Yotam Ottolenghi

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0:34Welcome to Ruthie's Table 4, a production of iHeartRadio and Atomize Studios.

0:44Last night, after dinner in the River Cafe, I sat with the chefs. Usually, we talk about the evening service, what happened, who came, what we cooked. But this time, knowing he was coming to the kitchen today, we spoke about our guest, Yotam Ottolenghi. They've all, the chefs read his books, they've all eaten in his restaurants, and like me, love his food. In short, they were thrilled he was coming. Yatam and I were introduced years ago by a mutual friend, Ari Shapiro. Ruthie, he said, you've got to meet this guy. You think the same way, and you will adore him. Yatam and I share a lot. Most of all, we believe in the people we work with, valuing them and their creativity.

1:34We also share a kind of geography. Mine is an Italian landscape with cities of the Renaissance. His is further east, desert, mountains, and biblical. We both live and work in cultures far from where we were born. Today, we will talk about separation and connection, eastern and western, family and friends. Would you like to read a recipe uniquely, I would say, not from one of our cookbooks, but from one of yours? I was looking forward to reading a recipe from one of your cookbooks because they're just so much shorter. Famously, otolenghi recipes are very long. So I worked hard to find a short recipe.

2:18So it'll only take 20 minutes. Yeah, right. And it's only going to have like 12 ingredients and not like 24. but this is from one of my most recent books called the Altolenghi Test Kitchen Shelf Love. It's a butter bean recipe so it's called one jar of butter beans with preserved lemon chili and herb oil. Five garlic cloves finely chopped, two mild red chilies finely chopped seeds and all, two tablespoons coriander seeds finely crushed with a pestle and mortar, three preserved lemons, inner parts discarded and skin finely sliced, 1.5 tablespoons roughly chopped thyme leaves, 4 rosemary sprigs, 1 tablespoon tomato paste, 170 ml olive oil, 1 jar of butter beans, 700 grams, 2 large vine tomatoes roughly grated and skin discarded, flaked sea salt and black pepper.

3:14Put the first 8 ingredients and 1.25 teaspoons of flaked salt into a medium saute pan on a medium low heat and stir everything together. Heat gently for 25 minutes until very fragrant but not at all brown. If the oil gets too hot, turn the heat down to low. Stir in the butter beans, then turn the heat up to medium and cook for 10 minutes. Remove from the heat and leave to infuse for at least an hour or longer if time allows. Meanwhile, mix the grated tomatoes with a third of a teaspoon of flaked sea salt and a good grind of pepper. To serve, pour the buttered beans mixture into a shallow bowl and spoon over the grated tomatoes, mixing it in places.

3:58Sounds like a recipe that I would definitely want to make. It sounds a bit like a River Cafe recipe, actually. I did read that your first word was, was it the Israeli word for Hebrew word for soup? Well, it is. They're kind of the little dumplings that go into the soup so it has the word soup in it yeah it was something I think my mom used to spread on the table while we were waiting for the food and I just used to kind of grab them and eat them and so going back then starting at the very very beginning tell me about your early childhood in terms of food as well what you know yeah so I grew up in Jerusalem and the food in Jerusalem at that point can I just ask you were your parents born in Israel or my parents were born in Europe just before the Second World War.

4:47And they immigrated with their parents as little kids just before the war in 1939. My mother was from a German family, so they were German Jews. And my father, they were an Italian family from Florence. Really? Yeah, so my dad was born in Florence. And they met in Israel? Yeah, they met in Israel years later. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And Jerusalem was, so I grew up in a very kind of a non-traditional Jewish home, very secular. Food-wise, like we had pork, which was unheard of, you know. My mom had that butcher in Jerusalem, the one and only one that sold pork, but it was under the counter in the brown bag.

5:33She used to come and buy a ham. And we used to get ham sandwiches for school. but we were not allowed to say what's in our sandwiches and we were not allowed to share it with friends. So the cover story was that it was a turkey. It was a very pink turkey. Brave woman to come from Germany. She was from Germany, so she probably had pork in Germany. She was not going to give that up. Yeah, they were very secular, you know, and so they just had to have pork. But the stories about these things, they sound quite innocuous, But actually, it was a big deal. So that butcher, when people found out that he was selling pork, his shop was vandalized, and you'd have people put glue in his locks so he couldn't open the shop the next day, et cetera.

6:25In Jerusalem, food is not a neutral stance. All those decisions, all those things that happen have political implications. What year would this have been? So I was born in 68. So we're talking about the 70s and 80s. So as late as that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, completely. So the food culture of the city was the food of the immigrants from wherever they came, the Jewish immigrants, but also the Palestinian population, which had such a rich, wonderful culinary history. And I feel that I grew up in this world in which we ate very European food at home. My father was cooking traditional Italian dishes. and my mom was kind of an international cook but with a very Germanic approach to cooking.

