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A cookbook from acclaimed London restaurant Nopi, by powerhouse author Yotam Ottolenghi and Nopi head chef Ramael Scully.
Pandan leaves meet pomegranate seeds, star anise meets sumac, and miso meets molasses in this collection of 120 new recipes from Yotam Ottolenghi's restaurant.
In collaboration with Nopi's head chef Ramael Scully, Yotam's journey from the Middle East to the Far East is one of big and bold flavors, with surprising twists along the way.
- Sales Rank: #20807 in Books
- Brand: Random House
- Published on: 2015-10-20
- Released on: 2015-10-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 10.93" h x 1.25" w x 8.00" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 352 pages
Review
Praise for Ottolenghi's previous books:
"This is simply wonderful cooking...modern, smart, and thoughtful. I love it." --Nigel Slater
"With his 2012 cookbook Jerusalem, London restaurateur Yotam Ottolenghi [has] created a sensation by sharing his unexpected and highly personal take on Mediterranean cooking." --Food & Wine
"Jerusalem is the top-selling cookbook in the country, subverting the conventional wisdom that you need to have a TV show to have a bestselling cookbook. The book...has become something of a phenomenon." --Publisher's Weekly
"Forget about the fact that it's a vegetarian's best friend. Plenty is the sort of cookbook that a home cook will fall for. It's as meaty as its meat-filled counterparts." --Charlotte Druckman food52.com
"Plenty...is among the most generous and luxurious nonmeat cookbooks ever produced, one that instantly reminds us that you don't need meat to produce over-the-top food." --Mark Bittman, New York Times
"Yotam Ottolenghi's second cookbook has recipes for dishes largely absent from the American kitchen--a fact that almost never crosses your mind when you flip through it hungry. Everything sounds mouthwatering and looks--and is--doable." --Wall Street Journal
About the Author
YOTAM OTTOLENGHI is the author of Plenty, Plenty More, and co-author with Sami Tamimi of Ottolenghi and Jerusalem, which was awarded Cookbook of the Year by the International Association of Culinary Professionals, and Best International Cookbook by the James Beard Foundation. All four books were New York Times bestsellers. He lives in London, where he owns an eponymous group of restaurants and a high-end restaurant, Nopi. RAMAEL SCULLY was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and started his culinary career at the age of 17 in Sydney, Australia. Now head chef at Nopi, Scully first worked under Yotam Ottolenghi in 2004 at Ottolenghi.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
If you happen to have any of my previous books—Ottolenghi, Plenty, Jerusalem, and Plenty More—you will notice right away that the dishes in this book are somewhat more complex. Therefore, most of the recipes here will be more challenging for home cooks. They are typically made up of a few distinct elements that need to be prepared separately, occasionally over a bit of time, before being put together on a plate at the very last minute.
I start with this disclaimer not in order to put anyone off—I think the food here is spectacularly delicious and I am massively proud of it—but because I want to make it clear that this is a restaurant cookbook: it features restaurant food. The vast majority of the recipes in my previous books were conceived in and for a home kitchen. The recipes here were created from a different frame of mind; that is, in an environment where a team of professional cooks labors for a few hours in preparation for a short pinnacle, the famous service, in which hundreds of dishes are served in short succession to a very large crowd. It is the complete opposite of the way we cook and eat at home.
The contrast between these two mindsets is, really, the story of this book. What Ramael Scully (or just Scully, from now on, as that’s what everybody calls him) and I have attempted to do is to modify and simplify NOPI’s recipes without losing their essential core. We tried to keep a degree of complexity that does justice to food that is by its very nature complex, at the same time as allowing a nonprofessional to feel that this is an undertaking that is doable at home, delicious, and gratifying.
The meeting of two distinctive worldviews also makes up the story of my relationship with Scully. I am telling it in detail here because it really is the story of the food you’ll find in the following pages and how it came to be.
