South Wales Echo

We both love big flavours, big gestures

Chef Yotam Ottolenghi and his co-author Ixta Belfrage chat to about their veggie cookbook, Flavour

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WHEN talking about food, the word ‘fusion’ can strike fear into a diner’s heart. More often than not, it suggests mismatched dishes chucked together with relatively little thought or considerat­ion.

However, Yotam Ottolenghi and Ixta Belfrage are here to change your mind.

Yotam is well known for his cumin-heavy cookbooks, colourful London delis and restaurant­s, and his love of pomegranat­e seeds. For his latest book he’s collaborat­ed with Ixta Belfrage, who worked in his test kitchen for four years.

The result is Flavour, a collection of exciting new dishes paying tribute to a range of cultures – and incidental­ly, it’s all vegetarian.

Yotam says the pair’s approach to writing the book was “pretty similar”, but they brought “very different background­s” to the table. “My background is deeply rooted in the Middle East,” explains Yotam, who was born in Jerusalem.

“I’ve lived here for more than 20 years and gone through my own trajectory. Ixta has less experience writing books, but tonnes of experience­s from being all over the world, and a really interestin­g background that includes Mexico, Brazil, Italy and France. And so all these stories came together.”

Ixta explains her “mother is Brazilian and grew up in Cuba via Mexico, so there’s south and Latin American in my heritage; in my upbringing; the kind of food I ate, and where I travelled when I was growing up.”

She moved to Italy when she was two-and-a-half, and says “that’s really what feels like home to me, and the food feels like home to me.”

With varied background­s capitalisi­ng on different ingredient­s and flavours, you might wonder how the book could come together so seamlessly.

However, a similar approach to food ties the duo together, with Yotam explaining: “We both love big flavours and big gestures. Intensity is definitely something we have in common, but the details are quite different” – and the recipes reflect this.

Whether it’s swede gnocchi with miso butter, za’atar cacio e pepe or caponata with silken tofu, the recipes marry together global flavours. For Yotam, “all these cultures” are united by one thing: “The human palate. We’re attracted to certain flavours, so if you substitute anchovies with miso – these two things are from quite different cultures, but they both involve the same level of saltiness, umami, fermentati­on – things that are really crosscultu­ral. So it doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to substitute one thing that may have been in a dish from one culture, with another from a different culture.”

The main issue is “being sensitive when you do that,” he explains, “so it actually does work.”

Something else uniting Ixta and Yotam is their roundabout way of getting into the food industry.

Yotam completed a master’s degree in comparativ­e literature and was considerin­g pursuing a doctorate before changing direction to study at the Cordon Bleu. Ixta never formally trained as a chef and says she did “lots of random things” before setting up her own catering company and market stall selling tacos.

Both chefs now see this as

an asset. As she didn’t have profession­al training, Ixta says: “I definitely don’t go about cooking thinking there is a certain set of rules that need to be followed, or ideas that might be taught at cooking school. I don’t think there are any rules when it comes to combinatio­ns about flavour.”

Ottolenghi Flavour by Yotam Ottolenghi and

Ixta Belfrage, photograph­y by Jonathan Lovekin, published by Ebury Press, £27. Out now

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 ??  ?? Shared tastes: Yotam Ottolenghi and Ixta Belfrage
Shared tastes: Yotam Ottolenghi and Ixta Belfrage

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