doing the opposite of what I’ve been doing for 20 years.
AP: You eat lovely things, like a mushroom pizza and mangos. But you also sample grubs and camel meat. Was that hard to do on camera?
Ramsay: I tend to forget the camera. I remember being 21 years of age and having a tiny studio flat in Paris. And underneath my flat was a horse’s butcher shop. And every weekend I used to save 30 or 40 francs to buy myself the most amazing fillet. It was all horse meat. It’s still pretty prevalent today in France, horse butcher shops. That’s no different to a camel in Morocco. It’s about what’s local.