Random meeting
Many of life’s most momentous moments stem from pretty random circumstances. My meeting with Scully is such a case. Well before I was even vaguely aware of the magical world of rasam, sambal, and pandan, I met Scully on an ordinary trial shift on an ordinary day in the kitchen of Ottolenghi in Islington: a big man with a congenial smile, baffling cultural heritage, and distinctive shuffling gait. Scully responded to what must have been the fifth online ad that Jim Webb, the head chef, had placed early in 2005, desperately looking for a senior chef de partie. His task would be to create a small menu of hot dishes served from the kitchen in the evening, alongside our familiar counter salads and cakes.
There was nothing unusual or particularly promising about this latest Aussie recruit; restaurant chefs tend to come and go quite regularly. Jim seemed to like him and that was good enough for me. Plus, with the chronic shortage of chefs in London, I couldn’t really afford to be picky. And so Scully got the position and started training to run our evening service in the restaurant. After a few days, he seemed to be doing a decent job, though I can still remember a fleeting chat inside a walk-in fridge where Jim expressed certain concerns about Scully’s experience and his efficiency during service.
I suggested that we wait and see.
A few days later I got my first taste of Scully’s food. He cooked, if my memory serves me right, portobello mushrooms braised in white wine, hard herbs, and, in typical Scully fashion, tons of butter, and topped with pearled barley with feta and preserved lemon. He also served the crispest pork belly that had ever entered my mouth, with a sweet and sharp compote
of plums, rhubarb, chile, ginger, and star anise. I was hooked!
Everything that is brilliant about Scully’s cooking was there in those two dishes: his ability to combine ingredients with virtuosity and flair (preserved lemon, rosemary, feta, and barley), his meticulousness in getting things just right (that heavenly crackling), his unreal generosity (a bottle of white wine in each of the dishes), his expertise in and understanding of both Mediterranean and Asian cooking, and his knack in blending them together thoughtfully, never willy-nilly, in a modern context.
Scully’s food also fitted, almost perfectly (and I will explain this “almost” later), with the Ottolenghi way. The bold, surprisingly intense flavors that became synonymous with the name, the irreverent blends of ingredients, the vibrant colors on the plate, the generosity of spirit and big gestures, the curiosity and somewhat restless approach to food (always looking for the next ingredient, a fresh combination, or a radically different method): all these were features we unmistakably had in common.
Within a few weeks of joining, Scully was running the evening section at Ottolenghi, constantly creating new recipes and new flavors, many of which I had been oblivious to before; he was serving our customers dishes ranging from squid with quinoa, smoked cherry tomatoes, and prosecco to poppy seed tart with squash, goat cheese, and carrot jam. And with the food came stories: the sambal was a hybrid of his mother’s recipes with those of his many aunties; the duck confit was salted and left in fat for three months because that’s the way it was done at Bathers’ Pavilion, the Sydney waterfront restaurant where Scully did his apprenticeship.
Scully’s food reflected his rich and intricate background. He was born in Malaysia to a mother of Chinese and Indian heritage and a father with Irish and Malay blood. At the age of eight, he moved with his mother and sister to Sydney, where he went to school and later to catering school. When he came to us, Scully had very particular culinary baggage. His Malaysian flavors were, like Sami Tamimi’s and my “Jerusalem flavors,” the basic building blocks of his culinary world. He also had his years of training in the European tradition and his experience in formal restaurants. He was, just like us, an unusual hybrid. The dynamic that has evolved ever since-—world Ottolenghi meets world Scully-—has become the creative engine behind a large chunk of what we have been doing since Scully joined.
Taming Scully
First, Scully brought with him his very recent experience in the world of contemporary restaurants. After a few years of running Ottolenghi, with its focus on daytime dining and general sense of food inspired by the street or the home, Sami and I were less conversant in the old restaurant kitchen language. We needed a firsthand, up-to-date take on the theme.
