10 essential Ottolenghi recipes (2024)

FAQs

What is Ottolenghi style? ›

From this, Ottolenghi has developed a style of food which is rooted in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean traditions, but which also draws in diverse influences and ingredients from around the world.

The guy's an omnivore but his recipes are overwhelmingly vegetarian and vegan. His vegetarian (not vegan) cookbook Plenty< spent years near the top of Britain's bestseller lists.

This is such a great side to all sorts of dishes: roasted root vegetables, slowcooked lamb or pork.

Eight volumes have followed: the all-vegetable cookery books Plenty (2010), Plenty More (2014) and Ottolenghi Flavour (2020); Jerusalem (2012); NOPI (2015); the dessert cookery book Sweet (2017); Ottolenghi Simple (2018); and most recently a series of Ottolenghi Test Kitchen (OTK) books: OTK: Shelf Love (2021) and OTK: ...

The only real criticisms heard by the industry about Ottolenghi's earlier books were that that the ingredients lists were too long, and the recipes too complicated. "So Simple was simply genius," says Jane Morrow. Each book is very much a hands-on process, with a core team of long-term collaborators.

Mixed Bean Salad

by Yotam Ottolenghi, Sami Tamimi. from Jerusalem. Crisp and fragrant, this salad combines lemon, tarragon, capers, garlic, spring onions, coriander and cumin seeds to bring its base of of yellow beans, French beans, and red peppers to life.

We cook a fair amount of Ottolenghi recipes at home, because he's one of the regular food writers in our regular newspaper (The Guardian). They are usually fairly simple recipes that focus on a good combination of flavours - even as home cooks, they're not nearly the most complicated things we make.

Candy. Candy includes many possible non-vegan ingredients, including sugar, honey, carmine, gelatin, shellac, and dairy. Most of these ingredients should sound familiar. Shellac is a “confectioner's glaze” and a varnish, the same as used on floors.

Pesto is great on rice. Grated cheese is great on rice, as is sweet chilli sauce or mango chutney. Also, oyster sauce, teriyaki sauce or hoisin sauce. Try egg fried rice (good with bacon in it too), rice with satay chicken, rice in a burrito with refried beans and salsa.

Chicken,eggs, beef, with spices ,with fried onions,with milk, mushrooms,honey,corn, fish. To conclude rice can be eaten with so many things. Butter. One of the most simple, yet delicious, combinations there is.

Why is Ottolenghi so popular? ›

Although Guardian readers frequently complain fondly about Ottolenghi recipes, his championing of hitherto obscure foodstuffs like pomegranate molasses or spices such as sumac have made him nationally famous. By the time he was on the Haaretz news desk Ottolenghi knew he wanted to cook.

So far, his books have sold 5 million copies, and Ottolenghi - although he has never even been awarded a Michelin star and without being considered a great chef - has successfully blended Israeli, Iranian, Turkish, French and, of course, Italian influences to create a genre that is (not overly) elegant, international, ...

In 2002 the pair opened Ottolenghi, the famous delicatessen in Notting Hill, which became an instant hit for its use of unique flavour combinations and fantastic produce paired with Middle Eastern opulence.

Some of the recipes are fairly straightforward but he does have a reputation for including some hard to get ingredients and some recipes can be very involved. I really enjoy his recipes and find they are very tasty.

If anything, Mr. Ottolenghi — tall and dapper, with salt-and-pepper hair, half-rim glasses and a penchant for pink-striped button-downs and black sneakers — should be a vegetarian pinup. But here's the rub: he eats meat. Apparently this is enough to discredit him in the eyes of the most devout abstainers.