Gordon Ramsay’s Easy Pasta Recipes, Ranked Least to Most Delicious

The Bloody Mary is one of Ramsay’s favorite cocktails, so he decided to whip up a pasta that channeled its iconic flavors.

“This makes an unusual starter or main and just shows how even the most familiar dishes — in this case pasta and tomato sauce — can be updated,” the chef writes in his “Ultimate Home Cooking” cookbook.

Ramsay’s Bloody Mary pasta features linguine, vodka, celery salt, and Worcestershire and Tabasco sauces, as well as handmade toasted breadcrumbs.

A great Bloody Mary cocktail is full of salt and heat, a burst of flavor that can conquer any hangover. Unfortunately, Ramsay’s pasta pales in comparison.

While I appreciated the ease of this recipe, the dish lacked depth. The diced tomatoes left the sauce too thin, and I barely got a kick of heat from the Tabasco. Overall, this pasta was just too plain — I’ll be sticking to the cocktail.

How to make Gordon Ramsay’s Bloody Mary linguine.

Ramsay’s shrimp scampi is one of the pasta recipes in his cookbook “Ramsay in 10,” which features dishes that can be made in just 10 minutes.

In addition to shrimp and angel-hair pasta, the dish includes cherry tomatoes, basil, capers, shallots, and lemon zest and juice.

With its bright pops of color and the scent of freshly squeezed lemon, Ramsay’s shrimp scampi transported me to a seaside taverna in August. The pasta tasted light and zesty, and I loved the texture of the blistered tomatoes.

I recommend adding more chili flakes to this recipe for just a bit more pop, and make sure to carefully watch your angel hair — it can get sticky if it cooks for too long.

How to make Gordon Ramsay’s 10-minute shrimp scampi.

Ramsay’s cacio e pepe only requires 30 minutes and five basic ingredients — butter, bucatini, black peppercorns, plus Parmesan and pecorino cheeses — but the chef set out to prove that “quick food doesn’t mean bland and one-dimensional.”

“Producing restaurant-quality meals in half an hour can be a challenge,” Ramsay writes in his “Quick and Delicious” cookbook. “But there are ways around this if you know how: choose the right ingredients, marry them with the right combination of spices and sauces, use the right cooking method, and you can produce incredibly tasty meals that tick all the boxes.”

Ramsay really elevates this cacio e pepe with the homemade Parmesan crisps, which added a nice contrast of texture to the chewy bucatini noodles. I also loved the sauce, which tasted silky smooth with the simple addition of some pasta water.

“Cacio e pepe translates as ‘cheese and pepper,’ and that’s essentially all that goes into this sauce,” Ramsay writes in the recipe description. “The magic ingredient that binds them together is the pasta cooking water. It is full of starch, which emulsifies with the butter and helps the sauce cling to the pasta.”

How to make Gordon Ramsay’s cacio e pepe.

Ramsay loves this turkey and leek pasta so much that he said he makes it for his family every week.

“For a change, skip the Bolognese and make this creamy turkey and leek sauce in a fraction of the time instead,” he writes in the “Ramsay in 10” cookbook. “It might just become a regular midweek family meal, as it has at my house.”

The 10-minute dish features either penne or fusilli pasta, plus ground turkey, leeks, shallots, garlic, lemon, Parmesan cheese, and homemade sage breadcrumbs.

I don’t usually crave poultry with my pasta, but Ramsay’s dish showed me what I’ve been missing.

The turkey and leek sauce was light but bright, thanks to the sweetness of the leeks and the zing from the lemon, and the sage breadcrumbs added an extra layer of depth to the overall flavor.

I whipped up this pasta while visiting my family, and everyone loved it — no wonder Ramsay makes it every week!

How to make Gordon Ramsay’s turkey and leek pasta.

My family and I discovered this 15-minute Bolognese while watching episodes of “Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Cookery Course” at the start of the pandemic.

The dish only requires a few basic ingredients — dried tagliatelle pasta, sausage, tomatoes, garlic, and onion. I also like to add a can of crushed tomatoes and some parsley if I have them on hand.

A typical Bolognese can take hours to simmer, but Ramsay’s recipe develops so much flavor at a fraction of the time. The dish takes very little prep — five minutes or less — and the sauce still comes out comforting, rich, and delicious every time.

My parents loved this pasta so much that my dad started making it almost every week after we first tried it. And no matter how many dishes I’ve tested on them, this is still one of their all-time favorites.

“It feels like home,” my mom told me.

How to make Gordon Ramsay’s 15-minute sausage Bolognese.