I found Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Home Cooking on Hulu, and because I watch everything with Ramsay, mom and I checked it out. It is a home cooking show allegedly set in his home kitchen and cohosted with one of his family members: his wife, four of his five children or his mother. The animals featured in the opening credits never get to participate in the fun. I think that the show is also known as Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Home Cookery Course. It lasted a single season, consisted of twenty episodes, and each episode lasts twenty-three minutes long.
Ramsay’s persona in Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Home Cooking is counter to the one that we are familiar with in the US. Instead of a brash, profane, perfectionist, he gets to be what he hopefully is in real life-a loving husband and father, an approachable instructor and a gracious host. British viewers are more accustomed to the gentler side of Ramsay than Americans. At this point in time, I have nothing but unconditional love for Ramsay so I accept whatever persona I get.
When I was younger, I watched any show on PBS faithfully, but cooking shows never became a regular part of my routine though I would occasionally watch a show hosted by Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, Martin Yan and Ming Tsai. It is possible that I am just not into this genre of television, but I was not into Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Home Cooking. I feel as if these types of shows are supposed to be instructional, but they are not for me. I am rarely interested in the recipes featured in each episode, and Ramsay’s idea of a simple meal that you can make at home is in reality the opposite for us regular folk. They require a certain amount of dexterity that most of us do not possess and equipment that an ordinary person would not have or use frequently. I used to take cooking courses and went on cooking appliance shopping sprees. There is a point when you realize if a piece of equipment will organically become a part of your routine or not or actually gather dust. If you have not embarked on that journey yet, then maybe you can be tricked into believing his reassurances, but as for me and my house, we are not buying it.
Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Home Cooking would occasionally feature a meal that sounded as if I could feasibly make it. I would grab a notepad to seriously take notes so I could try and make it later. Um, do all hosts of cooking shows leave out important details such as the temperature that the oven should be set or how long something should stay in the oven? Because Ramsay does. It was only recently that I discovered that when this television series aired, it was released simultaneously with a cooking book so is it actually a secret informercial, and I was watching it out of context? It would explain why it only lasted one season. Also it is possible that something got lost in translation because Americans use the Imperial System and the rest of the world uses the Metric System so maybe I am the problem.
My mom thought Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Home Cooking was boring. She prefers reality television though she is not so attached to Ramsay’s brash style, but if she has to get a warmer, gentler Ramsay, she would rather watch him on MasterChef Junior. She watches Ramsay for the competition narrative and the interactions between contestants and judges so she prefers his FOX shows over an instructional program. Unlike me, she is not trying to take her cooking to the next level.
Even though it is highly staged and constructed, the best part of Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Home Cooking is the sneak peak into his personal life and watching him interact with each of his family members. Even though Jack, his son, looks like his clone, Matilda, one of his daughters, takes after her father and is clearly into cooking, not just humoring her father. If she chooses it, she seems like a natural successor to her father’s business, especially since she is one of the few people who is able to give as good as she gets and often leaves her dad speechless with her comments. Also it was kind of hilarious that he would be quite vocal in encouraging his children to cook so they could attract a future love interest then it seemed as if he was confronted with the reality of getting what he wished for then began to walk back his comments or maybe the kids told him to stop it. Who knows?
Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Home Cooking is neither one of his best shows nor his worse in terms of production quality and as a finished product, but it is one of his least interesting programs. It took us a long time to get through the series because it is binge resistant. You can only watch so many episodes in a row before we lost interest or found ourselves nodding off. When his shows are bad, they are a hot, almost unwatchable mess, but this one just leads to indifference and makes you wish that you were watching something else. At least a bad show spurs viewers into conversations about the levels of dreckitude, but no one watches this series and wants to talk about it later. I barely want to write about it.
Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Home Cooking is probably a solid show if you enjoy instructional cooking shows, are familiar with the metric system and enjoy Ramsay. If you are a completist like me, you will check it out regardless of the content, but all the sweetness does not make it more interesting, and it isn’t educational enough to make it worth my time. Skip it.