Yotam Ottolenghi isn’t a vegetarian, but recently, his name has become known for the preparation of vegetables — both in the London shops that bear his name and in his column, “The New Vegetarian,” that has run for the last five years in the British newspaper The Guardian.
Those columns were collected last year in a cookbook called Plenty: Vibrant Recipes from London’s Ottolenghi. An American edition was released earlier this year, and if you’re looking for fresh preparations of vegetables for summer salads, this could be your book, as NPR’s Susan Stamberg discovered during a recent lunch at which a friend prepared two recipes from Plenty. There was burnt eggplant with tahini studded with pomegranate seeds, smoky and bursting with flavor, and green bean salad — fresh as a minute — with mustard seeds and tarragon.
“That’s a fantastic lunch,” Ottolenghi told Stamberg after sitting down in a studio in London. “These are some of my favorite recipes in my book and I think it was a good choice.”
The secret to the eggplant dish, he says, is fire.
“It is something quite magical, because it carries the smoke in it like nothing else does,” he says. “You’ve got your stovetop and you spread foil around [the eggplant] and then you literally leave it over the fire for a good 15 minutes. And every now and then you come with some metal tongs and turn it over. So it really does burn in an actual flame. And what that does is the skin starts burning and producing smoke, and that’s what gives the flesh the flavor.”
Then, after the eggplant cools, Ottolenghi says, “[You] just spoon out all the flesh and avoid the skin because at this point the skin is very, very smoky.”
From there, it’s just a matter of mixing the smoky flesh with tahini, lemon juice, garlic, vegetables and herbs, plus a old-school trick that he says is becoming more popular: pomegranate molasses.
“All around the Middle East it’s been used for a long time,” Ottolenghi says. “It’s very simple. It’s just pomegranate juice that has been reduced by heating up for a while and then it is extremely sweet and sour. It’s a little bit like balsamic vinegar.”
Pomegranate seeds are “the jewels in the crown,” according to the chef.
“I’ll tell you what it is about them. There’s something — talking about the [cookbook's] title, Plenty — there’s something very plentiful about them. They’re really symbols of abundance because there’s so much of them in every pomegranate, and they obviously have beautiful color and they have this sharpness that is a little bit sweet,” he says. “So you can add them in so many contexts and they always sort of add a little extra something which is a little hard to explain but it’s very visual. It’s completely beautiful.”
Also beautiful: that bean salad, barely cooked and popping with various shades of green.
“You know what it is,” Ottolenghi says, “basically all these are very simple ingredients that everybody knows, but I think sometimes they don’t know how to put them together properly. There is a long tradition of overcooking green beans of all sorts, even in Italian cooking, which does wonders with vegetables. Whenever I go to an antipasti place, the beans are limp and completely lacking in texture. And what I try to do in so many of my salads — or any dish really — is to just try to keep as much of the original wonderful, crunchy texture, so you remember it’s a french bean, you remember it’s a snow pea. It’s not something that could be anything else. And that’s the wonder of it.”
Just as in the eggplant dish, seeds add intensity.
“You need to cook them and they flavor the oil, but they also add little bits of flavor inside the salad itself, so you have the crunchy beans and also little crunchy bits of seeds.”
Ottolenghi was born in Israel to German and Italian parents, and now lives in London, where he oversees four prepared-food shops and a new restaurant. His food carries some of the same multi-cultural pedigree as his background.
“I would say it is pretty dominantly Middle Eastern and Mediterranean in the flavors and the colors and in the ingredients. Occasionally I do go and venture out to Asian, but really it is very Mediterranean in spirit,” he says. “Everything that fits that palate I can add in. You know, in Italy, for instance, they don’t use cilantro, but all around the Middle East they do. So what I do is try to bring all these things together, not in fusion, but in inclusion.”
Much of his food is casual, so what does he do to dress it up for special occasions?
“For me, every food can be special,” Ottolenghi says. “I always think you can add beauty and luxury to a dish by adding lots of herbs to it. I think a huge platter always looks better than a small plate, so to make my guests welcome and feel special I put many beautiful platters with food, as I do in my shops, so it’s quite a lot around, a lot to choose from. Once you’ve done that, you can make the simplest things in the world, and still everyone thinks you’ve gone to the longest of efforts, but actually it’s as simple as that.”