Gordon Ramsay's Top Tip For Preventing A Tired Arm While Whisking

Ask any chef and they'll tell you cooking is strenuous physical work. Lifting 20-pound bags of flour, dashing around the kitchen, or even just standing for hours on end is enough to suffice as a day's workout. But if you've ever made whipped cream by hand, you know that's the real arm burner.

Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay — known for his hit reality cooking competition show "Hell's Kitchen," which is filled with his notorious tirades pointed towards contestant's sub-par abilities — dropped his top tip for whipping cream by hand in a recent episode of his YouTube series.

In this video, Ramsay cooks with his oldest daughter, Megan, to create one of his "all-time favorite classic desserts," Eton Mess Bombe. Eton mess is a British dessert made with meringue, whipped cream, and fruit — traditionally strawberries. The treat originated from the English boarding school, Eton College. Ramsay describes his dish as an Eton mess with a twist because he freezes it, turning it into a frozen dessert "bombe."

Ramsay delegates the task of whipping the heavy cream to his daughter, but not before imparting some key advice to spare her arms.

Gordon Ramsay's top tip for homemade, hand-whipped whipped cream is to whip for 10 seconds with one hand, then take the whisk in your other hand for 10 seconds, then switch again (via YouTube). This back-and-forth process makes it so your arms don't get tired.

Another way to ensure your cream-whipping arms stay agile is to make sure you have the proper technique and the right equipment. Rather than stirring in a circle, or beating like you would for scrambled eggs, Cook's Illustrated notes that the proper whisking technique is to move side to side. This is effective because it allows "more shear force to be applied to the liquid." Cook's Illustrated also recommends using chilled cream and a chilled bowl, because "the colder the cream, the faster it whips."

No fancy Kitchen Aid mixer or hand-mixer is needed to make whipped cream; all you need is a bowl and a whisk. But which bowl and whisk you use can determine how long the process takes. According to Food52, using either a large balloon whisk or a cage whisk will cut down the whipping time significantly compared to a regular whisk.

Additionally, using a very large, chilled bowl ("at least eight times the volume of the unwhipped cream," per Cooks Illustrated) makes the process faster. Stainless steel or glass bowls work best because they retain the chilly temperature better than other materials. With Ramsay's top tip plus a few others, you'll have beautiful, velvety whipped cream in minutes — no sore arms required.