Ottolenghi on creating recipes and his cookbook Sweet
Here is an image that I can’t shake. It’s a Sunday afternoon, around 4, probably. My husband, Karl, looks out the window of our first-floor West London flat; an expression of clear foreboding appears on his face and then, very quietly, he says: “Helen’s here … with her cakes.”
Helen Goh then walks through our front door like a gust of wind or, rather, an overzealous dusting of icing sugar, carrying more cartons than humanly possible and, before even setting them down, begins apologising for all the things that went wrong with her cakes.
Helen is an old friend and colleague who came to the Ottolenghi shops fresh off the proverbial boat from Australia, back in 2006. I heard her story but couldn’t quite understand what drives such a star to leave behind a very successful career — Helen is both a talented pastry chef and a successful psychotherapist — in a very sunny Melbourne in favour of a rather elusive future in a rather grey London.
I finally realised that it was Helen’s restlessness and her insatiable drive for perfection that had brought her to me.
What we shared was the notion that there is no upper limit to the number of times you can bake a cake or the amount of thought that can go into the components of a tart in order to get it just right; that you can discuss the minutiae of a chocolate ice cream or a nut brittle as if the fate of the entire universe rests on the conversation, without worrying for a second that this may be, just maybe, a tiny bit over the top.
Baking brought out both our inner kids — and, also, our inner geeks, with all the precise measuring, timing and weighing that informed all of our chats. The combination of the child whose enthusiasm never wanes and the nerd who won’t rest until it’s perfect led to some pretty sweet results.
Officially, she’s a “product developer” for Ottolenghi, but that doesn’t really do her role justice; her originality and perfectionism have had an enormous impact on what we do. From Australia, she brought wonderfully crumbly and sharp yo-yo cookies, her billowy powder puff cakes that are just impossible to put down, and her chocolate cake, which is the cake grown-up kids dream of, and which a newspaper in Australia once called “the world’s best”.
Her Malaysian heritage came through loudly in her chiffon cakes and pandan-infused pineapple tarts, which we often placed on the counter alongside our mince pies around Christmas. Her fluency in European and American baking traditions are there everywhere, from the almond-and-aniseed nougat bars piled by the register to our cheesecakes, cupcakes, madeleines and scones, which all sit beside the cakes I grew up eating, like the syrup-soaked semolina cake here.
Because I am a pastry chef myself, and a notoriously sweet-toothed being with an insatiable appetite for cakes, my bond with Helen was immediate and firm. We spent the following decade conjuring up an enormous variety of sweet things. Eventually, all these led to Sweet, the cookbook Helen and I have been working on for the past three years, which is also my first book dedicated solely to sweets. The Sunday tastings at home were forerunners to our Wednesday tastings for the book, which happened in my test kitchen in Camden, North London. Similarly, they were long and intense, sugar being both the fuel enabling us to carry on and the focus of our in-depth discussions.