Scully’s first attempts at creating an evening menu for Islington showed his talent and enthusiasm for what I can best describe as “composition”; that is, putting together quite a few complex elements on a plate in an arranged, thought-through manner. There would normally be a piece of meat or fish, marinated for at least a day and cooked to perfection in a very particular stock, accompanied by a vegetable that had been braising slowly and was then mashed with some of Scully’s favorite ingredients (miso, perhaps, or rehydrated dried chiles or an obscure Korean spice paste). A couple of other elements would no doubt be there: crisp vegetable pickle, maybe, or a caramelized nut and seed mix. A fruity salsa with fresh coconut could also work. Maybe even all three.
This was in extreme opposition to Sami’s and my tendency to just “throw together” a few things on a large platter in a pretty effortless way: large chunks of roasted butternut squash with a drizzle of citrusy tahini and a dusting of za’atar would do us just fine. Scully would just have to add something else: five-spiced crispy shallots, maybe, or a drizzle of reduced passata with ginger and chile. He was also partial to liberal quantities of butter, various rich stocks, and salty, umami-heavy condiments such as kimchi or ikan bilis (salt-cured anchovies). Again, a far cry from our simpler favorites: yogurt, lemon, and garlic.
The years that ensued saw us in a constant state of negotiating to find a middle ground. A permanent Islington kitchen fixture would be myself or Sami engaged in one of our famous “tastings” with Scully to introduce a new dish to the menu (normally around 2 p.m., when the kitchen was already bursting at the seams with manic lunch service overlapping highly space-consuming dinner prep). “Scully, this is marvelous but can we tone it down a notch? Lose an element or two? Wouldn’t a plain salsa suffice?” And the answer: “Man, this is already super simple. I was actually going to slow-cook it for an extra twenty-four hours. Did you not see how David Chang does his kombu broth in five stages over three days?”
Scully’s delight in slow processes-—including meandering around Chinatown looking for any number of new ingredients while service is practically on its way, or vegging in bed with a pile of cookbooks by his side until inspiration finally hits-—earned him our love and, occasionally, a fair bit of harmless exasperation. There’s quite a lot Scully can get away with, owing to his disarming charm, big heart, and enormous talent.
Thanks to these exceptional qualities, collaborating with Scully has always been a breeze. In every single case we’ve managed to find a compromise, a dish that is a little lighter and simpler than Scully had in mind and a little heftier and more involved than what Sami and I wished for. This became the blueprint for the hot food we now serve at NOPI and at Ottolenghi in Islington and Spitalfields. In short, Scully showed us how to do “restaurant,” we taught him how to do “Ottolenghi,” and the result was this new hybrid set of dishes that are now the “Ottolenghi haute cuisine,” and are featured in this book.
Scully’s second big contribution to Ottolenghi and, similarly, a bit of a bone of contention at the outset, was a very fresh set of flavors, most of them Asian: curry leaves, yuzu, dried shrimp, lime leaves, glutinous rice flour, pandan leaves, galangal, ketjap manis, and many more. These were great additions to our repertoire and made complete sense because they were just as bold and colorful and rich as our sumac, preserved lemons, and pomegranate molasses. Yet they weren’t part of our usual palate and I vigorously resisted turning the menu too “Asian” and losing the Middle Eastern/Mediterranean blend that was much more natural to Sami and to me. Much of the first few years of us working together were spent with me trying to curb Scully’s “Asian tendencies.” Slowly, however, I gave in. One dish in the first year (white pepper–crusted soft-shelled crab, with miso cucumber and wasabi mayonnaise, I believe it was), two the following year, then three, and, finally, as many as Scully wanted, really, when NOPI opened in 2011.
While haggling with Scully over the degree to which Ottolenghi would “go Asian,” I secretly (I was keeping my cards very close to my chest, you see), developed my own love of all things to do with the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. Through my physical and virtual travels and through friends and colleagues, one of whom was Scully himself of course, I was beginning to seriously enjoy my laksas and tamarind broths, my misos and yuzus, my tofus and peanut sauces. And so, gradually, my palate and the Ottolenghi repertoire naturally expanded eastward.
