If you’re hoping for a MasterClass full of expletive-laden lectures calling you an “idiot sandwich” or a “f***ing donkey” because of your inability to properly cook a scallop, this is not the class for you.

Although Gordon Ramsay came to fame for his fiery criticisms of chefs on Hell’s Kitchen and MasterChef, you’ll find a different side of Ramsay in this MasterClass.

Since this isn’t a competition and we’re not in the middle of dinner service at the Hell’s Kitchen restaurant in Las Vegas, Ramsay as MasterClass teacher is far calmer and more patient.

He’s much more like the MasterChef Junior judge in the clip that opens the MasterClass, praising nine-year-old Addison’s final entree moments before she is crowned the first female and (at the time) youngest winner of the show.  

You won’t get off easy in Ramsay’s MasterClass, though. While Ramsay patiently explains nuanced kitchen skills like breaking down a kitchen, his standards of excellence — and the belief that you, watching this, can meet them — shine through.

In this review, I’ll walk you through everything you need to know about the Gordon Ramsay MasterClass curriculum, structure, and pros and cons. I’ll tell you what I learned and who I think this course will benefit most.

Disclosure: In the interest of full transparency, Codeless uses affiliate links in our MasterClass reviews to cover our site’s costs.

Our Verdict

This MasterClass is recommended to anyone who loves Gordon Ramsay or just enjoys learning about good food from someone who loves it.

Gordon Ramsay Masterclass Become a Pro at Cooking

$15 /month

PROS

• Gordon Ramsay is at his MasterChef Junior best: patient, knowledgeable, and passionate about food (and helping you be passionate too)
• Lessons emphasize kitchen safety and reducing food waste
• It’s easy to jump around to the lessons or topics that interest you
• The MasterClass interface and the workbook are user-friendly, easy-to-use resources you can return to over and over

CONS

• There’s no clear through line to the curriculum
• Some of the recipes and ingredients feel a little intimidating, like cooking with sea urchin or king salmon

VISIT Gordon Ramsay’s MASTERCLASS

A few frequently-asked questions…

Do I need a subscription to access this course?

Yes. MasterClass offers subscription plans starting at $15 a month. You must hold a subscription before starting your first lesson. Of course, that subscription gets you access to all the MasterClass courses, not just Gordon Ramsay’s.

MasterClass occasionally offers deals and discounts to help you save money on a monthly or annual subscription plan. If we see any around, we’ll be sure to update this review.

Is the Gordon Ramsay MasterClass for beginners?

Home chefs of any skill level will find tips and takeaways in Gordon Ramsay’s MasterClass.

Brand-new home cooks with minimal kitchen experience may have some difficulty following along with the instructional lessons, but intermediate cooks looking to deepen and elevate their kitchen skills will probably get the most out of it.

Does MasterClass have a cancellation policy?

You can cancel your MasterClass subscription at any time through your account page. At the end of your current subscription period, your account will become inactive.

If you’re unhappy with your subscription, you can email MasterClass within 30 days of your initial purchase to obtain a full refund, thanks to their 30-day guarantee.

Is the Gordon Ramsay MasterClass worth it?

If you’re a fan of Gordon Ramsay, whether it’s for his intense TV personality or his long history of running Michelin-starred restaurants, his MasterClass will be a source of inspiration, insight, and entertainment.

Check out “Gordon Ramsay Teaches Cooking” on MasterClass

About Gordon Ramsay

Gordon Ramsay got his first restaurant job at the age of 16, where the head chef encouraged him to go to London to further develop his cooking skills.

After working under Marco Pierre White in London and in restaurants in Paris for several years, Ramsay took over a restaurant in Chelsea. That restaurant eventually became Aubergine, which earned Ramsay his first two Michelin stars.

In 2004, Ramsay began appearing on the reality cooking shows Kitchen Nightmares and Hell’s Kitchen, first in the U.K. and eventually in the U.S. Since then, he’s also starred on MasterChef, MasterChef Junior, Hotel Hell, as well as numerous other short-term shows and series.

As Ramsay grew his reality TV empire, his restaurant group also grew. It now operates dozens of restaurants across Europe, the United States, and Asia. Together, Ramsay’s restaurants currently hold a combined total of 7 Michelin stars, three of which are held by Restaurant Gordon Ramsay. At one time, Ramsay held a total of 16 Michelin stars.

A short breakdown of the Gordon Ramsay Masterclass course:

The Gordon Ramsay Teaches Cooking MasterClass, the first of Ramsay’s two courses, covers kitchen and cooking fundamentals while offering insight into Ramsay’s life.

