Celebrity Chef Yotam Ottolenghi Likes to Keep Things Simple

Aw, that is so nice. I’m really excited to come.

Yes, I worked as a journalist in Israel for a couple of years. Then I moved to Amsterdam and spent a few years there. In 1997, I moved to London and I started my career in food. So, it’s only quite late that I started cooking.

I always loved cooking at home; I cooked for my friends and for my family, and I never took it very seriously. It was just something that I did. When I graduated from university, I thought, I’m going to and try and cook professionally for a few years, see what that looks like. When I started working, I really enjoyed working in the kitchens, and the creativity. Everybody loves to eat, and that’s what brought me into the kitchen.

I had Italian grandparents, and I grew up in Jerusalem, which has the food of all the Jewish diaspora and also Palestinian food. So we had a little bit of everything. And that was a really good thing for me because I was exposed to many cuisines. At home, my parents liked to cook; my dad was a great cook in Italian food, and my mom was also a wonderful cook and just had a lot of delicious things growing up. We’d go to the market and find all these Middle Eastern ingredients and wonderful vegetables and pulses and herbs, and everything was so fresh. So, I ended up enjoying some really good ingredients throughout my childhood.

That also meant that I didn’t have just one cuisine in my background— I was exposed to many ways of eating and that really informed my cooking. I don’t see myself now as cooking one type of food; I get my influence from Asia, from Southern Asia, from North Africa, from different parts of the world where I could find great ingredients and great ideas. So, it’s not just one kind of cuisine and that does have a lot to do with my background.

Yes, definitely. America is incredible in the sense that there are people coming from everywhere. It’s an immigrant country and it’s a young nation, so you already have that mashup of different cultures by definition. It’s made up of a lot of different cuisines, from Europe to South America to Southeast Asia and East Asia. I think Americans have become really open to different ways of eating and are quite open-minded.

I find it so exciting to go to a place and eat with the immigrant community because quite often when they cook their cuisine, they adjust it to the local ingredients and what people like locally. And you can get some really interesting combinations, such as Italian American and Chinese American; every culture does a little bit of that, don’t they? When they come, they adjust and then you get these incredible hybrids.

Yes, definitely. If you go to a supermarket in different parts of the world—definitely in America—you find the most incredible selection of ingredients, spices, cooking oils and vinegars. I love pomegranate molasses and I use it a lot in my cooking. I also like date syrup, preserved lemons and different, and tahini. There are a lot of things that I’ve been cooking with over the years and really enjoying that are more available now. And people are just more knowledgeable. They know what to do with those ingredients.

I always think recipes are one thing, but they’re so much better if they come with a story, because we’re surrounded by so many recipes, right? We have an infinite number of recipes online, but you don’t really get the story behind the dishes. So I love telling the stories of how and where it was created. If it’s something new, I like to tell the story of how it came to be, how I created it for myself and my team. I just find it so interesting to learn about people’s stories through their food.

With Simple Too, my cowriter and I like to think about how we get people into the kitchen and get them to cook. I realized what has happened in the last few years is that people are always on their screens looking at food but not always cooking. They get their food fix from their screens and then they go and order food, also on their screens. (He laughs.) And they really miss out on the joy of cooking. They miss out on going into the kitchen, putting your phone down and really immersing yourself in the process of cooking, which is really such a grounding thing to do. And, but I also realized that people are on their screens because sometimes they think that cooking can be really hard and complicated and it will take half a day. So they shut down and say, “Okay, well, I’m just going to get takeout or I’m just going to buy something in the supermarket and warm it up.”

We wanted to take down the level of cooking and allow people to cook with spice mixes or pre-cooked sauces that they can buy. The message is don’t give up on cooking just because you think you’re going to have to spend half an hour chopping onion and garlic. When in fact, you can buy a mix that has already done that for you and then you just need to sear the fish or roast your vegetables.

