One Time I Sprinkled Salt On My Own Brain And I Screamed (by Gordon Ramsay)

Hello. I’m Gordon Ramsay. As a professional chef and TV personality, salt is a part of my everyday life. It pairs quite well with a number of dishes. Meat. Vegetables. Pretzel. Egg. You name it, and odds are, it goes with salt. However, there is one exception to this rule–an exception that I had the misfortune of learning the hard way… 

You see, one time I sprinkled salt on my own brain and I screamed.

It happened about 15 years ago. I was testing a new recipe in my home kitchen when I had an idea: If salt can bring out the best in flavors, why can’t it bring out the best in my brain? Was there unused potential in my brain, just waiting for a dash of salt to unlock it? I had to know. So I put my recipe aside, grabbed an electric drill from the garage, and called my son into the kitchen to help bore a hole in my skull until my bare brain was exposed. After giving me a kiss on the cheek, my son ran off, and I set to work, gathering a variety of salts to test on my brain: table, Kosher, sea, flake, pink, black, garlic, etc. “Let the experiment begin,” I said to myself, as I sprinkled a pinch of table salt onto the flesh of my brain, and waited 10 seconds to see what happened–and 10 seconds later, what happened was I screamed. Loudly.

In fact, putting salt on my brain made me scream so loudly the fire alarm went off. The frequencies of my scream were so high, so banshee-like, that a slice of raw chicken I’d left on the counter began to shake. For the next hour, my screaming continued, only ceasing occasionally for me to take a breath, which I’d instantly turn into more screaming. This reaction, i.e. screaming, was due to pain, caused by the salt on my brain.

Sadly, screaming was the only major impact of putting salt on my brain (I also went blind for three weeks, but the most notable effect was the screaming). I did not need to test the other salts to conclude that salt would not bring out the best in my brain, as it does an egg. Salt and my brain are a pair made in hell.

As unpleasant as this experiment was, I came away having learned an important lesson about salt and my brain. This lesson is now the very first rule of working in my restaurants, and perhaps the most helpful advice I can impart to chefs of any skill level: Unless you’re serving “scream” for dinner, keep salt away from my brain.