Gordon Ramsay Uses This Rich Liquid For Extra Flavorful Meatballs

We all have unique strategies when it comes to making staple dishes and ingredients as delicious as possible. While this can sometimes be quite time-consuming (like taking Guy Fieri's advice and making all your pasta sauce from scratch), it can also be simple, painless, and well worth your while. One instance of this latter case is a technique utilized by none other than Gordon Ramsay. The critically acclaimed celebrity chef's trick is to add coconut milk to the pan when he cooks meatballs, giving them an instant flavor boost that few other techniques can replicate.

His use of coconut milk when making meatballs was highlighted in a video posted to Gordon Ramsay's YouTube Channel, which shows the chef detailing his fittingly-named Meatballs in Coconut Broth recipe. "It gives a really nice new dimension to a sort of soft, rich, sumptuous meatball," the chef explained. While Ramsay does use whole milk alongside breadcrumbs within the meatballs themselves, the coconut milk comes into play later on as the meatballs are nearing completion in the pan alongside coriander seeds, cardamom seeds, turmeric, cinnamon, dried chilis, lemongrass, and ginger. "That sort of gives it that creamy richness, but it's not heavy," Ramsay explained of the coconut milk. "It's a fragrant, light richness."

Now, while Gordon Ramsay's reputation as a restaurateur and tenured head chef gives credence to the combination of coconut milk and meatballs, he's far from the first person to utilize the two ingredients together. Coconut milk and meatballs are often used alongside one another in India, for example, where coconut milk plays a role in dishes such as kofta curry. This is also true for Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand. In the case of Thai meatballs, some recipes use coconut milk in place of whole milk within the meat itself; making the dish completely dairy-free without losing out on the remarkable taste and texture that milk provides.

Gordon Ramsay's recipe uses coconut milk as a key part of a brothlike sauce which the meat simmers in. For the video, Ramsay plates the meatballs sitting in a bowl of this sauce, but you can take things a step forward by adding noodles to the mix to give your dish more substance. Either thin rice noodles or chow mein noodles would be a good fit here. You may be scratching your head over that since thin noodles like angel hair pasta don't typically work well with heavy sauces, but this coconut milk broth is a truly perfect pair for stringier types of noodles.