There are four key components to the curriculum:

• Practical skills and concepts
• Ingredient overviews
• Recipe instructions
• Personal stories about Ramsay’s career

Ramsay’s first MasterClass begins with simpler recipes and ingredients like scrambled eggs and root vegetables before moving on to fish, pasta, and lobster.

Gordon Ramsay Teaches Cooking II: Restaurant Recipes is composed entirely of recipe videos. There are recipes for vegetarians, pescatarians, and meat lovers alike. I’m particularly intrigued by the crispy duck and the sesame crusted tuna as well as this platonic ideal of a raspberry souffle:

How much does Gordon Ramsay MasterClass cost?

To access the Gordon Ramsay MasterClass, you’ll need an annual subscription. The base subscription is $180 a year, which breaks down to just $15 per month.

When you subscribe, you’ll get access to every MasterClass in any category, as well as all of the supplemental materials like workbooks and discussion boards.

You’ll also have unlimited access to the lessons in Ramsay’s MasterClass. You can return again and again to brush up on your knife skills, get ideas for serving root vegetables, or finally tackle filleting a whole fish.

Check out “Gordon Ramsay Teaches Cooking” on MasterClass

What is included in the Gordon Ramsay MasterClass?

Supplementary workbook

The 44-page workbook summarizes the key points of each lesson and offers tips and assignments to help you practice what you’ve learned.

If you read the workbook on your phone, laptop, or tablet, you’ll find additional resources linked in the text to help deepen your knowledge of the topic.

There’s also space for taking notes if you’d like to print out the workbook for future reference.

The MasterClass Hub

Each MasterClass comes with a dedicated community discussion page, also known as “The Hub.”

You can discuss all things cooking with others who have taken Ramsay’s MasterClass, as well as ask questions and offer feedback.

Unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately) you won’t get any criticism from Ramsay himself.

A complete breakdown of the Gordon Ramsay MasterClass curriculum

Gordon Ramsay’s MasterClass gives you a little bit of everything: immediately practical tips for the kitchen, step-by-step recipes that you can make along with him, and all the details about how he became the chef you binge watch on Hulu.

The roughly four-hour curriculum is broken into 20 videos, ranging from under five minutes (the introduction and closing videos) to over 20 (the Make: Beef Wellington lesson).

Lesson list:

1. Introduction
2. Gordon’s Journey: Learning from Masters
3. Method: Kitchen Layout
4. Mastering Ingredients: Vegetables & Herbs
5. Make: Poached Egg & Mushrooms on Brioche
6. Method: Knife Skills
7. Make: Elevated Scrambled Eggs
8. Method: Breaking Down a Whole Chicken
9. Make: Chicken Supreme with Root Vegetables
10. Mastering Ingredients: Fish & Shellfish
11. Gordon’s Journey: Becoming a Master
12. Method: Breaking Down a Whole Fish
13. Make: Salmon with Shellfish Minestrone
14. Method: Making Pasta Dough
15. Method: Rolling Pasta Dough
16. Make: Lobster Ravioli
17. Mastering Ingredients: Beef, Lamb, and Pork
18. Make: Beef Wellington
19. Advice for Life
20. Closing

Course summary

The Gordon Ramsay MasterClass includes four types of lessons: Gordon’s Journey, Method, Make, and Mastering Ingredients.

After an introduction to Ramsay’s life and career, you’ll learn cooking techniques and recipes that gradually increase in complexity.

There’s no pattern to the lessons in this MasterClass. Instead, you’ll see each video build on the next one by incorporating skills and concepts that were previously covered.

The next couple of sections take a closer look at each type of lesson.

Gordon’s Journey

The behind-the-scenes view of Ramsay’s career that opens his MasterClass focuses on his accomplishments as a chef rather than a TV personality. It gives some nice context to how he rose to the prominence he has today.

You’ll get the most out of these lessons, which serve as an introduction and intermission if you’re a fan of Gordon Ramsay. If you’re just looking for cooking tips, focus your time on the other types of videos in this course.

Method

In each Method video lesson, Ramsay shows you each step of key skills like breaking down a whole chicken or fish and making fresh pasta dough.

These videos are incredibly detailed with great close-up shots so you can see exactly what Ramsay is doing. He covers sight, smell, and touch cues so you can understand what to look for at each step of the method.

In theory, you could grab a whole chicken and a knife and break it down along with Ramsay in the video, but I think the video moves a little too fast to keep up. (Slowing the play rate to 0.5x does not solve this problem.)

