Julia Gartland
shakshuka in pan and bowl
Shakshuka via Ottolenghi Facebook
Yotam Ottolenghi is a prolific cookbook author, with titles like Plenty, and Jerusalem topping best-seller lists. He also owns a number of London restaurants, including the award-winning NOPI. He writes for the Guardian and the New York Times, has designed great tableware, and created an empire by making vegetables incredibly alluring (though he's not a vegetarian).
Ottolenghi is making his first trip to the Twin Cities in a few weeks, for a conversation and book signing at Temple Israel on May 5th. Tickets are still available for $50 (virtual or in person) with GA seating. That night he'll be on stage chatting with our own David Fhima, but we got a quick Zoom chat with him first.
In your opening column this month for the New York Times Magazine you said: I will start my first column on the pages of this magazine with an uncomfortable confession: I eat everything. I am greedy. I love to eat, so yes, I eat everything. Not literally. I won’t consume any food, obviously not; but there isn’t a kind of dish that I don’t like by definition. I eat the high end and the low end and anything in between. ... I fully share this ethos, which can be hard in the food writing world, people want to polarize one way or the other. But you're saying, it's ok to love both.
Yeah, totally. You know when I get on an airplane and I get these trays that make your heart sink sometimes wondering how long has that been sitting there? But I open it and sometimes I find things to be cheerful about, sometimes there's a yogurt which is actually quite good to eat, or a piece of cake that I kind of like. And that's the point that I tried to make in the article, that if you are a naturally greedy person, you kind of like anything. And you find situations in which effort has gone into the cooking or manufacturing of something delicious, then you're okay with that.
We just celebrated Easter and even in the Easter eggs department, there's the posh Easter eggs, and there's like the cheap ones. And I get joy out of both, so my kids are really annoyed because I eat their Easter eggs, as well as the grown up ones.
Do you find yourself writing more than cooking at this point? Is one more challenging than the other?
I used to spend almost all my time cooking. When we started in restaurants, I used to spend the first few years in the kitchen all the time. Then gradually, I shifted from the cooking to writing and these days, I do much more writing than actually cooking because I've got a test kitchen.
There are books coming from the OTK, Ottolenghi test kitchen. They'll be recipe books, but focused on a particular subject or skill that we're trying to help people learn. The one that's coming out this year is all about little condiments that you can create while you're cooking: chile oil or pickle or something. So you make a meal, and it has an element in it that you can double and put in a jar, and then it would be the beginning of your next meal. Like you put it on your eggs or potatoes or whatever it is the next day that you're cooking.
These days, it's a group of people testing recipes and I'm kind of maybe the conductor. So, I spend much less time actually cooking and much more time thinking and writing. Well, I guess the challenges now come from writing. So when I wrote that piece for the New York Times magazine, my column just moved to the magazine, I spent a good, four, five days, just kind of trying to get it right. What is the message? What is it that I'm trying to tell? And that was hard.
During the pandemic, people were cooking so much and reaching for your books as a way to challenge themselves, because they couldn't go out. But how did the pandemic change you?
Like so many, I've got two young kids and my husband and I spent our first three or four months of lockdown really producing meals and cooking, three times a day.
And that was something that we all share, you know? The rest of the world was doing the same and as much as you can be well-versed in the world of food and know recipes, and know ingredients, it can become quite tricky. To produce three meals a day takes time, it takes effort.
We also didn't have all those ingredients to add together, it was hard to get yeast, hard to get pasta. I mean it shifted and changed all the time, but it made me much more frugal in the way I cook. The amount of bread puddings that we had just because I didn't want to throw even one bit of stale bread into the bin was crazy. Savory bread puddings and sweet bread puddings and also frittatas with bread, just don't throw out any bread.
But it's a really good life skill we learned, isn't it? The idea that you don't throw stuff away, that there's so many extra uses to certain things. We call it extra good things, like those condiments that really help you. So when you cook one meal, you take that first step to creating other meals. And it's really useful with kids because, for instance, a pickle or chili sauce or a sprinkle is really something the adults could add to their food, while the kids eat something simpler. So if I make rice or polenta or couscous, I would make a plain version for them, and then we can have all the extra good things. You know, the delicious things that they don't want to eat.
But now you've built this empire over the last decade, how do you make time for it all? Traveling, restaurants, books, test kitchens, writing, and two kids: isn't it horribly stressful??
Everybody says it's a group effort about what they do, but in my case, it really is. There's a lot of people involved in the business. All my books these days are collaborations, since the last four or five books. I always am quite open about how much of it is not about myself. It's really about my particular collaborator on each book, which has a huge influence on what the book ends up to be.
But if we spoke in April or May 2020, I was literally losing sleep all the time about the future of our business. We had many employees and I wanted all of them to be paid at the end of the month and I wanted our business to continue and and it didn't seem like I could take that for granted.
Have you ever been to Minnesota?
This will be my first trip.
Do you have any expectations?
I don't know enough to! But I'm really excited to come and someone recommended a really good Vietnamese place to check out on my visit, Hai Hai. So I'm gonna go there and I'm looking forward to trying lots of food. I think I've got two nights. If you want to give me a recommendation for the other one or for a lunch, I'll be happy to hear.
Do you eat hamburgers?
Yeah! That's how we started, you know, I'm not picky. I like everything!
Well, there's this thing called a jucy lucy at a place called Matt's Bar. You should go.
I'm writing it down.
It's a burger stuffed with hot molten cheese, and they give you a warning not to bite too quickly, so you don't burn your mouth.
Like soup dumplings? Ok! I'll be careful.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. If you want to hear the whole conversation, tune into Weekly Dish on MyTalk 107.1FM this Saturday.