Our “grown-up” restaurant
The reason for NOPI was a somewhat self-indulgent one: a desire for what we called a “grown-up restaurant.” We are not sure what made us think that the Ottolenghi delis weren’t quite grown-up enough, but the reality was that Noam Bar, who formulated the vision, and the rest of the team—Cornelia Staeubli, Basia Murphy, Sarit Packer, Alex Meitlis, Scully, and me—were all ready for a fresh challenge: an all-day brasserie, a “proper” West End establishment serving the kind of food that we’d developed in Islington over the years, drawing in people seeking genuinely good food throughout the day with the quality of a serious restaurant but without any of the stuffiness and formality.
Easier said than done—much easier! The year that preceded NOPI’s opening saw a painstaking process of getting details right—all the details!
Alex, mastermind of the Ottolenghi look, was translating Noam’s ideas into a reality that included plenty of patina-laden brass, smooth-polished bloodshot marble, whitewashed brick, striking art, and the famous bathrooms, where a set of floor-to-ceiling concertina mirrors threw customers into a perplexing Wonderland and evoked a general sense of bewilderment and slight unease.
Cornelia and Basia were making sure that upstairs was quite the opposite. Everything—all the things you are not meant to notice when you sit comfortably in a restaurant enjoying a serene meal—needed to tick along in the nicest, smoothest, slickest, most predictable way. Waiters’ probable journeys in strategic junctions were plotted and analyzed; training manuals perfected so that staff knew their stuff inside and out (grape varietals, the obvious distinction between farro and spelt—just between us, I am still not quite sure about that myself—and the very elusive art of laid-back etiquette). Reception had to operate in full harmony with the bar, shift managers, and downstairs office; the expeditor to be alert to the kitchen intercom and movement on the floor; table covers to be regularly stocked, wiped and changed; plates seamlessly cleared; bills to arrive on time; tables turned; guests called; guests seated; wines decanted; food served; kitchen informed.
Once we were open, at the top of the pyramid stood Basia, the general manager, who came from Ottolenghi in Islington and built up NOPI with infinite amounts of passion, commitment, and know-how. You didn’t need to actually see Basia on the floor to recognize her mark, her boundless upbeat energy, clearly apparent in the movements of the waitstaff and in the smoothness and elegance of the operation. Basia was the embodiment of the restaurant in the first few years and the absolute key to its popularity. More recently she has been replaced by our very own Heidi Knudsen, a different kind of force of nature but with a similarly affirmative presence.
Since we never do things simply at Ottolenghi, NOPI’s kitchen was designed from the start as a slightly peculiar, three-headed creature with responsibilities shared between Sarit (now running her own super-successful restaurant, Honey & Co), Scully, and me: an arrangement that generated a fair bit of confusion among our poor chefs. Even some exasperation, no doubt, when Scully’s garnish of fried chile and baby cilantro was replaced by Sarit’s fresh chile and pomegranate seeds and finally by my “Who needs a garnish at all?” Nevertheless, the aim was to create a strong structure that benefited from my experience, Sarit’s management and food skills, and Scully’s particular style and years of working at Ottolenghi.
Months before the restaurant was due to open, we would all get together once or twice a week at the back table of Ottolenghi on Motcomb Street and get to taste the progress of recent creations. In order to “sign off” on a dish, we’d all need to like it. Anyone who’s ever worked with the Ottolenghi team can tell you how utterly impossible the task is of getting Noam, Cornelia, and me to unanimously agree on anything; adding all the others to the equation, the food really needed to be pretty spectacular to pass through our little committee. Scully and John Meechan, who worked with Sarit on desserts and bread, rose to the challenge and created some of NOPI’s most iconic dishes: twice-cooked baby chicken, beef brisket croquettes, pig’s cheeks, strained ricotta, and coffee financiers—they were all there.
