522: Yotam Ottolenghi Stops By!

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0:31and I think food transcends time you know food is something that we've always had unlike our devices that we've had for the last five minutes and I think the fact that that timelessness of food that's what gives people comfort because they connect to something which is great bigger than they than they are you know it creates it connects you to your whole ancestry. This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard. London chef and author Yodam Adalenghi puts out cookbooks that meet at the intersection of practical and cool with a recipe development process that is part Warhol factory, part Bon Appetit test kitchen, and pure Adalenghi.

1:13After tackling baking with his terrific book, Sweet, and before that putting Israeli cooking on the international stage with Jerusalem, he most recently tackled the concept of comfort with his incredible new book, Comfort. In this conversation, we tackled the many ways comfort food is served around the world and how personal preference plays a major part in the quest for ultimate comfort. The result is a conversation that circles the globe and brings one of my all-time favorite recipe writers into focus. It's so cool having Yotam into the studio, and I hope you enjoy this conversation.

2:00Yotam, it's great seeing you. Thank you, Matt. It's very good being here. I always enjoy our conversations. I think you've been on the show. This is your fourth time. I know. I'm a veteran of the industry. I mean, I've been cooking from your books for years and I cannot wait to talk about Comfort. Truly unique book in your canon. But first, when you end up spending time in New York, where do you like to go? I know this trip is on book tour, but restaurant wise, where do you like to go? so where do I like to go last night I went to a place that I haven't been before it's called Indian Accent it's an Indian restaurant that was just around the corner on 56th Street I think from West 56th there was some really great Indian dishes with a modern twist which is I like those kind of things we had these kind of tiny little flat chapatis stuffed with blue cheese that arrived as a kind of appetizer and I had them and it was are absolutely delicious.

3:01So that was a place that I've just discovered. So I'm happy to share with you. I'm sure you know all about it. I like Bouvet. Last time I was here, maybe a few times ago, I went to Laser Wolf, which you probably also know. I don't have secrets as such. There was a bakery that I visited. I think it was last time or the time before Libraille. Yeah, Libraille, of course. It was incredible. So it's kind of a Gulf, Middle East pastry kind of place, which I've had a few pastries from them. They were amazing. Some of them were like black limes, Danish. Oh, my God. Oh, that's such a great combo. I love that you've picked up on an Indian accent.

3:47I mean, it represents New York has seen such an incredible boom in South Asian restaurants with a bungalow and a damica. And really, I feel like we're finally catching up to London in terms of South Asian cuisine. Yeah. Yoram, your books are consistently mentioned on our show. We are always asking our guests for a taste check. What are your favorite cookbooks ever? And your books from Jerusalem and plenty, plenty more flavor sweet, they end up being on this list. And I wanted to get a sense, how do you look at your cookbooks as a unified movement? I mean, do you feel there's themes happening? How do you look at this?

4:31it's a really difficult question for me to answer only because every book feels very independent and it's kind of kind of an individual identity and it comes through um it comes through my collaboration with a co-author so i've had a couple of books that i published on my own but all the rest are collaborations and it's it every book ends up being the story of the people that created it with me and the creative process itself. And I think that increasingly I can't imagine myself not working with someone because this book has four authors on the cover, which is like a world record for me. I think it's a world record anyway.

5:14And the story of this particular book is that it started off with a conversation that I had with Helen quite a few years ago when we wanted to do a book about the recipes that we like to cook at home for occasions, you know, for dinner or for someone's party or for Hanukkah party or Christmas. And we wanted to call it like the food we love, which was a weird name for recipe workers because it almost implies that the other dishes we don't love, which is not true. But you get the sentiment, right? And Helen and I had this conversation. Then COVID came and we added Verena, who's an incredible cook with it.

