THE OTTOLENGHI EFFECT
Superstar chef shares delightfully SIMPLE dishes in new cookbook
Yotam Ottolenghi may not have invented the way we like to eat now, savouring all those small plates of bright, zingy, cross-cultural and veg-forward flavours. But no one, perhaps, has done more to define it.
“My mission is always to find an angle on a dish,” he says. “It’s a case of taking a dish that might seem to be familiar to people, but adding that little twist.”
The charmingly soft-spoken Israeli-British chef, author and all-around culinary superstar was in Vancouver recently to promote his latest cookbook, his seventh, which is called Ottolenghi Simple and aims to make his sophisticated cuisine accessible even to the most inexpert, time-crunched, cashstrapped home cook.
“A lot of people think it’s an oxymoron to have Ottolenghi and ‘simple’ in the same breath,” he says wryly. But, he points out, “Easy is not necessarily about the recipe, but the cook who cooks the recipe.”
While he was in town, he spoke to a smitten sold-out crowd at the Granville Island Stage, where he was interviewed by Vij’s chef, co-owner and cookbook author Meeru Dhalwala.
“I kind of feel like I’m introducing George Clooney,” she said, as star struck as anyone in the audience.
The event was organized by the Vancouver Writers Fest, which — good news for food-obsessed Vancouverites — is looking to add similar high-calibre culinary content to its year-round lineup.
“His is the kind of story that we’re interested in presenting: a celebrated, international chef who can speak to the importance of good food to communities, and whose books and style are culturally grounded and help to expand the conversation about good food and good living,” says Leslie Hurtig, the festival’s artistic director.
Afterward, Ottolenghi took a few minutes to chat with us about cookbooks, culture and pantry staples before jetting off to Toronto and then home to London. We’re pretty smitten now, too.
In case you’ve somehow missed the culinary phenomenon that is Ottolenghi, here’s a little background. He was famously born and raised in the Jewish part of Jerusalem — the ancient holy city that is possibly the world’s greatest cultural and culinary crossroads — to parents of German and Italian background.
“We had very European food at home, but everything that was going on outside was fascinating,” Ottolenghi recalls. “This is one of the reasons I find myself cooking so diversely.”
He briefly considered a career in academe, but was seduced by the instant gratification of cooking for others and ended up a chef in London instead.
By 1999 he was head pastry chef at a shop called Baker and Spice, where he met Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi. The two had grown up on opposite sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, just a few kilometres away but worlds apart from each other.
They bonded over their shared love of Middle Eastern food and, in 2002, opened the first Ottolenghi delicatessen in London. It has since been followed by two more delis and three restaurants.
“One of the ways Sami and I convinced people that Middle Eastern food is good is because we modernized it with garnishes,” says Ottolenghi, who showers dishes with fragrant herbs, nutty seeds and peppery olive oil. “We started off selling food to go and if it didn’t look good it didn’t sell. And to make hummus look good is really hard work.”
In 2006, Ottolenghi began writing the weekly “New Vegetarian” column in The Guardian newspaper. His approach was what he calls “vaguely vegetarian:” although he still included meat dishes, he made vegetables the main show.
“For me the main consideration has always been the flavour,” he says. “And then there are all the side reasons to enjoy vegetables.”
Vegetables, he points out, are healthy, inexpensive, sustainable and endlessly versatile. Take the humble cauliflower. You can enjoy it steamed, fried, roasted, gratinéed or raw, but more importantly, it’s a vehicle for an infinite variety of other flavours. “And that versatility doesn’t really apply to animal proteins,” he says.
In 2008, he published his first cookbook, Ottolenghi, which was an instant bestseller. It was followed by the all-veg books Plenty and Plenty More, then Jerusalem, Nopi, Sweet and now Ottolenghi Simple.
He believes passionately in the value of home cooking, not just for putting food on the table, but also for gathering friends and family around that table.
“Every single one of my books has really been focused on home cooking,” he says, noting that while his earlier books have featured some complex, time-consuming recipes, “the techniques are not that complicated.”
More to the point, the recipes really work. Every recipe is tested eight to nine times in a North London test kitchen that is deliberately low-tech, as close to a home cook’s kitchen as possible. Even so, they can be challenging for time-pressed cooks, so a couple of years back The Guardian asked him to write a series of simplified recipes. “That was a lot of fun. That was the starting point,” he says.
It was also, increasingly, the way he was cooking at home. He and his husband Karl Allen have two young children and neither has the time to produce complicated meals, even if the kids had the patience to wait for them. They’re not alone, of course.
“I never asked myself when would people cook my food, until this book,” says Ottolenghi.
When he realized that most of his dishes were so time-consuming they could only be made on weekends or for special occasions, he decided to create a book for people who wanted to cook serious food every day. It became Ottolenghi Simple.
But, he says, “Even though the recipes have been simplified, I don’t think they’ve lost any of those bold flavours.”
SIMPLE is actually an acronym for a code to the recipes; after all, what one person means by simple (it needs to be on the table in 20 minutes) can be completely different from another’s definition (it needs to be made ahead of time). So, in the book, each recipe is marked by a letter: “S” refers to “short on time,” “L” to lazy-day dishes” and so on.
For me, the main consideration has always been the flavour.” Chef Yotam Ottolenghi
“S and L are for daily cooking, and P as well, for pantry. On the other hand, the M, make ahead, is for dinner-party food and weekendbrunch-type food,” says Ottolenghi.
He also includes a handy section of suggested menus and an even handier list of “10 ingredients that are flavour bombs.” They include za’atar, sumac, pomegranate molasses, preserved lemons and rose harissa, a North African chili paste with a subtle rose flavour.
“The idea is to stock up your larder with a set of great ingredients that I love and then they are threaded throughout the book,” he says. “If you buy them, you’ve taken the first step to cook from the book.”
Readers who assume Ottolenghi is just about Middle Eastern food might be surprised to find recipes for Asian- and Italian-influenced dishes as well.
“I work with people from everywhere,” he says.
“And I find certain cultures resonate with my food.” Indian, Malaysian, Singaporean and Thai cuisines, for instance, use similar spices (cumin, cardamom, cayenne, coriander), herbs (cilantro, mint) and condiments (chilies, pickles, yogurt) as those in Middle Eastern cooking.
“One of the things I try to do is not just feature the food of different cultures, I try to feature the people of different cultures,” he says.
“My kitchens are a good example of how it can be, and it produces great food. It’s great to show the whole world how we all benefit when cultures come together and work together.”
He smiles sweetly. “It makes you think that maybe we can do the same with humans.”
And that truly is the way we’d like to dine: peacefully, happily and deliciously, all of us at the same table.