On the day NOPI opened to the general public—February 17, 2011—we were all thoroughly exhausted and more than slightly anxious. Anyone who’d tell you that opening a restaurant is a trivial, cheerful kind of matter would be lying through their teeth. Even more difficult, though, is running a new restaurant; the real hardships start when the doors are finally open. It took a long while for the (proverbial, we assure you!) dust at NOPI to completely settle, probably a couple of years. Some key players had changed—Cornelia and Sami had become more involved in the kitchen once Sarit left, Basia was replaced by Heidi—but we think we can now say with confidence that we did manage to realize our dream of a “grown-up” restaurant, and that the vision that was set in motion in early 2011, or, actually, in early 2005, keeps on moving forward and expanding all the time.
Yotam Ottolenghi
Most helpful customer reviews
95 of 96 people found the following review helpful.
Meticulous layout and thought-provoking recipes
By Kat L
Since an inside view of the book isn't posted yet, these are the recipes you can expect to find:
Starters:
Roasted aubergine with black garlic, pine nuts, and basil
Celeriac puree with spiced cauliflower and quail's egg
Fried baby artichokes with pink peppercorn aioli
Burnt spring onion dip with curly kale
Burrata with blood orange, coriander seeds, and lavendar oil
Chargrilled asparagus with romesco sauce and apple balsamic
Purple sprouting broccoli with skordolia
Butternut squash with ginger tomatoes and lime yogurt
Baby carrots and mung beans with smoked labneh and crisp pita
Truffle polenta chips
Sharp and spicy watermelon soup
Pea soup with rolled goat's cheese crouton
Jerusalem artichoke soup with hazelnut and spinach pesto
Baby squid with almond tarator and lime relish
Seared scallops with pickled daikon and chili jam
Sea trout and bulgur tartare with preserved lemon salsa and Jerusalem artichoke chips
Salads:
Three citrus salad with green chili, stem ginger, and crunchy salsa
Raw brussel sprout nests with oyster mushrooms and quail's egg
Watermelon and feta salad with marinated olives and preserved lemon
French beans with freekeh and miso
Tomatoes with wasabi mascarpone and pine nuts
Mixed cauliflowers with golden raisins, ricotta, and capers
Lentil and pickled shallot salad with berbere croutons
Red quinoa and watercress salad
Black radish, red chicory, and apple salad
Side dish:
Crushed new potatoes with caper berries, pink peppercorns, and roasted garlic
Fondant swede gratin
Baby carrots and Parmesan with truffle vinaigrette
Crushed Jerusalem artichokes with tarragon
Cardamom and clove rice
Farinata
Sticky sesame rice
Butterbean mash with rosemary and garlic
Green salad with sumac, red onion, and allspice
Mixed Chinese vegetables
Paprika oven chips
Roasted carrots with coriander seeds and garlic
Potato and celeriac gratin
Wilted kale with fried chili and garlic
Whole roasted celeriac
Fish:
King prawns with Pernod tarragon and feta
Lobster, fennel, and grilled grape salad
Sea bass and turmeric potatoes in rasam broth
Sea bream with mango and papaya salad
Steamed haddock with sesame bagna cauda and cavolo nero
Spiced buttermilk cod with urad dal
Turbot with oyster mayonnaise and cucumber salsa
Pistachio and pine nut-crusted halibut with wild rocket and parsley vichyssoise
Gurnard baked in banana leaf with pineapple and chili sambal
Lemon sole with burnt butter, nori, and fried capers
Basil spatzle in saffron broth with red mullet, clams, and mussels
Scallops with corn and merguez salsa and sorrel sauce
Octopus and stir-fried kale with black olive and golden raisin salsa
Pan-fried mackerel with fresh coconut and peanut salad
Tuna skewers with coconut mochi cakes and carrot and yuzu salad
Soft-shelled crab with sweet black pepper sauce, okra, and cinnamon pickled cucumber
Meat:
Lamb meatballs with warm yogurt and Swiss chard
Lamb fillet with peanuts, coconut milk, and red onion salsa