Mastering Ingredients

The Mastering Ingredients classes help you understand the individuality of specific vegetables, herbs, meats, and fish. It’s part of educating and understanding your palate.

Essentially, the Mastering Ingredients classes are about 10 straight minutes of Ramsay telling you why he loves his favorite ingredients, like this enormous flat fish called a turbot.

These are my favorite lessons.

Make

In the Make lessons, Ramsay creates recipes like poached egg and mushroom on brioche and lobster ravioli while providing insights into techniques and cues for handling these ingredients.

I really like the MasterClass interface for the recipe lessons, which includes the ingredients and instructions for each dish in a pane to the right of the video player.

If you’ve ever tried to cook from a recipe video on YouTube, you know that scrolling between the video and the instructions in the description below is a huge hassle, so I love how MasterClass has solved this problem.

You can also follow the recipe in the supplemental workbook, which also includes extra tips, resources, and assignments for each lesson.

Pro Tip: For an accelerated curriculum that will immediately boost your skills in the kitchen, watch the Method videos to focus on a few essential skills.

What I learned: 3 takeaways from this MasterClass

I’m never going to be able to summarize Ramsay’s cooking advice any better than he could say it himself.

So if you want to know precisely how to fillet an Alaskan king salmon, head over to MasterClass to check out Gordon Ramsay’s cooking lessons.

But there are three takeaways from Gordon Ramsay’s MasterClass that I’m going to start incorporating into my own cooking. Here they are:

1. Don’t be afraid to go slow:

Ramsay emphasizes the importance of practice. For instance, if you’re working on your knife skills, start by holding your knife on the cutting board and practice the movements with no veggies.

Then practice on softer or easier-to-cut vegetables like cucumbers before working your way up to “awkward-looking” vegetables, as Ramsay calls them, such as butternut squash.

While this class is technically only four hours long, you’ll get the most out of it if you can invest more time in practicing and refining what you learn over a longer period of time. Since the MasterClass subscription is good for an entire year, you can really take your time to let the lessons sink in.

2. Use every bit of your ingredients:

Thanks to his days as a struggling restaurateur in Chelsea, Ramsay’s made a habit of using every piece of every ingredient, especially the pricey ones.

From lesson to lesson, Ramsay shows you how to make the most of your ingredients. You’ll break a chicken down and turn salmon filet leftovers and lobster knuckles into an incredible ravioli.

3. Prepare yourself for cooking success:

Everything from the layout of your kitchen to the quality of your ingredients to preparing your supplies ahead of time contributes to helping you create excellent meals at home.

Once you set up your kitchen the way you like, get into the habit of preparing your mise en place. That’s the practice of measuring and chopping all of your ingredients ahead of time so you can focus on your cooking technique and timing, rather than finding the next pot or pan you need.  

Check out “Gordon Ramsay Teaches Cooking” on MasterClass

Memorable quotes from this MasterClass

“Can you buy a palate? And give someone the most extraordinary finesse through buying that for them? F***ing no chance. Can you educate a palate? Yeah you can.”

Introduction

“Chopping is not about learning to chop fast. It’s chopping with accuracy, and understanding that every slice is pivotal.”

– Knife Skills

“When vegetables are that good, serving them whole, roasted on a plate speaks volumes. You’ve got to respect what you put on the plate.”

Mastering Ingredients: Vegetables & Herbs

Gordon Ramsay Masterclass pros and cons

Clearly, I love Gordon Ramsay and really enjoyed his MasterClass. But to give you a quick look at the best and not-the-best parts of the Gordon Ramsay MasterClass, here are a few pros and cons.

Pros

• Gordon Ramsay is at his MasterChef Junior best: patient, knowledgeable, and passionate about food (and helping you be passionate too)
• Lessons emphasize kitchen safety and reducing food waste
• It’s easy to jump around to the lessons or topics that interest you
• The MasterClass interface and the workbook are user-friendly, easy-to-use resources you can return to over and over

Cons

• There’s no clear through line to the curriculum
• Some of the recipes and ingredients feel a little intimidating, like cooking with sea urchin or king salmon

Do I recommend this Masterclass?

I absolutely recommend this MasterClass to anyone who loves Gordon Ramsay or just enjoys learning about good food from someone who loves it.

Check out “Gordon Ramsay Teaches Cooking” on MasterClass

Our favorite Masterclasses, reviewed:

• Gordon Ramsay Teaches Cooking II: Restaurant Recipes
• Mossimo Bottura Teaches Modern Italian Cooking
• Mashama Bailey Teaches Southern Cooking
• Niki Nakayama Teaches Modern Japanese Cooking