5:52So Helen has got her Asian background, Malaysia, Australia, and Verena's got, in her history, she's got Germany and Scotland. These are the two places she grew up in. And Tara, who's been a long-term collaborator with me, and really specializes in Middle Eastern food, Palestinian, she wrote Palestine with Sami. So all of us together with all our stories, really, it's not about comfort in the sense that, oh, you know, comfort food has to have a stodge, you know, that it has to have, you know, cauliflower cheese or mac and cheese or a pizza or it has all of the above. Don't worry about it. It's much more about the emotional connection to food, like back to what I said, the food we love.

6:39All of us traveled a lot and all of us carried food memories with us and ingredients with us and kind of got those memories and ingredients transformed through the process of migration. And that's what the story is about. It's about recipes that are familiar, but have gone through transformations over time through immigration. I love the intro of the book. You are so clear about the different phases and levels that comfort kind of embodies in cooking. And you write, nurture, convenience, nostalgia, indulgence, agreeing on the notion of comfort food is fairly straightforward. What's harder to pin down, though, are the actual dishes that hit these proverbial spots.

7:23And as you just said, it's about love. It's dishes you love. But comfort can mean many things. I guess at the beginning of your journey, I know you said it's where you were kind of compiling recipes that you love. How did you further flesh out this idea of comfort through many cultures in the world? So we didn't flash it out completely. So what we did is like, we just started telling our individual stories. So for me, I've said it many times in the past, a recipe book or cookbook always starts from a list of recipes that I love cooking or my co-author likes cooking. and we don't have a story, we don't have a concept as such.

8:05I don't love the word concept because it kind of assumes that you need to kind of overthink things which don't need overthinking. It's like if you've got a book, you've got a book, you don't need a concept. But we start by choosing a bunch of recipes that we absolutely love cooking and we really want to show the world. And then the book kind of tells its own story. So in this particular, as I established, you know, we had this idea that we wanted to create a book about food to cook at home. And we just started presenting those ideas to each other. So Helen brought in all these Asian noodle dishes and rice dishes that I love.

8:40She's this beautiful steamed fish, like in the traditional steaming fish in Chinese culture. But this particular one is cooked over rice. So it kind of steams in with the rice or at the end of the cooking of the rice. And then you finish it off with the oil. And so you have kind of this wonderful thing, a bowl or a Dutch oven that's got a layer of rice, which is slightly crispy on the bottom, but then it's got that steamed fish on top. That's Helen's comfort food. Or in my case, I'm just looking in front of me, there's a chicken meatballs and potato with lemon. So there's like a brothy, lemony, potato-y celery stew in which chicken meatballs cook.

9:17That takes me back to Jerusalem of my childhood. So there wasn't a concept. The only concept was it is about us reliving memories of food, telling them to each other and then thinking, oh, so what do we want to do about them? I really appreciate the way that you just explained how comfort can, you know, appear in multitudes in a cookbook. Is there a recipe that you feel some readers may be surprised is a comfort dish? Yes. Yes, I mean, I think anything that is not warm would be surprising to some people in the northern hemisphere, you know, in cold regions of the world that it would be comfort.

9:56So we have, for example, we have a recipe for green tea noodles. It's a kind of cold salad with radishes and a citrusy soy dressing. And it's like a slurpy salad. And I spent time in Japan in the past. And every time you go to these soba noodle places, you know, it's the heat of summer in Tokyo or wherever you are. And these people are coming from the offices with their suits and they go and sit in these soba noodles restaurants and they slurp the cold noodles. And you go like that is like pure comfort. It's a hug for these folks. And it's different than a warm apple pie in New York City. Exactly.

10:32It's exactly that. So that was the fact that we've got these kind of cold recipes or we have a salad of slow cooked courgettes, zucchini with flaky salmon. And all it is is like zucchini that's been cooked in its own liquids for quite a while and kind of breaks down and creates a dressing for that pulled salmon. And that is a cold summery dish that I can die for, you know, when it gets all hot and I get bothered. and it's not comfort it's not it's not a surprise because when you understand what comfort is comfort is is it it's an answer to your emotional needs that's what comfort food is it's an answer to a particular need at a particular point in time and sometimes cold food is when you're sweating in a subway and you walk out and you find a cold tofu stand in seoul or in you know somewhere in jakarta i love the cold tofu dish that you have yeah a couple cold dishes yeah we yeah Yeah, exactly.

11:31So there's a cold tofu dish, which is really very soft tofu with a soy based sauce and flaked chilies. And a whole pot of bits of crunchy things that kind of make the soft tofu give it a bit of texture. For me, this is just a wonderful thing. But obviously, there's all the other predictable comfort foods from chicken to rice to noodles to pastas, you know, to potatoes. Let's get into the recipes. I'm so impressed with this North African sando, which is basically taking, you know, the Shibuya Japanese Tokyo sando and bringing in North African flavors with harissa mayo. And I'm like, I've never thought about that.

12:17Yodam, how did you come up with this idea? It's really smart. So it's Helen, Helen Go, who's my co-author, as I mentioned. We were talking about sandwiches and I'm really reluctant to put sandwiches in my books normally. because I said, who needs a recipe for a sandwich? You know, I know, I know it's very controversial. Americans, we love sandwiches. I just find it like, if you can give people a condiment, then they'll know to put it in a sandwich with whatever it is, ham or cheese or whatever they need. Who needs a recipe for a sandwich? But, but, and that's a very big but, but I think the whole culture of sandwiches is a massive thing, especially in the Japanese context.

12:55You know, those soft, bready, rich and rich breads in which something nestles, you know, like you hold it in and you have this delicious combination of a soft crust, something with a bit of texture inside and a lot of flavor. So Helen suggested, let's do a sando. I go like, do we need a sandwich recipe? I did my normal reaction. And she says, yes, I'll prove it to you. And then we started talking about what is going to be the flavor profile. so of course coming from a jewish culture and coming from israel schnitzel obviously no i don't need to say no no need to say so much more yeah but a little amba on it too yeah you could we've got amba in a different context but uh but helen said let's do that and also the the nifty thing about it is that when you when we marinate the the chicken in the yogurt or buttermilk sauce it does two things.

13:50It tenderizes the chicken, but it also presents the kind of the adhesive that makes the breadcrumbs stick. So rather than have the messiness of egg, flour, breadcrumbs, we just have one thing, which is also the marinade. So you take it out of the yogurt sauce. It needs to sit there for a few hours to really give the flavor. And we had baharat and cinnamon, so to add those kind of sweet spices. And then you kind of just take some of that yogurt off the chicken, run it through the breadcrumbs and fry it. Yeah, like a shallow pan fry, I would imagine. A shallow pan fry, yeah, like a one centimeter.

14:25And then it goes all nice and crispy and goes into this very soft bread. And we added crunch by making like a very quick sliced slaw made out of cabbage and spring onion. See, that's the Yodem way, adding that extra thing. Because, you know, you could just do it with like the cutlet and the great milk bread, but add that thing. Yeah, I always try to do something, but it was particularly hard in this book because this book is about the familiar. So you don't want people to come and read and say, I don't know what that's all about. That's discomfort. That's not comfort, right? That's not what this book is about.

14:59But people identify those beautifully comforting sandwiches and they go, okay, I know that. All I'm asked to do here, the extra, is to add a tablespoon of harissa to the mayonnaise, which would probably be there, and slice some cabbage and put on top. That's the whole twist. But you do get the all, and I'll give you a little insight because I was cooking it the other day and I gave it to my kids. So my kids never see white bread. You know, they always only see sourdough bread because, you know, it's like anathema. So they go like, what is that bread doing there on the counter? What's the Warburton, which is the British brand?

15:39And they were kind of shocked and said, wait, I'll make it for you later. And I made it for them and they absolutely loved it. I mean, you can do it with brioche as well if you want to be fancy, but they kind of... You can make your own milk bread too. And you can make your own milk bread. And yeah, so that's how this whole thing happened. Another recipe that really jumped out, and it's really smart. It's a slow cooked green bean with feta and mascarpone. And I wanted to hear the technique is unique in that it's not a quick walk fire and it's not a steam of these beans. These beans are being cooked slowly.

16:16And then you're adding this double cheese element, which is very Yotam. It's very, you can't just have one cheese. You got to have two cheeses, which I think is smart because you want a layer of flavor. Talk about this dish a little bit. I'm very happy. You said it's new, but actually it's very old technique. So if you go around the Middle East and Turkey, you get this slow cooking vegetables, especially with beans. And I grew up on that. So effectively what it is, is a ricover or any green beans that you're going to have. And it could be done with broad beans, anything really, cooked in their own juices.

16:51So you add olive oil, garlic, maybe onion, and we also add a few cherry tomatoes. And in fact, you put it on the stovetop. There's quite a bit of oil there, like half a cup or something. And that's key. It's a lot of oil. It's a lot of oil. It's key. And you put the lid on and you just forget about it for a good half hour. So what happens is that all the liquid comes from the actual beans. You don't add any extra liquid. So the flavor all remains in the pot. it kind of confits the beans and they overcook. So I normally don't like people to overcook their veg, but in this book, I ask people to overcook their veg because if you want them to be comforting, you need the sugar levels to go higher and you need them to be softer.

17:34That's comfort. So these beans are just, I love them. I cook them all the time. I just throw them in the pot, put the lid on and you've got a meal at the end. the the kind of the the we i take some feta and mix it up with with the mascarpone just to kind of give that a little bit of creaminess there because it's because i can but uh but you don't have to have that you can just you can just add feta or you can just have the bean stew by itself it's a delicious bean stew you can have it with eggs you can have it as a may as kind of with rice as the main meal if you like there's nothing and we call it beans on toast because we wanted to take on the British beans on toast that people have for breakfast.

18:13So we actually take a sour dough bread and just put all those beans on top. But if you want to just put some bread croutons, even if you buy them, oh, and the beans, delicious. Yeah, on toast was how I really, it spoke to me with that preparation. So you're slathering the feta mascarpone on the bottom of it and you're topping it with the beans. Yeah, but it's all about the beans. So the toast is just a bit of crunch on the bottom, but it's the soft beans that I love so much. And listen, this is normal if you think about italian cooking and crusty all those vegetables the the aubergines the zucchinis they're all overcooked or not i don't even call them overcooked they're just cooked they're cooked properly in that mushy way that we accept i mean i think shocking beans and having really like top beans from a wok is one way to do it and it's great but the mush is comfort i agree and the sugar levels you write about in the intro how sugar is a key component to why we love like what makes a comfort dish yeah i think about a french onion soup i mean you take a bunch of onions you don't want to touch them but once they've cooked for a good hour they they become so sweet that's that's the i think that's a top uh comfort food we have a kind of a slight equivalent to that using cavallo nero but we also have the cheesy toast on top as well as a kind of our take of the friend on a french onion soup um i never underestimate one of your rice dishes I feel you're, and you're getting your blushing look because you're very modest, but your rice dishes come up all the time on our show, how they're the best out there in terms of recipe development.

19:44And one that stuck out is the cheese ball lemon rice with chili butter. And it's a steaming technique, which I feel is a little less common here in the States. I think we typically will do fried rices or we'll definitely boil our rices. Talk us through this cheesy rice and how steaming rice is such a great way. So listen, I mean, I have to give credits to all the cultures that cook rice in different ways. And there is really, I mean, rice is, first of all, there's the different degrees of different types of rice from the short grains to the long grains that take different cooking techniques. So this technique that I love so much works really well for long grain rice like basmati.

