Gordon Ramsay's Ingredient Swap For A Less Pungent Guacamole

Guacamole is a Cinco de Mayo essential and the perfect complement to your chips and salsa. It can also add an extra creamy element to your tacos and burritos. While it may seem like a simple, classic recipe, not everyone agrees on the ingredients. Of course, avocados are a must, but celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay opts to exclude onions in his guac and swaps them out for a less traditional element.

Ramsay prefers to replace the sharp bite of onion with a milder-tasting shallot. While shallots become quite sweet when cooked down, in their raw form, they offer similar tasting notes to red onion, without such a pungent kick. This allows for subtler guacamole that isn't overpowered by onion flavor. Despite many quick and easy guacamole recipes consisting of red or white onion, cilantro, and various seasonings such as paprika and garlic powder, Ramsay doesn't find any of these items necessary; cilantro is another common ingredient that he is not afraid to omit from his guacamole. 

Beyond swapping onions for shallots, Ramsay leaves room for other ingredients to shine. While jalapeño is a common addition, the chef adds green chiles to his guacamole mixture instead for lighter spice and earthy notes. Since avocados are extremely high in fat, a well-balanced dip should incorporate other flavor profiles such as acid and heat. Therefore, along with the shallots' slight pepperiness and the green chiles' heat, Ramsay includes lime juice and plum tomatoes for acidity.

Gordon Ramsay believes everyone should know how to prepare a few basic meals, and he's not shy about offering cooking advice. As seen on FOX's "Hell's Kitchen," the celebrity chef's standards are quite high. In a YouTube video, Ramsay walks viewers through the process of making his guacamole, which he pairs with marinated chicken. 

Beyond his staple ingredients of avocado, tomato, shallot, lime juice, and green chiles, Ramsay seasons his guacamole mixture with salt and pepper before finishing it off with a drizzle of olive oil and mashing it all together. While having lime juice on your ingredient list is the golden rule for making restaurant-worthy guacamole, many home cooks overlook the slight differences that preparation or ingredient swaps can make.

In a Reddit post about finding the best guacamole recipe, one user shared that adding the avocado last was a "subtle game changer" because it gave the other ingredients time to meld and actually "temper[ed] the sharpness of the onions." Alternatively, Ramsay's ingredient swap seems to solve this problem by simply opting for a milder onion flavor in the first place by using shallots. While guacamole may seem like a straightforward recipe with only a few simple ingredients, making small changes can result in a different flavor profile entirely. Therefore, it's worth considering Ramsay's method.