It’s OK to be sweet on these sugary treats...
Yotam Ottolenghi and Helen Goh want us to savour our sweet treats – as ELLA WALKER discovers
ADEBATE with Yotam Ottolenghi and Helen Goh on the merits of any particular cake, biscuit or pudding, spirals into serious, labyrinthine assessments of silkiness and nuttiness, crumb size and snap.
There is, they will tell you, an art to ensuring a biscuit has as much crunch when it’s liberated from the oven as it does after three days in a tin.
You quickly realise they’d be utterly formidable on Bake Off.
Israeli-British chef Yotam, 48, co-owner – with Sami Tamimi – of the Ottolenghi delis and restaurants, and pastry chef and psychologist Helen, 51, have spent three years concocting and wrangling over sugary treats like this to include in their new book of desserts, Sweet. It’s his sixth book and her first.
In it there are mini berry frangipanes, decadent creamfrosted puds and cookies galore – all of which have been put through the pair’s ruthless, multi-stage recipe-testing regime.
“Each recipe has to have something indefinably ‘Ottolenghi’ about it,” says Yotam.
“There was always going to be an Ottolenghi pastry book, the question was when,” he adds, explaining how the Ottolenghi deli windows have become synonymous with sweet things, particularly the brand’s huge and billowy meringues.
“Before you, no one had taken meringues seriously,” Helen tells Yotam proudly.
The pair met in 2006, when Helen, who hails from Melbourne, Australia via Malaysia, moved to the UK. She began by encouraging Yotam to up the patisserie and sugar-work in the deli windows, and won him over with her remarkable attention to detail and oaty Australian Anzac cookies.
They’ve been friends and partners in pastry ever since.
With baking, it’s the precision and escape that appeals to Helen: “There’s a satisfaction of following the steps and then getting something at the end – just that sense of achievement, and that sense of flow. You have to be accurate and very focused, which means you forget about everything else.”
For Yotam, it’s the way baking intersects with memory: “We’re all yearning for things that feel comforting and reminiscent of home – and I think baking really brings that across, even more than other forms of cooking.”
One thing they were highly aware of throughout making Sweet, was the negative conversations being had around sugar – the mainstream demonisation of the white stuff.
“The difficulty at the moment is creating a clear understanding of what you expect of sugar,” says Yotam. “Whenever you demonise something, you want it even more; it creates an unhealthy relationship.
“We’ve always been raised eating a little bit of sugar, but somewhere along the way, that relationship has become a little bit broken,” he says, explaining how a bewildering distance has opened up between us and sugar.
“It’s mainly to be blamed on mass-produced food, and sugar added where it doesn’t need to be, so how are you meant to trust your instincts on it now?
“There is room for a piece of cake, room for a bar of chocolate – there is room for all of these things in our lives – but we need to do it consciously.
“And if you make it (yourself ), you know exactly what goes in – you are much more aware of what you’re eating. I think generally we should be a little bit more relaxed about everything, and the rest will follow.”
Sweet by Yotam Ottolenghi and Helen Goh (photography by Peden + Munk) is published by Ebury Press, priced £27, and is available now.