Ryan Trahan stood at a professional kitchen counter, hands shaking, slicing open a beef Wellington he had assembled entirely on his own, 24 hours after cutting his first onion and promptly nicking his finger. The stakes were as real as they get: Gordon Ramsay had promised to watch the final result and send back a rating. But beyond the culinary celebrity pressure, this was a story about how fast a complete beginner can move when someone actually teaches them the fundamentals instead of assuming they already know them.
Nick DiGiovanni, who runs one of food’s most-watched cooking channels, had a specific theory to test. He believed that six core skills, knife work, seasoning, searing, sauce-making, baking, and plating, could take someone from square zero to beef Wellington in a single day. Ryan arrived knowing approximately nothing. During baseline testing, he identified beef broth as potato broth, called a spider strainer ‘a skillet with holes,’ and required confirmation that a can opener was, in fact, a can opener.
Six badges and one very expensive filet mignon
The training moved faster than anyone expected. Knife skills came first, built around what DiGiovanni calls the claw method, curling fingers like a dinosaur to use them as a guide for the blade. Ryan drilled chives, then faced a timed ten-minute test: break down a full chicken, segment an orange, and slice half a cucumber. He finished with seconds to spare, visibly shaking, and earned the first badge.
Seasoning followed, with the core lesson that every dish needs fat, acidity, and salt working together. Ryan seasoned french fries from high up to distribute evenly, then attempted to balance a butternut squash soup he had never tasted in his life. He landed on salt, butter, parmesan, and soy sauce, which DiGiovanni confirmed was close to ideal, noting only that a splash of cream and a touch more vinegar would have finished it. For the final seasoning test, DiGiovanni handed him a chicken biryani and asked what it needed. Ryan correctly identified it as a trick question: it was already perfect.
Searing came next, and this is where the training snapped into focus. A filet mignon hit the cast iron at the right moment, held down for contact, flipped cleanly away from Ryan at the exact right second, and came off the pan at 144.3 degrees Fahrenheit. DiGiovanni had five backup steaks waiting. He did not need a single one.
The sauce badge produced a red wine reduction built directly from the fond left by that steak, with a mirepoix base, a controlled flambé that briefly alarmed Ryan (‘Nick, it’s on fire’), and a finish of butter whisked in off the heat to protect the pan. Baking came through pigs in a blanket and five culinary trivia questions, which Ryan answered four correctly, including identifying that bagels are boiled before baking, a fact he genuinely did not know he knew.
Ninety minutes, one Wellington, one very nervous chef
The following morning, wearing a chef’s coat with ‘Chef Ryan’ embroidered on it, Ryan had 90 minutes and a full beef tenderloin. He minced shallots and garlic with a bread roll clamped in his mouth to blunt the eye sting, a trick DiGiovanni offered deadpan and completely seriously. He built a duxelle from three varieties of mushrooms cooked down with beef stock and red wine, seared the tenderloin in vegetable oil rather than the olive oil he used to burn at home, painted it with mustard, layered prosciutto, spread the duxelle, rolled the whole assembly tight, and wrapped it in puff pastry with a lattice scored across the top.
It went into the oven with roughly 30 minutes remaining. When it came out and Ryan cut through it, the cross section showed a clean pink center ringed by the dark duxelle and a shatteringly flaky crust. DiGiovanni, who had been narrating with increasing disbelief for most of the hour, went quiet for a moment. ‘I don’t know what’s happening right now,’ he said. ‘I might have created a monster.’
Gordon Ramsay‘s texted response arrived shortly after: ‘Bloody hell, that looks good. Nine out of ten.’
The chef’s coat with mustard on the lapel
The chef’s coat Ryan earned that morning had a mustard smear across the front by the time the Wellington went into the oven, applied during a particularly chaotic brushing session that DiGiovanni noted would have made Ramsay furious. Ryan’s only defense: ‘I didn’t earn the cleanliness badge, Nick.’
By the time Ryan finished his last bite and confirmed he was, in fact, late for a flight, the Wellington was mostly gone. The flaky salt DiGiovanni shook over the finished slice at plating, the chives scattered on top, the red wine reduction pooled underneath, every element traceable to a specific lesson from the previous 24 hours.