We tried to pare down the process of making some of these dishes. This book tries to lower the bar for cooking and really get people into the kitchen. A lot of the dishes are cooked in one pan. For example, there’s a recipe for tomato sauce. Sometimes when people make tomato sauce, they spend so much time chopping up things. But for this recipe, everything goes into the tray—cherry tomatoes chopped up really roughly, all your herbs, three whole garlic heads, olive oil, and you just cook them in the pan. In the end, you whisk it. And the garlic does something quite clever. When you squeeze it out of the garlic heads, it goes really soft and sweet. And when you whisk it into the sauce, it thickens it and emulsifies it.. And you get this really delicious tomato sauce that I use for everything now. I use it for pasta, I use it for like meatballs; I use it for everything. I like that all you do is just put it in the oven and forget about it. And so we have a lot of recipes like that.

They’re so good. My kids never ate sweet potatoes and now all they want is these fritters.

I’m trying to get my son, who is a vegetarian, to eat more vegetables. I love vegetables, which is one reason why I love your cooking and your cookbooks.

They’re so incredible. I have a recipe in the cookbook for a cauliflower souffle bake; you roast cauliflower and onions in the pan with olive oil. And when they’re really nice and soft, you add some cherry tomatoes. You create this mix, which I call a souffle, but actually it’s just mixed-up eggs and some cottage cheese and some fresh basil leaves and all that goes on top. So it creates this cauliflower souffle and it’s so delicious.

My kids are 11, 11 and 13. They like chicken, pasta and schnitzels. They eat vegetables, but it’s not their first choice. In this cookbook, we also have recipes for cakes and desserts, and there’s this amazing chocolate cake that I made for my son on his birthday the other day. It’s so easy, you just mix it all up in one bowl. And he absolutely loved it.

Many of my quick meals involve rice. I like basmati rice because of how it soaks up the flavor of a dish. I may fry a fish and put some beans in the oven to roast and serve it with rice, and that’s a delicious meal. My cupboard is so full of condiments, like harissa sauce, pesto sauces, different kinds of marinades. So often I don’t really even have to make that. I just give the fish a little fry and then it’s ready. It’s a really quick way of cooking.

You don’t need to go crazy stocking your pantry; you just need some staple ingredients, such as tahini, a good olive oil, garlic, ginger and onions and some spices and herbs, like cumin, coriander seeds and paprika. There are around 12 spices that you’ll use on rotation. It also depends on what you love cooking, but I think a stocked pantry is really important for people, because it means you don’t need to go and buy everything every time you want to cook. If you have a relatively well-stocked pantry, you just buy the core ingredients, like the vegetable or the meat and then you’re good.

Yes, I love her so much. We’ve met a few times in the past and I think she is, first of all, charming and, and like her style. I like the fact that she is quite easygoing and relaxed. Sometimes, people who cook takes themselves very seriously, such as, it has to be done this way or that way. I feel that she has a quite relaxed vibe about her. I’m excited that she agreed to speak with me on stage. I find it to be an incredible honor. She’s done so much in her life and her books are like bibles in people’s kitchens.

[Laughs] Not quite as much, but thank you.

I think a lot of people want to cook vegetables and don’t know exactly what to do with them. I always try to find really interesting things to do with vegetables—they take a little more effort. A lot of people know how to roast a chicken or fry a steak, but a cauliflower or an eggplant or, or zucchini are a little bit trickier. So you just need to know a little bit better what to do. I feel like I educate people about how to get the most out of their vegetables.

I also think people like surprises in their food and I’ve always tried to find interesting ways into dishes, such as interesting combinations that people may not have thought about before. I also like to mix up ingredients of cuisines from different parts of the world, mixing sweet and salty.  Also, it’s accessible food. They don’t take a massive technical skill to cook these dishes well. I think that’s what people like—my recipes are quite informal, and easy, but they delivers on flavors.

Thank you.

Well, perhaps one day. I mean, there isn’t really a plan at the moment, but I would love at some point to do something in America. We’ll see what happens.