HOW MANY MORE WAYS ARE THERE TO FRY AN AUBERGINE?
Chef Danielle Postma of Moemas JHB fame, protégé and friend of the maestro Yotam Ottolenghi, caught up with the man who has turned veg into starring roles in a variety of dishes you never ever thought could taste that good. Compiled by Hilary Biller
Imet the delightful Yotam when I was a student at Leiths School of Food and Wine in London in 2000 when he was head pastry chef of Baker & Spice in Walton Street, London, the teeniest of bakeries in the hidden streets behind Harrods. He came to the school as a guest lecturer and watching him work I was smitten and took the opportunity to ask if I could work with him. He’s even a nicer person than you might think, attracting similar souls, and work never felt like work despite the long hours and endless orders ... it was always fun. — Chef Danielle Postma
Danielle Postma (DP): In your latest cookbook, Flavou r, an ode to vegetables, how do you come up with all your ridiculously ingenious ideas?
Yotam Ottolenghi (YO): I think I realised very early on that there’s a limited number of ideas that can come out of my head. And that it’s much better, more productive, to work in a team. It comes naturally to me and I love to work in a team. I actually really dislike working by myself. I’ve written one cookbook, Plenty , which is solely a work of my own, and going into the kitchen, testing the recipes, writing them down, sending them off, I said never again. I love the idea that people have a conversation around food, and I’ve been a beneficiary of these conversations for quite a long time now. And since my book Plenty, all the other books on one level or another were collaborations.
DP: And Flavour ?
YO: I’ve worked with an incredible woman called Ixta Belfrage — she’s only been working with this kitchen (the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen) for four years, or nearly five now. She’s got an incredible history with food in Italy, in Mexico and Brazil, a little bit of China, and she just brings all that to the table. So when we have a conversation, I learn as much as I teach and it’s always a new, really, really interesting conversation. And I just love it — for me that’s the culture that has been created in our test kitchen in Camden (London) where we test the recipes.
DP: What was the most surprising recipe you created in Flavour ? YO: The miso butter onion recipe is really an incredibly clever idea that came out of a Friday fridge clear-up where there was lots of miso and there was butter and there was more or less nothing else.
And we said, “Oh let’s just throw those in the pan and try”, and obviously now that we’ve tried it, it kind of makes total sense because what happens when the onion pieces combine with butter it turns into like a gravy with the flavour of the juices of the onion. You know it takes quite a lot of tests to get it right. And I think we mentioned it in the introduction to the recipe, to get the proportions right, and I know from years of recipe testing you can have all the right ingredients but if something is not right in terms of proportion, the size of the pan, the amount of liquid, it can burn or it can fail so easily.
DP: I know editors like short and sweet recipes to inspire effortlessness. How did you fare in ?
Flavour YO: I think we’re getting it right, and books improve thanks to experience. And we’ve tried to give people a lot of information, so even if you’re not a confident cook you’ll get it right, which is exactly what you want. If someone reports a disaster in the kitchen with one of my recipes it’s like my total devastation.
DP: Is aubergine still your favourite vegetable?
YO: It kind of changes. I do love aubergines but this book is also a kind of journey of discovery of vegetables that I love. The last couple of books have had a lot of cauliflower, which kind of threatens to dethrone the aubergine and take over top spot because cauliflower is so wonderfully versatile. It had such a bad reputation, but not anymore, at least here in the UK. And so cauliflower and also celeriac — such a wonderful overlooked vegetable as people really don’t know what to do with it. It’s just a wonderful thing.
DP: I see onion takes centre stage on the cover …
YO: In this book we have recipes for kohlrabi, swede and potato. They are pedestrian ingredients and run-of-the mill roots, but they can become heavenly if you give them the right treatment. This is the message of the book, and why it has the onion on the cover with all the layers. If you layer it with acidity, layer it with heat, layer with a certain degree of sweetness, or slow cook it and get those sugars coming up naturally, you’ll get something good, even if it’s okra.