7:09But outside, you know, when we went out, we used to have Palestinian food, Arabic food, and that's the mix that I grew up having. And I always thought that I was quite lucky to have been exposed to all those kind of foods from quite a young age. Could your father find ingredients that he wanted for Italian cooking? Yeah, he could. So first of all, they used to have food, like they like i remember my grandparents because they couldn't really separate themselves from their italian background so they used to have food sent to them so we had to we used to get like anchovy paste and olive oil and and biscuits and and and cookies and things so they always get these packages of italian produce that arrive in parmesan yeah so they lived about an hour from where we lived in jerusalem they lived in a suburb of tel aviv and i used to come to their house as a kid with my with my dad and the smell was just completely different it smelled of italy uh in so many ways so they kept the italian connection going on and we used to travel in the summer because they had a house in the hills outside florence that we used to go to when i was growing up so we we had a lot of a lot of that so in between the italian and the palestinian and the german influences i've yeah i just kind of had all that because i often think that i often say that in my history as an interviewer that many of the people, especially immigrants, talk more about their grandparents' food than their parents.

8:36That if you've moved from your culture to another culture, the mothers probably try and adapt. So if you have a family from Ghana, coming from Ghana to London, the mother would try and kind of still remember her food she grew up with but would try to adapt. And the children completely adapted and would have the food of their friends. But the grandparents, when you went to their house, they would cook the Ghanaian food or the Italian food. And my mother-in-law left Italy for London pre-war. And her father, who was kind of Florentine, aristocrat, would send her candied oranges every month, you know, that she craved those kind of Italian, the Italian food of your culture.

9:19Totally. And the only difference is that in Israel at the time, there wasn't like a cuisine as such. because it was just so early on and it was just so new and so young. So a national cuisine has not evolved. The Palestinian food was extremely evolved, but what people would call Israeli food is something that evolved later. But when I was growing up, there was the food that Polish Jews would have cooked or Russian Jews or Libyan Jews or Moroccan Jews or Iraqi Jews. Each one had their own cuisine. But I always like to say, like, in Jerusalem was like survival of the fittest. You know, like the best food from every culture would surface.

10:01That's lucky. Yeah, that's really good. So you would have the Sephardic and you would have the Ashkenazi. So you'd have the Sephardic, you know, salads and mezes, and you'd have, like, the babkas that would come from the Ashkenazi food. And in some ways, like some restaurants in Jerusalem these days, then when you go, that's what's featured, you know, like the best of every culture. Yeah. That makes up the city. Because in America, definitely, my family, where they were Hungarian and Russian Jews, and my Hungarian grandmother was a great pastry cook. She made all the strudels and all that. But I remember not really liking all that sort of gefilte fish and matzo pole soup and that meat they cooked for hours.

10:44I'm going to get in trouble for this. You're in good company. It's fine. The Eastern European food, I always say, there is this Israeli chef called Aris Komrovsky. He's a baker, and he's become quite well-known because he's outspoken. He's one of the founders of the modern way of cooking. He always says, in Israel, you only get filtered fish if your grandmother is still alive. Oh, really? That's funny. That's funny. And I guess they are, but those grandmothers might not be here for very long now. Yeah, but I also think there's good things you can do with your fish. And I always say there's no bad cuisines.

11:25It's just about how people cook those foods. And when I go and people say, oh, what do you like about British cooking? I say, like, there's so many great things here. And the desserts are like some of the best desserts in the world. And I think it really is about what you do with it, not how you do it. I agree. So going back again, it seems like you had a household where food was really important, but your father and your mother cooked. Yeah, both my parents cooked. My father, because of these Italian sensibilities, he used to cook in a way that doesn't remind me of the way I cook now. So it was quite minimal, great ingredients, cooked with care and attention.

12:06And he used to make polenta. and he's just stand there and stir it you know for 45 minutes or an hour until it was just right and add the cheese like but everything very kind of moderately and with a lot of attention and was so different from the way I ended up cooking which is this kind of quite a maximalist way of cooking quite a lot of ingredients more in I think more akin to maybe how they cook in North Africa or in Asia, South Asia or Southeast Asia, in the sense that quite a lot of spices, cook them down, create something which is kind of a base for a sauce. He didn't cook like that. He cooked much more the Italian way.

12:47But he was a professor of chemistry at the university, so he had a really kind of a deep understanding of ingredients, intuitive. I always say that a recipe, I don't know if you agree, is part science and part poetry. Yes. You know, everybody likes the image of the Italian that throws something in and does something there and does something there. But actually, they're very precise, I think. Very precise. But he loved food. But there are certain things he just, like all Italians, he loved his food the most. And he just, it looked like there are certain combinations that he would just not have.

