Ramsay gets hands dirty for travel show
NEW YORK – For his latest TV show, famed chef Gordon Ramsay has definitely left the comforting familiarity of his kitchens.
On “Uncharted,” Ramsay travels 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 on the National Geographic Channel at 9 p.m. Sundays. “It’s straight to the source.”
After spending a week learning about the ingredients, Ramsay ends each show with a cooking competition, pitting himself against a local chef. Think of it like Anthony Bourdain crossed with Bear Grylls and “Top Chef.”
Ramsay, who is also a host on Fox’s “MasterChef,” talked recently about being a fish out of water for once and how kitchens are changing.
Question: For the new show, you’re climbing trees, fishing for eels and rappelling down cliffs. Are you having fun?
Answer: I’m definitely having fun. It’s an extraordinary journey of discovery and peeling back those layers with cultures that in this evermoving 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.
Q: A more humble side of you comes through. You aren’t often out of your element, are you?
A: 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 ... become a local.
Q: What’s it like to get up close and personal with the ingredients?
A: 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.
Q: Do you recommend that every chef do what you’re doing and carve some time to explore?
A: I’d recommend to every chef in the world to ... disappear for a month on a sabbatical. The problem is that when you get good, automatically you stop training because you’re caught up in the rapture of success and you don’t get a chance to go back to that coal face.
Q: Speaking of rough places, do you think the brutality of life in kitchens is lessening?
A: It’s definitely changing, and changing for the better. The kitchen environment today, with a far more greater female presence, has made things so much more relaxed in terms of temperaments. And so that’s been a blessing. So, yes, it’s definitely getting easier. And rightly so.