Cookbook's veggie dishes deliver big flavour
Chef Ottolenghi's latest cookbook is all about the flavour bombs
You know it when you taste it. The jolt of an extraordinary flavour combination, intense and complex. The first bite holds the pleasure of the unexpected — the second and third only get better, unfolding and developing, lingering on your lips and tongue.
The first recipe I cooked from Ottolenghi Flavor (Appetite by Random House, 2020) by Yotam Ottolenghi and Ixta Belfrage was their sweet potato in tomato, lime and cardamom sauce.
With a touch of heat from green chilies, the sweetness of roasted sweet potato, brightness of lime, tomato's umami and cardamom's camphor scent, it stops you dead in your tracks. With a book called Flavor, it's clear what you're getting. And with Ottolenghi's name attached, you know it's going to be special.
Since his second book, Plenty (Chronicle Books), was first published a decade ago, he has taken home cooks on a multi-part, vegetable-centric journey — introducing inventive combinations and treatments and inspiring experimentation and play.
“In a sense, this book is all about big flavours,” says Ottolenghi. “(Our) recipes are always about big flavours. But this time particularly sticking to vegetables, we really wanted to show how we tease out the flavour of that particular thing to a greater extent than we've even done in the past. So it just had to have that firework element to it in order for it to make it to the final cut.”
Flavor is the third of his vegetable-based collections: First there was Plenty, then Plenty More (2014). In the Ottolenghi test kitchen — a creative space in north London, where recipes are conceived and developed — one of its working titles was Plenty 3, or P3 for short. As they formalized the book — and as collaborator Tara Wigley came up with its structure — this nickname took on an extra layer of meaning.
The three Ps encapsulate three main chapters: Process (charring, browning, infusing, aging), Pairing (sweetness, fat, acidity, chili heat) and Produce (mushrooms, alliums, nuts and seeds, sugar — fruit and booze).
With their decades of combined experience as chefs, for them, “cooking is mainly instinctual,” explains Belfrage, who began her culinary career at Ottolenghi's NOPI restaurant and has been developing recipes at the test kitchen for the past five years. They took time to question their own decision-making processes in order to share not only 100-plus recipes, but an education.
“It's not just about cooking all of the recipes in Flavor,” she says. “It's also about having the confidence to build flavour in your own dishes, and understand the whys and hows … Why we're chargrilling. Why we're infusing, and how that brings out flavour.
“So I hope more than anything, more than people making all the recipes, I hope that it makes them become better, more confident cooks.”