Smoked lamb cutlets with aubergine puree, jalapeno sauce, and kohlrabi pickle
Lamb rump with vanilla-braised chicory and sorrel pesto
White pepper-crusted lamb sweetbreads with pea pesto and miso
Venison fillet with date labneh, blackberries, and peanut crumble
Chicken supremes with roast garlic and tarragon brioche pudding
Twice-cooked baby chicken with chili sauce and kaffir lime leaf salt
Chicken livers with red wine, smoky bacon, and cherries
Chicken pastilla
Confit duck leg with cherry mustard and kohlrabi slaw
Roasted duck breast with hazelnut beer butter, red quinoa and mushrooms
Beef brisket croquettes with Asian coleslaw
Roasted beef sirloin with cucumber kimchi and fresh plum
Pepper-crusted beef sirloin and fennel salad with pecorino and truffle
Onglet steak with caramelized shiitake ketchup and chargrilled cucumber
Vine leaf beef pie
Roasted pork belly with crushed butternut squash and apple and walnut salsa
Spiced pork neck with physalis (similar to a tomato) relish
Braised pig's cheeks with celeriac and barberry salad
Bourbon-glazed spare ribs with smoked corn salad
Quails with burnt miso butterscotch and pomegranate walnut salsa
Vegetables:
Corn cakes with beetroot and apple salad
Baked blue-cheese cake with pickled beetroot and honey
Five-spiced tofu with steamed aubergines and cardamom passata
Snake bean and peanut achar
Urad dal puree with hot and sour aubergine
Spiced chickpea patties with coconut and curry leaf paste
Pearl barley risotto with watercress, asparagus, and pecorino
Persian love rice with burnt butter tzatziki
Brunch/dessert:
Ham hock with baked beans, fried egg and sourdough
Grilled grapefruit with star anise sugar and elderflower yogurt
French toast with orange yogurt
Sweet potato pancakes with yogurt and date syrup
Black rice with mango and coconut cream
Courgette and manouri fritters
Corn bread with grilled peaches and maple cream
Baked chocolate ganache with spicy hazelnuts and orange oil
Poached quince with raspberry and quince jelly and marscapone sabayon
Roasted pineapple with tamarind and chili and coconut cream
Popcorn ice cream with caramelized popcorn and black pepper
Caramel peanut ice cream with chocolate sauce and peanut brittle
Tapioca with coconut jam and caramelized rum bananas
Ricotta fritters with blackberry sauce and chocolate soil
Coffee and pecan financiers
Farro pudding with caramelized orange, tahini, and pistachios
Strained ricotta with blackcurrent compote and rhubarb
Strawberry and rose mess
Cocktails:
Coriander and ginger martini
Chili fine old-fashioned
Banana and cardamom (rum)
Kumquat and passion fruit (tequila)
Rooibos old-fashioned
Saffron chase (gin)
Pineapple and sage martini
Sotol and mezcal
Spiced pumpkin (Benedictine)
Sumac martini
Condiments:
Asian master stock
Chili jam
Lemongrass curry paste
Dukkah
A lot of thought went in to the design of this cookbook. Of course the cover, gold-edged pages, photography, and type-face are stunning. After three cookbooks from Ottolenghi, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect, even if this is a restaurant cookbook. This book is missing the plush cover his other books have, which is kind of a bummer, as I finding that kind of cover incredibly satisfying to hold while paging through recipes. But the single best thing, in my opinion, about the design of this cookbook is that almost all recipes are all on my page, with a photo of that recipe on the facing page. I have often found myself frustrated with cookbooks where I have to flip back and forth in order to see the ingredients called for a later steps. Even if I am being responsible enough to set up a mis-en-place (I admit, sometimes I skip it), I worry about whether I am correctly remembering what goes with what, so I really appreciate having everything I need to know about a recipe on one page. I found only a few exceptions to this, which is forgivable given the length of some of the recipes.