13:20Like he said, sweet and savory food, no. Because he was from northern Italy, you know. Maybe in Sicily you'd find there, or Puglia, but not in the north. So if you'd have like something Moroccan, you know, like a tagine with prunes or whatever, you wouldn't touch that. And your mother, did she cook German food then? My mom cooked German food. She was more of an international cook. You know, she had these international cookbooks of the 50s, you know, and she would try like a Malaysian curry or delicious gazpacho. But she also was a foodie in the sense that for her food was very important. and the most important meal in the day in our house was breakfast.

14:00And we had this kind of spread of food. Again, not very Italian. Before you went to school? Mostly on the weekend, but even before I went to school, there was like freshly sliced vegetables, fresh vegetables, and some cheese in brine, you know, like feta style, and fresh bread and egg. And this is still what I do for my kids. Do you? Like before they go to school, I give them this massive breakfast. And Carl, my husband, looks at me and says like, is that really breakfast? but they love it it really is delicious the whole concept of breakfast is different cultures do it very differently my grandchildren are half Chinese and they have chicken soup for breakfast they can think of nothing nicer than having a bowl of soup I agree when I came here and I saw that grilled tomato and beans and sausage I thought what an abomination I do like it now you do?

14:51yeah Oh, okay. And so growing up in your house, did you have brothers and sisters? I have one sister. Yeah. And so the family meal would be sitting. Did your mother work? Yeah, yeah. My mom was a teacher. Yeah. So you would sit down to breakfast, fantastic breakfast. And then most dinners, would you have dinner together? Yeah, we would also have dinner together. Yeah, breakfast was the main time you could trust that everybody would be there. My parents worked a lot, so dinner not always, but we also had dinners together. Do you have memories of the kitchen? Yeah, so we had the kitchen I was growing up with.

15:26It was a long kind of galley kitchen with a dining table and chair at the very end. It wasn't fancy at all. It was very practical, but there was always cooking going on. And it was, yeah, I remember it. I remember a cupboard where everything was stored. And I remember I was always to climb up the counter. I couldn't reach to get chocolate. There was a box. And she didn't mind. I don't know. She never told herself. off, but we just come and had that cooking joke.

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17:40When we start in the morning, they do all the fish mongery and all the butchery. So we start off with the meat and fish while I'm writing the menu. What's the level of butchery? Like, do you get a whole pig? Yeah, or a whole, you know, fish sirloin on the bone or legs of lamb, and the whole fish with all the scales and everything, and gut and gill and scale fish and do all the proper you know stuff that's skilled stuff that i suppose some kids we're busy kitchen but we have a lot of chefs so we do all that you don't have stations no so anyone can do everything anything by the end of probably it take about four years to learn all the sections well not everyone here can cook on every section yeah the pasta section is quite hard it is hard yeah a lot of people be learning that section.

18:32So the person on it today is sort of learning it. So I'll be teaching them how to, you know, and... Thank you. Yeah, not at all. Did your parents take you to restaurants? Did you go out? Yeah, so we didn't have great restaurants in Jerusalem in the sense, in the way we have now. So this whole revolution in food has not happened yet. So we ate, when we ate out, We used to go to a Palestinian restaurant. So the war just happened not long before, the 1967 war in which Israel occupied East Jerusalem. So in some ways, this is the pre-traumatic times. You know, it was all very new and obviously it was complicated, but it was relatively peaceful.

19:20So I remember we used to go travel a lot into the West Bank. We used to go to Annapolis, to Jericho, to Hebron to have meals. so we used to go to Jericho and have like incredible meals we would have these spreads of delicious things that you find some of them you'd know and some of them you wouldn't so from you know like hummus or Labané you know the strained yogurt but you'd also have like local herbs that'd be sautéed in garlic and olive oil they have incredible they have wonderful oranges so you'd have orange juice freshly squeezed a bit like Seville like they have some of them that are cooking and some of them mostly for juicing because it's so hot and humid it's like perfect for for citrus and lamb on the grill so they have we cook lamb on an open grill and rice dishes like makluba like upside down rice cakes and bulgur salads and it was an olive oil an amazing wonderful olive oil wonderful olive oil and great freshly baked breads, pita breads and other variations on that theme because the Palestinians cook their bread on enetabun which is that kind of ceramic oven earthenware oven so all that was there and I really have really really strong memory of driving down to Jericho and just having all these wonderful foods and coming back but also in Jerusalem, I have such strong memories of these flavours Did you ever think that you would like to do that?

20:54Did you ever think you'd want to be a chef? No, I didn't really think I would want to be a chef. I really loved eating, so much so that, like, my dad always used to make fun of me, used to call me golozzo, which is, like, Italian word for, like, greedy. Because I was greedy, and I had to make them, like, take me to restaurants. There was one restaurant in Jerusalem that served as seafood, like shrimps and squid and that. and it was in East Jerusalem in the Arab part because they were Christian Arab. I mean, Muslims can eat seafood as well. And we'd go there and have like a plate of like prawns and like butter and garlic and lemon, you know, and I just thought it was the most delicious thing I've ever had.

