Cooking with Gordon Ramsay

Gordon Ramsay's pasta roller is falling apart. Because I've broken it.

The Scottish-born chef on Fox's reality show "Hell's Kitchen" is trying to show me how to cook salmon-stuffed tortellini. But we've barely started rolling the egg-white dough into long, appetizing, chamois-width garlands of pasta when the machine's handle comes off in my grip. Twice.

When things like this happen on the TV show -- and really, such kitchen mishaps are pretty much the whole point of "Hell's Kitchen," on which the master chef scouts a suitable protege from a platoon of eager young apprentice cooks with diverse aptitudes -- Ramsay turns the whole experience into a teaching opportunity. He will get very red in the face, race up to one of the student chefs and then bellow some helpful advice in his or her ear. Usually spiced with a bleeped-out, four-letter word or two.

My culinary skills are, it is safe to say, modest; I can scramble eggs and broil a steak, but not much else. Now, standing there with the pasta-roller handle in my hand, I brace myself for the hurricane of chef Ramsay's loathing. Would he try to psych me out, the way he does contestants on the show? Would he tell me I'm worthless and have no self-respect? To get the [expletive] out of his [again with the expletives] kitchen?

Read more (and see video): Cooking with Gordon Ramsay

-- Scott Collins

Photo: Gordon Ramsay, 42, presides over a mini-empire that has vaulted him into the ranks of celebrity chefs.  Credit: Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles