Gordon Ramsay’s Easy 10-Minute Pasta Dinner Features This Surprising Ingredient

You’ll usually find this ingredient in salad, but it’s much more versatile than you might think.

When he’s not judging his Hulu competition cooking show Next Level Chef, Gordon Ramsay is dropping gold nuggets of culinary knowledge on his social media accounts. He already demonstrated how to make a 15-minute version of butter chicken over on YouTube. Now, he’s shown us how to make a mouthwatering pasta dinner in just 10 minutes, and it features an ingredient you may not think of including.

In the video, Ramsay makes a buttery pea and pancetta pasta that’s packed with garlic and herbs. He says, “This is a dish that I’ll eat the night before a big run, because it’s hearty, delicious and—more importantly—so easy to do.” And easy it is! Had he not been explaining the recipe, he might have actually finished the bulk of the cooking in eight or nine minutes. (Not including the time it took to bring the pot of pasta cooking water to a boil.)

You might think the salty bits of pancetta are the star of the dish, or perhaps the sweet spring peas. Not according to Ramsay. Rather, he claims, “The lettuce for me is what gives it the vibrancy.” He goes as far as to say it’s “better tasting than fresh spinach.”

Now, you might be thinking, “‘Lettuce?’ Why would anyone put lettuce in a hot, saucy pasta?” For Ramsay, the inspiration came from his time working in France, where he would eat “fresh peas finished with bacon and lettuce.” And trust both Ramsay and us when we say cooked lettuce tastes way better than you think. He says the key to using lettuce in pasta is drying it well and adding it at the end of the cooking process so the dish doesn’t get watery. He stirs it in at the very end, just after he folds in the pasta, letting the residual heat slightly wilt it.

We often turn to spinach or kale as a leafy green for pasta recipes, but lettuce tell you why we’re here for Ramsay’s romaine. Not everyone likes the pronounced flavors of darker leafy greens, so using romaine could be a good move if that’s you. Plus, romaine lettuce can be a nutritious addition to your eating pattern. It’s packed with nutrients like vitamins K and A, folate and a range of antioxidants to help support healthy bones, eyes and skin and combat inflammation. This makes it a good nutritional stand-in, when you want to get your greens without the more bitter taste of dark leafy varieties.

And when tossed in at the last second, romaine adds a brightness to the plate that you might miss out on with dark leafy greens. If you’ve never tried it before or just want something flavorful for dinner tonight, we agree with one commenter who says Ramsay’s pasta dish “looks amazing for an ‘I’m too tired to cook’ night.”