21:40It was so exotic.

21:44And so, yeah, so I had all really all that wonderful food, but I never thought I was going to become a chef. No, I kind of just assumed I'm going to follow in my parents' path. What did you think you'd be? An academic, you know, go to university, which I did. I went to university and I studied in Tel Aviv University in the late 90s. Did you live at home while you were at university? No, I moved to Tel Aviv. And what did you eat? So the first apartment that I had with my boyfriend at the time, we lived by Carmel Market, which is the main fruit and vegetable market. So it really was an apartment really close to the market.

22:20And this was the first time I started to cook because I was at university. And so many students, food was not forthcoming anymore. So I had to cook. And I fell in love with cooking through the market. So on Friday I would go and buy fresh herbs and vegetables and cheese. They had this incredible cheese stand. They had all the Balkan cheeses, those sitting in brine, the different types of feta. are there many different there are many different types of I use the word feta but it's the Bulgarian cheeses it's a whole range of young cheeses they vary in saltiness and texture from something which is more like a ricotta to something much firmer it's like a ricotta yeah you have really really bland unsalted cheeses that would be used for one's use and then things that are crumblier more like a ricotta and some are much smoother like other Greek cheeses.

23:19So you'd have the whole range. And would you entertain? Would you cook for that? Yeah, we'd have other student friends came over and I'd make like, you know, I remember making, you know, just starting to understand what do, like marinating a chicken and grilling it and making a salad to go with, like very baby steps in the kitchen. Yeah. But I did fall in love with cooking through that. But I was still in university. I still didn't think it's going to be a career for me. so I finished a master's degree in what? in comparative literature and philosophy and I just decided it's not for me yeah what's the academic life?

23:58I just thought it was very insular you know I thought like I was speaking to like seven people who knew what I was talking about and then the rest of the world knew nothing and wasn't really remotely interested and it just felt esoteric and it's like And then the opposite happened when I started cooking, because all of a sudden everybody's interested, right? And that dichotomy between somewhere where you really have no one to share your passions with, to a world in which everybody's interested, was such an eye-opener for me. And I realized, yes, I want to try and engage in this conversation and not in that conversation.

24:37when I came to London in 1997 I haven't made up my mind who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do but I thought I'm going to take a year off and I went to the Cordon Bleu and I took a course there in Marleybone yeah, Marleybone Lane and I did a course there and I thought okay, maybe there's something for me there but I wasn't that sure I did pastry and savory cooking for three months. And then I started working in the evenings. I worked at their capital restaurant in Knightsbridge. Oh, yeah, in Knightsbridge, behind Harrods. Yeah, behind Harrods. It was quite a good restaurant, wasn't it? It was really good.

25:19They had a Michelin star, and I was an assistant to the pastry chef there. I was working with her. Right into pastry. Right into pastry. Well, I didn't know anything, so they always throw you into pastry if you don't know anything because you're in nobody's way. so I loved that and then I met Rolly Lee and I started working at Kensington Place what year was that? that was in 98

25:46and I worked for him for a couple of years and I learned a lot so by that time you kind of knew this was the career you wanted I was a pastry chef always in pastry with Rolly I did mostly pastry as well I was running the pastry kitchen at some point and then I realized I want to specialize in pastry and then I went to work for Gail, a baker and spice. What do you think you liked about pastry? I loved just the fact that you go to play with your dough. I love that. And the magic that happens when you bake. I still love that, how one thing turns to another thing. Yeah, you see it. You know when you take a chicken, you put it in the oven, you get a chicken, but when you take a cake and you put it in the oven, you get something completely different.

26:32It's not the same thing. I still love that magic. So I really specialized in baking. And even when we opened Ottolenghi years later, I was still baking. When I went to your kitchen, it really reminded me of the way we work at Baker and Spice. Gail would come back from the market with strawberries and apricots and quinces. And she said, there you go, six boxes, do something with them. There wasn't a plan. and there wasn't a recipe or a plan for the day. It was just like these things arrived because she saw them and they looked great and we just had to work with what we had. Amazing times. Yeah.

27:10You could do that. And then? And then my good friend, my ex-partner, Noam Barr, came back from traveling the world and he said, like, let's do something together. And he studied business and I was at Baker and Spice at the time and he said, like, let's open a shop. and we decided to do it and it took about a year to make it all happen and Sammy Tamimi who's our other partner wasn't quite ready to join us so we started the process without him and it was supposed to be just a bakery in which I would be baking and then when Sammy joined at the very last minute, this was in 2002 when we opened on Leadbury Road in Notting Hill he joined us and we decided we're going to have two sides to our offering, which would be freshly made salads and savory food mirrored by a mountain of cakes and pastries.