Yotam Ottolenghi and Noor Murad want you to write all over their new book. And cover it with food splatters and stains. OTK (Ottolenghi Test Kitchen) Shelf Love is no coffee table tome — it’s more manual than eye candy. They want their new cookbook dog eared and dirty, spending all its time on your kitchen work top.
“We wanted it to look kind of like a notebook — with the flexi-bound cover” says Noor Murad, the book’s co-author together with boss, Yotam Ottolenghi — or “Big Y” as he’s referred to in the book’s intro.
Like this one, each of the Israeli super chef’s previous eight books has been written by him together with either a business partner or one of his team. Murad has been a member of the test kitchen for about three and a half years and has worked for the Ottolenghi group since she moved to London from Bahrain, five years ago.
The restaurant’s trademark, modernised Middle Eastern flavours and ingredients were already familiar to her: “They were just part of my DNA. I grew up in Bahrain. My Dad’s Baharaini but my Mum is English, so I always had that East meets West approach to my food. Mum would make cauliflower cheese and shepherd’s pie and Dad would take us for street food like samosas and chapatti — and all the things that Mum said we shouldn’t eat!”
The change in publication style, from coffee table food porn to everyday manual is down to the strange times we’ve seen in the last 18 months. In the book’s introduction we’re told that when lockdown hit in 2020, Murad and the other members of the Test Kitchen team quickly returned to their home countries. ‘Suddenly … we found ourselves dispersed and separated, across borders and continents alike.’
It meant that collaboration — a key part of their recipe development work — became more of a challenge. “One of the big questions was whether we could do it at all. We had to mainly work as individuals and then we’d present to each other [virtually] what we were doing. We talked a lot about how we were going to engage with our audience because we were stuck at home and we wanted to communicate with them — which we did via Instagram.”
Ottolenghi says they also discussed what was happening in people’s kitchens generally that they could utilise for a book, but that would still be pertinent when we came out of the pandemic, and that was using the ingredients they had to hand.
“The book really had to reflect what’s been happening, I mean it’s hard to avoid the subject. There’s a very positive aspect that we wanted to showcase. Noor, who has put this together found such clever ways to make really humbling, quite cheap ingredients, glorious. The transformation is quite incredible, from a can of chickpeas into something that looks like a feast” says Ottolenghi.
It was food that also kept them connected to each other and to their audience: “We were cooking and sharing it on Instagram and the response was really quite positive.”
He explains that their different focus on food generally was also an inspiration for the book: “Our reasons to cook just changed. When you’re in the test kitchen, it’s a dedicated environment for recipe testing. So you could decide to test anything that you want to. Perhaps we haven’t worked with this fish for a long time, so we’d try that. But all of a sudden we were cooking in our own homes and that completely changed the way we were thinking. We weren’t just coming up with recipes for a cookbook, we were also maybe going to feed our families or preparing food to entertain people on Instagram.”
Ottolenghi was feeding his young family: “Most of the lockdown I was in Ireland with Karl and the boys [his husband and sons, Max and Flynn who are both under nine] so I used to cook kid-friendly recipes — you know, chicken, pasta, French toast and puddings and so those ended up being things I was doing more and more.”
Noor was locked down in Bahrain with her family, while also creating recipes for Ottolenghi’s newspaper column, so hers was a different menu. She also took to social media to share kitchen tips and tricks. Cooking techniques for example: “I’d share Instagram stories with lots of pictures and processes, especially if it was a recipe that was more technique-focused like bread or noodle making. And we tried to emulate that in the book with the more involved recipes to give it that feel — not really like Instagram-esque photos, but like a lot of process shots, so the book is quite picture heavy,” she says. Expect step-by-step instructions on how to grate tomatoes or assemble a curried cauliflower cheese pie; as well as some seriously complicated-looking bang bang noodles that I confess are a project I would only undertake if locked down. Fellow OTK team member Ixta Belfrage mastered them during lockdown one and kicked off an Instagram flurry of videos of people making their own versions.
They made an effort to use easy-to-find, store cupboard ingredients and to be flexible. “We presented the recipes to the world saying ‘all right if you don’t have this, you can use this — the recipe is not one solid formula, it’s a more like a framework that we will test for you and you can kind of tweak it here and there. So that built the premise of the book” says Murad.
Each recipe offers alternatives to make a recipe your own, with a handy box for making your notes and suggestions. They really do want you to write all over this book.
Don’t be expecting a slew of ‘out-there’ new ingredients. There are few — because who could go hunting for unusual spices or sauces during a pandemic? Ottolenghi admits that was a conscious decision — “We tried not to introduce the reader to a million new ingredients — it wouldn’t be in the spirit of the book, as this is not what it’s all about. This is about raiding your shelf that probably already has too many things on it that you haven’t used.”
However, it wouldn’t be an Ottolenghi cookbook though without at least one new flavour. The ingredient you’ll undoubtedly start to find in supermarkets — if their buyers have been doing their homework — are black limes. Maybe they made the cut as they are dehydrated and last indefinitely. “They are great because they are really effective in creating incredible intense flavour. Actually the sesame crusted feta with a black lime syrup [in the book] is just so good. I really recommend that. It has lemon, black lime and honey and is such a different way of using feta” he says.
OTK taps into the post-pandemic zeitgeist which has echoes of wartime rationing.
“A lot of the things that we realised during cooking in lockdown remain relevant. Which is what we’re celebrating with the book — simple, humble ingredients that people still want to cook with.”
And it may be simple, but it’s food of which you can be proud: “We were given this gift of time and being able to actually spend time with our families and cook the foods that we want to eat and that I want to share. I guess that the Shelf Love recipes are just food that we would practically make on any day” says Murad.
Ottolenghi Test Kitchen Shelf Love (Ebury) is out now