20:25And so what I do, and I found that in the last five or six books that I've published, each one has at least one baked rice recipe. I find it really, really comforting. So effectively what it is, is a pot, an ovenproof dish, in which you put olive oil or butter and some aromatics, whether it's a skin of a lemon, whether it's star anise, whether it's cardamom, it could be whole garlic cloves, it could be shallots, whatever it is that you want to cook in that oil or butter. And let that cook a bit. And then you add your rice. and on top of that you put the rice needs to be washed and it also it goes if it sits there in the water to just kind of soften a bit and lose some of the starches so a bit of soaking and then the rice goes on top and then you add stock or boiling water and you cover it really well with foil or and you really are if you have a tight fitting lid and you don't or both you forget about it in the oven for a good 20 minutes, half an hour.

21:27And what happens is that the rice steams itself, a bit like what I talked about with the vegetables earlier. You don't need to worry about it all and becomes really fluffy, especially if you got rid of some of the starch through the soaking. And then this particular one that you're talking about, it's like a cheese ball rice. It's amazing. It's a wonderful thing that my kids love. It came to me as an idea where and Noor, my co-author on the last two test kitchen book, did these cheese balls. And they were cheese balls on rice. They were just cheese balls that were delicious. And I thought, what would happen if you just dunk those into rice as it's cooking?

22:05I don't know where that came from. You have 12 little balls in the rice. Each rice ball is a combination of cheddar and ricotta and mozzarella and feta. and they're just rolled into balls. Very easy. And then when you put the rice with the boiling liquid in the oven, you just dot them there and cover and put in the oven. And as you cook, the rice, the cheese kind of spreads a bit, but there's still an area with the cheese and without. So you get the balance. So you get that kind of rice with cheese immersed in it. And Verena, who kind of tested the recipe, said, oh, it doesn't look so great. And then she added that.

22:48At home, I wouldn't do all of that, But she added that chili butter that goes on top, gives it color with some olive and spring onion. So it becomes a whole meal. Yeah, adding an aromatic butter to fried rice or steamed rice. What a great technique. I think it obviously adds a richness and layers the flavor a bit more. But I love how you put the balls within it. I mean, it's such a smart move. Did Noor spend some time in the States, right? I feel like Noor... Yeah, she went to the CIA. She went to the CIA, right. And she worked in various restaurants in New York. I was like, Noor definitely spent some time with putting cheese balls into rice.

23:23Like that's an American. Talk about an American technique in the best way or, you know. Yeah. Yeah. She spent time. She knows more about American food than I do. Noor is amazing. She is. I want to welcome Noor back on the show. I'm sure you will. Yeah, yeah. So when I'm reading through the book, I'm thinking to myself, I'd like to figure out my comfort dish. like what speaks to me the most because this book is highly personal and there's a lot of options like i could have gone in the roasted chicken route i could have gone into a barbecue route but to me i thought about it a lot i wanted to say this to me the most comforting dish from this book is the linguine with miso butter shiitake and spinach so interesting wow i mean could you tell me why i'm just yeah i'm just curious why this one in particular okay so great thank you for asking me to talk on my podcast i'm joking um honestly two things first miso and butter for me going back to like foil yaki and this like grand japanese american western crossover like technique has always spoken to me and i think either it's tenjun in korea or miso in tokyo japan but also i like like i like a pasta and butter um i like in butter noodle and i think Like to me, when you have the simplicity of these ingredients and you decide that shiitake is your mushroom, this is like an uber umami dish.

24:51And to me, I want that when I'm thinking I need comfort because of a variety of reasons, celebration, you know, feeling down. And yeah, it's great. It's a great one. And thank you. And also what I love about it is in the great tradition of certain pasta dishes that come from Italy, it's a dish that you cook the sauce while the pasta is cooking, you know, so like cacio e pepe, all those recipes that the sauce is made through a process of emulsification rather than cooking down something for a long time, which is obviously also great. but the comfort of ease is also part of this recipe as long as you prepare what you need you have your mushrooms and it's not a lot of preparation it's all soy sauce and miso and you as the pasta cooks because you're going to need some of that water for the emulsification you just cook down your mushrooms and spinach so that it's kind of ready to collect the pasta when it's ready and i think again comfort comes in so many ways and we try to touch on all of them But the ease of cooking, the immediacy of cooking is also super important.

