CLOSE TO THE VEG
Chef Josh Katz tells PRUDENCE WADE about trying to grow his own vegetables, and what he learnt from his old boss, Yotam Ottolenghi
LIKE many people, the pandemic made chef Josh Katz want to go back to basics. He even relocated from London to Ibiza, saying he believed “the pandemic was telling us to live a more simple life”.
But he soon found this was easier said than done. “I moved to the middle of nowhere and started growing vegetables – but I found it’s really difficult,” Josh admits.
“It’s not that easy to live self-sufficiently, it takes a lot of work and a lot of time” – particularly with work and family responsibilities too.
Josh was battling the more challenging climatic conditions of the Balearic island. In the UK, he explains, “we get a lot more rain – and there you get great sunshine”, but the soil isn’t quite as rich.
He did try, though. “I had courgettes, I tried pumpkin, I had peppers, chillies, aubergines – a lot of things.” It would’ve been helpful for Josh to produce a bountiful crop, because he was writing his second cookbook – one entirely dedicated to vegetables. Instead, he says: “You would spend a lot of time tending plants, and end up with barely enough to test a recipe.”
Josh says he’ll “persevere” – but he’s not going to become completely self-sufficient any time soon. Luckily, his experiences haven’t put a dampener on his love for vegetables, either.
“I’m not vegetarian, but I’ve been cutting down on meat over the last few years. For my own health reasons, I want to eat less, and also environmental,” he says.
Josh is responsible for London restaurants including the grill house Berber & Q and Shawarma Bar – and while they might sound meat-heavy, he says: “I was very conscious from the early days to make sure vegetables had a prominent place on the menu. In fact, one of our signature dishes was our cauliflower shawarma.”
Not that Josh has always been into veg – he admits it’s been a “journey of discovery, and I’m still on it. As a teenager, vegetables didn’t play a significant part of my diet, and in my 20s vegetables were never an exciting thing for me.”
The real turning point was when Josh started working for Yotam Ottolenghi in his late-20s. “He’s always been a big advocate for cooking vegetables, and that was probably the starting point for me – cooking in Notting Hill, doing salads every day. I loved my time there. I had been working at a French restaurant before... classic bistro cooking, much richer and heartier French cooking.
“Then I went to Ottolenghi, where it was all about light and bright colours and vegetables.
“Twelve years later, I’ve written a book on it.”
There’s a mix of cuisines in the book, from the Middle East to North Africa. Mediterranean dishes also feature heavily – perhaps unsurprisingly, as Josh was writing in Ibiza – and there’s a reason he eats a lot of Mediterranean-style dishes.
“It feels like a healthy diet, I always feel a lot lighter for it,” he explains. “Subsequently, I feel healthier and mentally more charged by it. I’m getting to the stage in my life – I’m 41 – where my body tells me what it likes, and what it doesn’t want – and it changes as you get older.
“So the Mediterranean diet just feels a slightly cleaner and lighter approach to cooking for me.”
■ Berber&q: On Vegetables by Josh Katz, published by Kyle Books, £25. Photography by James Murphy