Chef talk: Yotam Ottolenghi

Δημοσιεύθηκε: 12 Σεπτεμβρίου 2014 - 16:26

A few weeks ago Yotam Ottolenghi posted a tweet that read: "Buddha pear. Just when I thought I had everything I needed . . ." Lest his fans rush to Waitrose to seek out this elusive fruit, there was a link to a picture on a novelty website of a pear moulded into a Buddha's face. The chef was slyly poking fun at his own supposed fetish for improbable ingredients.

In the quiet Camden railway arches where his business has offices and kitchens ("Twenty-four hours a day something flour-related, jam-related, curd-related, chocolate-related is happening in Arch 20," he writes in his new book), Ottolenghi puts his hands together, almost as if supplicant, and says: "It doesn't need to be complicated. People sometimes accuse me of having very long lists of ingredients - 'where am I going to get this?' - but what I want to say is that it's not all about exotic ingredients. It's more about stocking certain spices and getting a basic understanding. It's a bit like a curry - if you have your mustard seeds, turmeric and cardamom, you can make a dozen curries. It's the basic paints you have in your palette."

In Plenty More, the sequel to his bestselling "vegi-renaissance" cookery book Plenty (his three cookery titles broke the million-copies-sold mark this time last year) Ottolenghi continues his odyssey through vegetables, grains and legumes. And, yes, there are a few shopping challenges - yuzu (or Japanese citrus) powder for one. Meanwhile the online Ottolenghi store has corralled black garlic, pot barley, sea spaghetti, tamarind pulp and other ingredients from the book into a Plenty More cheat's hamper.

Technique is nevertheless the book's main target: "Everyone knows what it is to cook a piece of meat well or grill fish, there's a shared knowledge there. But with vegetables the only concept people have is that you boil them." He concedes this is a British weakness, and gives a British example: "If you quarter Brussels sprouts and add lots of olive oil and garlic, salt and pepper and quickly roast them so they're a little bit crunchy, almost charred, you've got something really delicious. If you boil them, they become bitter and soggy."

Vegetables were at first imposed on Ottolenghi as the subject of his Guardian cookery column; the food he grew up with in Jerusalem was meatier, messier. (At home, he says, "I'm happy with a bowl of pasta.") After a post-grad stint at the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, he pursued academia, swerved into cooking and moved to England in 1997, setting up the first Notting Hill Ottolenghi deli-cafe with his culinary partner Sami Tamimi in 2002.

There are now three cafes, with a fourth to open in Spitalfields next year, and a restaurant, Nopi, in Soho. "I think I found what suited me. I still like writing but cooking I find very relaxing, and mental work quite stressful. When I first started cooking in a restaurant, even if there was immense pressure to get food out on time, I always felt that I didn't have that mind that races all the time to find ideas."

Like the Ottolenghi deli-cafes, where biscuits are wrapped in Christmassy-red ribbons, cakes are stacked in glistening towers, and salads are as greedy-making as any Vegas hotel buffet, the Plenty More recipes are instantly seducing. Smoky polenta chips, Iranian vegetable stew with dried lime, tagliatelle with walnuts and lemon - all exude a colourful warmth, stemming partly from Ottolenghi's visual approach to recipe-writing: "I sit down in front of books and magazines first and start getting myself inspired."

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>The cuisine of Iran, which he's still hoping to visit, is a recent influence: "I find that I like getting myself acquainted with cuisines in a parameter expanding from where I grew up - I'm very familiar with Palestinian and Levantine food, what you get in Syria, but then you spread out to north Africa, Iraq and Iran." Iranian food is, he says, "wonderful for its mastery of rice - it's often the focal point of a meal. They parboil it, then drain it and cook it again with very little water so it steams itself. It's a kind of dry rice with a wonderful texture, very light . . . They line the bottom of the pan with potato or rice mixed with yoghurt so you get a crispy layer."

This family-style food has a more ascetic opposite: seaweed, ginger and carrot salad, for example, or tomato and watermelon soup. Can he empathise with the person standing cluelessly in the vegetable aisle, with no ideas at all? "It is very difficult to know what to do and what to choose. In some ways I think it's good to limit yourself. I'm vegetable literate and I still don't look at 50 per cent of the stuff - it's impossible to take it all in."

Ottolenghi generously protests that it's "very easy" to impress him at a dinner party. "Good cooks have 10 or 12 dishes they're very comfortable cooking and maybe they'll add one or two more. It's not good to have 50 recipes in your repertoire, it's just confusing. I would like people to look at something in the book and say,

'Oh that looks nice' and cook it over and over again."

"Plenty More" by Yotam Ottolenghi is published by Ebury Press (£27)

Photograph: Josh Shinner

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