The introduction to this cookbook, how it came about, and the relationship between Ottolenghi and Scully makes for an enjoyable read, and gives a nice backstory to the spice combinations in the recipes. Ottolenghi goes to some length to warn the reader that these recipes are not as accessible as those in his previous books. He even notes that he thought about including a "hardcore" section (I wish he had!). While it is true that these recipes are not as approachable, they are a lot less challenging than all the warnings led me to believe. There are also some recipes with optionally easier/harder versions. A lot of the recipes are labor-intensive, or at least, require some pre-planning. There are a few dishes that could be pulled off on a weeknight in a reasonable amount of time, but not very many (and they are mostly vegetables or desserts). However, the explanations of each recipe are detailed enough to enable most home cooks to succeed. I enjoy reading the reasoning behind why certain steps are taken - for instance, you're told in the Buttermilk Cod with Urad Dal recipe to only soak the cod in buttermilk for 4-6 hours, because after that it will start to fall apart.
My sole dilemma with this cookbook is don't find the dishes as immediately appealing as I expected to. There are quite a few dishes where half sounds fantastic, and the other half, not so much. That still means at least 50% of the cookbook is something I would make, which is a much better average than most cookbooks. I also expect I will like a lot more of the dishes than I think I will, purely based on how much I've liked everything else that has come out of the Ottolenghi empire. I'll update my review as I try these recipes.
48 of 50 people found the following review helpful.
Spectacular and creative restaurant-style recipes
By Deidre512
This cookbook is a collection of recipes adapted from NOPI restaurant by Yotam Ottolenghi and Ramael Scully.
It is a different style and type of recipes than are featured in Ottolenghi's other cookbooks, and it is mentioned multiple times in the beginning of the book that these recipes are more complex based upon the fact that they were designed for restaurant preparation and then adapted for the home cook in this cookbook. With that in mind, there are some pretty spectacular recipes in this book for those comfortable enough to tackle.
The recipes are broken down into chapters divided by Starters, Salads, Sides, Fish, Meat, Vegetables, Desserts, Cocktails, and Condiments. There is a very helpful section on meal suggestions that help with ideas of dishes that would come together nicely for a full meal.
To give an idea of the complexity through the mix of ingredients, some examples of recipes include: Roasted Eggplant with Black Garlic, Pine Nuts, and Basil (Starter), Black Radish, Red Endive, and Apple Salad (Salad), Cardamom and Clove Rice (Side), Lamp Loin with Peanuts, Coconut Milk, and Red Onion Salsa (Meat), and Tapioca with Coconut Jam and Caramelized Rum Bananas (Dessert).
The instructions are clear in the recipes, and each recipe has a photo of the finished dish to assist with presentation.
As a fan of Yotam Ottolenghi, I think this cookbook is a great addition to your cookbook collection. If you enjoy the process of cooking, this cookbook has a lot of great recipes that will yield unforgettable results. You will need to plan ahead for both shopping, preparation, and cooking. I also do not recommend this cookbook for novice cooks.
29 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
... recipes and have found them to range from really good to awesome
By RL
I've made four of these recipes and have found them to range from really good to awesome. Very creative and unique ideas. I'm working my way through the meat dishes. It's work, but not overwhelming.
For the complaints about complexity, make sure you read the Introduction and "Cooking NOPI at Home" sections. Basically, the main difference between a home kitchen and a restaurant kitchen is prep work. You really need to have the ingredients all laid out, chopped, sliced, diced, etc. You have to read ahead so that you know when you need to, say, "marinate overnight" or "let sit in a cool place for 3 hours". There may be spices you don't have and need to buy. There are sure to be stocks or marinades that you need to prepare ahead of time.
In other words, read every recipe from beginning to end before you decide to try it. In then end, it's SOO worth it.
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