25:56It's a really good point. Sometimes we just don't want to cook when we're, and that's why we go out to restaurants for comfort or go to takeaway restaurants. But, you know, how do you know when the emulsification is ready and proper? I feel like that's a tough thing to negotiate as a home cook. I think you see it happening. So first of all, I think it's important to not cook your pasta in too much water. So you get more starch left in the water that you've collected from the pot. And then just don't add, you need to keep the pot very warm. So there is more evaporation going on when you add your water and you kind of shake it with the pasta.

26:36And then add it in small additions because you don't want to throw all the water there and then you end up too much water. but you see it. It becomes all velvety or silky at that particular point. And obviously there's butter here. So butter and the starchy water really gives you that kind of velvety texture. You see it happening. And once you've done it a few times, you recognize it. But I guess the trick is just not to add too much of the pasta water to it. I think that's a great point to have a shallow boiling point or boiling height so you have really starchy water. Yeah. And serve immediately.

27:12serve immediately some people are like we do the emulsifications and you're like and then you're chit-chatting away with your friends in the kitchen and you serve it three minutes later and you're like ah there's two types of dishes that you cook there's the dishes that you cook a la menu and there's the dishes that you pre-cook and I'm a firm believer of pre-cooking when there's a lot at stake you know when there's a friend over that you don't care to kind of just be distracted and while you're they're sitting standing there chatting to you that's fine but for meals i really am i wouldn't cook that if i've got six people sitting at the table and it's just well it depends what you want but yeah just generally speaking this is the one that you want to cook when you're super relaxed and they're not too there's no chatting and catching up about you know whatever it may be yeah and you're gonna be distracted totally it's all about the strategy of the dinner party and you just gotta all have it all done when your guests arrive that's about mine yeah you know i was thinking about you mentioned the dinner party quite a lot um you mentioned it once but i've been thinking about it quite a lot recently and there is this i don't know i'm not so aware of how things are in the u.s but in the uk people talk about the end of the dinner party like people do not have dinner parties anymore and at least since covid like and i don't from my perspective i i still go to dinner parties but i I think there's less and less dinner parties.

28:36And I think also the dinner parties changed their features. So I think in the past, I think many dinner parties in my mind were about like a competitive sport. You know, you were there, you were going to impress your guests, right? Beef bourguignon. Yes. Yeah. And a bunch of other things. Like Patayon Cru. Yeah. And then you finish with the sabayon. Sabayon. And it's just so stressful because you need to impress so much. and why I love this book so much, but not just this book, but just this different state of mind, is that I find that people do not want to cook like that so much anymore. They want to go into the kitchen for a relaxation and a break from the real world.

29:20And it's for grounding. So, you know, we're all our phones. It's all so fidgety and it's all so noisy. You come home, I just want to cook something easy and simple that can go no wrong that I know really well, rather than really challenging myself. And this is why I think the old school dinner parties are kind of over now. And since COVID, there's terrible war and suffering going on in the world that I feel very helpless when I see them because it's actually happening in a part of the world where I grew up. And I feel so much pain and I don't know what to deal with it. So often I just go to the kitchen and kind of engage in something that feels a little bit real.

30:04And I think this is a very, very important sign of our time, that people cook for comfort themselves and to find some solace. I think that's a really important moment. I'm glad you brought it up. It's kind of why I love the Shabbat tradition. I think on Friday nights, Dina Sussman wrote a beautiful book about it. You have to unplug and you can call it Shabbat, you can call it whatever you will, but it's a time when you take your phones and put it away and then you have your dinner to start And then you have a weekend. You have a prolonged period of not being plugged in. And I think that the dinner party taking a little bit from Shabbat, that culture, is smart.