"Ottolenghi?" I said to my husband over the holidays. "What makes you think I would be the type to cook Ottolenghi recipes?" What was he thinking, gifting a mother of a toddler -- a woman with her own book in the works, a magazine to publish, and a farm/winery to help run -- a collection of recipes that are known to be meticulous, multi-step, and time-consuming?
Yotam Ottolenghi is an Israeli-born, London-based, world-famous chef of Jewish-Italian and German-Jewish heritage. He celebrates what you'd call "plant-forward" cooking that is primarily vegetarian and can easily be vegan. Ottolenghi himself is "flexitarian" but he has done a lot for the cause of vegetables through his various restaurants, delis, and cookbooks.
I am a cook who considers herself "anti-recipe," as in, I can't be bothered to follow a recipe correctly, especially if it involves using a scale (being American, we don't grow up doing this, although the LA Times might be changing that per their very pertinent, recent update on their approach to recipe writing). Typically, I think of cooking as throwing together ingredients with some seasoning that makes sense, i.e. eggplant with Mediterranean herbs; chickpeas with turmeric. I've been known to throw some garlic in a pan, slightly burn it, add vegetables, toss it with some store-bought pasta and call it a day. However, I do try to cook with seasonality, using things grown on our farm, and we buy organic whenever possible.
The moment I opened Flavour and read the first few pages, I began to see how I could change as a cook.
In Flavour, Ottolenghi and his co-authors introduce four processes, which the everyday home cook can implement in order to deliver more delicious vegetable dishes: Charring, Browning, Infusing, and Ageing. Then, there are four "Pairing" principles: Sweetness, Fat, Acitiy, and Chilli Heat. There's also a section devoted to certain ingredients that he feels are overlooked. Indeed, the recipes are multi-step and time-consuming, but Ottolenghi provides helpful explanations for why all those steps exist. He delves into the Scoville scale, used to measure chilli heat; goes into the science of browning (the Maillard reaction); and pontificates on the uses of nuts and seeds.
I first tried the Rainbow Chard with Tomatoes and Green Olives, probably the easiest recipe in the book. It was a perfect side dish alongside roast chicken and I loved it because I have a beautiful oregano bush in our herb garden, as well as fresh chard in our veggie patch. This one was in the Acidity section.
Then I moved onto the Hasselback Beetroot with Lime Leaf Butter. This was rather involved, and I was nervous as I set out roasting the beets, then slicing them, making a browned, infused butter, making a lime leaf salsa, and whipping a yogurt/cream mixture. The end result was tasty and more importantly to me, I learned something in the cooking process. Both the butter and yogurt/cream were excellent and very versatile leftovers (we spread the yogurt/cream over toast for breakfast). I will confess, I couldn't find our scale so I eyeballed some things, and I also subbed regular limes for kaffir, but it worked out.
There are really a lot of recipes to work through, and I hope that over time I'll actually develop new skills by making them.
My two main critiques of Flavour are that there is no recipe index, so it's actually very hard to find recipes if you aren't sure which section they fall into, and also that there's no discussion of quality produce and how to find it (or what season to look for certain items).