I tried Gordon Ramsay’s 10-minute ‘gourmet’ pasta. It’s one of my new go-to weeknight dinners.

Any food lover will tell you that Gordon Ramsay’s cooking looks delicious, but his Michelin-starred cuisine doesn’t always sound easy to replicate in a home kitchen.

That’s why his 10-minute “gourmet” pasta recipe caught my eye. A fancy pasta with pancetta and veggies that comes together in under 30 minutes? Yes, please.

In search of a new, easy, celebrity-chef-backed weeknight meal, I put the recipe to the test. Here’s how it went.

The pasta calls for 15 ingredients, and I already had several in my fridge.

This recipe has a distinctly British tilt, with its classic combination of peas and pancetta. It also shares a few ingredients in common with classic pasta carbonara, but the result is something altogether different.

The base of the sauce is made by rendering out the fat from pancetta lardons (you could also use thick-cut bacon) and adding garlic, a chile pepper, frozen peas, and a mixture of fresh herbs.

The sauce is rounded out with vegetable broth, butter, plenty of lemon juice and zest, and starchy pasta water. Finally, the recipe calls for crushed red pepper flakes and Pecorino Romano (or grated Parmesan) as toppings.

Although pancetta and Pecorino Romano are both carbonara mainstays, the peas, lemon, herbs, and spicy pepper land this dish in a category of its own.

Preparing the ingredients took more time than I expected, but the sauce came together quickly.

I knew this recipe was a 10-minute pasta, so I didn’t expect to spend nearly 10 minutes just preparing the ingredients.

Some of them were simple (I used frozen peas, after all), but it did take some time to slice the pancetta, zest and juice the lemon, grate the cheese, chop all of the herbs and pepper, and measure my broth and butter.

To cut back on prep time in the future, I’d go with pre-grated cheese and pre-chopped pancetta lardons.

Still, I didn’t mind the prep time. Taking a few extra minutes to assemble my ingredients made executing the sauce much easier and faster.

As soon as I added a pound of spaghetti to a large pot of salted boiling water, I started cooking the pancetta in a large skillet. (Make sure you use one that’ll be big enough to hold all the pasta at the end.)

Next, I cooked all the ingredients in one skillet.

The key to getting the meat crispy — and rendering out as much fat as possible, which will contribute to the sauce’s richness — is not to blast the heat.

Ramsay recommends medium heat, and though it’s tempting to nudge your stove toward medium-high or even high, a lower and slower cooking process will yield better results.

Still, because the pancetta was sliced into lardons (a fancy term for bite-sized pieces), it only took me about four minutes to render out the fat.

After that, things started moving quickly. I sautéed the garlic and pepper in the pancetta fat for about a minute until I could smell the spice and allium cooking. Then, I melted a knob of butter and tossed in the peas and chopped herbs.

These green ingredients cooked very quickly (even though the peas were still frozen), so I didn’t want to leave them in the hot skillet for too long before adding the vegetable stock and more butter to cool things down.

I remembered to save pasta water before adding my spaghetti to the skillet.

It’s tempting to drain the entire pot of spaghetti in a colander when the noodles reach al dente, but saving about a cup of pasta cooking water is key to achieving a silky-smooth sauce. (The recipe calls for about ¼ cup of pasta water, but I chose to save a bit more.)

After draining the pasta, I squeezed lemon juice and zest into the skillet and added a splash of the water, too. Then, I poured in the cooked noodles and gave everything a big stir.

I served the pasta immediately to keep the peas looking fresh.

As soon as the dish was seasoned, I served the pasta.

The peas ended up darkening a bit, but the texture was still great, and overall, the dish had wonderful flavor. The lemon packs a punch, so I ended up adding more salt and a snowfall of creamy pecorino to counter that acidity.

I also found that the crushed red pepper flakes made a nice addition without overwhelming the more delicate flavors.

The entire process of making this dish took closer to 20 minutes — but it was still quick enough (and even Michelin-worthy, according to my inner critic) to earn a spot in my personal cookbook.

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