Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Extra Good Things

Introduction

Good things come in multiple forms: experiences and memories, friends and loved ones, travels and places, and all the cheerful sights in between. At the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen (OTK), good things come to the table, where good things are food things and food things must absolutely be good. Sometimes, though, good things show up with a little bit extra. You get a meal, a dish, a recipe, but you also get a takeaway—a sauce, a sprinkle, a pickle!—a condiment you can repurpose time and time again, with limitless opportunity. These extras help you build up your fridges and shelves, to be brought out at any and every mealtime; accessorizing your plates with pops of texture and color, acidity and heat, and all the magical flavor bombs that make a good meal great.

This book brings you an abundance of veg-forward meals from the OTK team, each with an added condiment or skill to build into your creative repertoire. It’s all the good things you want from Ottolenghi, plus extra: Extra Good Things.

Narrating this book is Noor, who brings to life the many conversations and diverse personalities of the OTK. There is, of course, Yotam, who requires no introduction, but more a big thank-you for leading a collaborative team of chefs, writers, doers, and thinkers: Gitai, Verena, Chaya, Tara, Claudine, Jens, Clodagh, and Noor. Together we cook, taste, converse, and put into writing all the recipes we truly hope will make it onto your tables.

INSIDE THE OTK

Someone’s just put a plate of food on the counter, “Does anyone have a minute to taste this with me?”

A few hours earlier the place had a quiet stillness to it, as the first sets of feet slowly shuffled into the room, home of the OTK. The Test Kitchen, you see, has moved. No longer based in the Camden arches but instead on the bustling Holloway Road in North London, the big sunny rooftop room shining its morning light onto the clean stainless-steel countertops, the brightly colored floors, the rows of jarred ingredients lined up like keen students in a classroom saying “Pick me!” There’s no movement yet, no exhaust fan doing its best to drink in all the fumes of charred green onions and eggplants, of fried shallots and chiles, of sugar and spice and all things nice. It’s just 9am on a Monday morning, and the best is yet to come.

Coffee poured and laptops fired up, there’s a slow build-up as the minutes pass by, echoes of chatter as the Test Kitchen’s hottest topic enters the room: food, obviously. There’s a verbal exchange here, an I-go-you-go rhythm as a couple of chefs speak about their latest ideas and inevitable conundrums that ensue. Eventually this stops. A sizzle. Someone has started to cook.

It’s gently fried onions, their harshness now sweet and their sharpness turned buttery. It’s the holy trinity of ginger, garlic, and chile. It’s an amalgamation of sweet spices, cinnamon, and star anise, and with that the whole room takes a deep inhale. “Hey, can you grab some spoons?”

There are a few murmurs and a nod of approval. Someone grabs a lime and squeezes this on top. A sudden lift. Another nod. Then, the inevitable question, “So, how are we going to Ottolenghify it?”

OTTOLENGHI, THE VERB

Ottolenghify doesn’t exist in the modern-day dictionary. But it should. Let’s say it did, though, and the verb is as universally recognized as stands true in the OTK universe, here’s what we think it would say:

Ottolenghify / Pronounced: Otto-lengy-figh / verb British Derived from the noun Ottolenghi, also an adjective.

– To Ottolenghify is to make something feel unequivocally Ottolenghi
– To add flair, a slight twist to the familiar
– A surprise in the mouth

“I Ottolenghified my roasted eggplant with some feta.”
“Shall we Ottolenghify this dessert display with some huge meringues?”

The Test Kitchen team, as individually diverse as they are, all happen to speak the same food language. Having all worked their way through the Ottolenghi delis and restaurants, it seems they’ve also inadvertently been schooled in the skill of what it takes to make an Ottolenghi dish, well, Ottolenghi.

So, what does it mean, really, for a dish to be Ottolenghi?

It’s the celebration of vegetables. An all-inclusive vegetable environment. It’s abundance. Big plates of food piled high, generous and inviting. It’s food with a Middle Eastern twist, not always, but mostly: the cardamom to the vanilla, the allspice to the tomato. It’s the building of flavor. Laying the brickwork for a very solid, very tasty foundation. It’s the finishing touches: the zesty sauce, the pickled herb stems, or the drizzle of oil. More than anything, it’s the chefs, each of them making their mark with different tastes and experiences, different palates and cultural influences. Ottolenghi is one of the above and all of the above together.

Which brings us to this book, Extra Good Things—filled to the brim with all the added extras that make a dish undeniably Ottolenghi.

THE BOOK

In Shelf Love, we had you raiding your shelves, digging through your cupboards and clearing out the corners of your kitchens. It was all about utilizing and improvising, using up what you have and swapping out with what you need. All in all, it was about creating lots of empty space and plenty of opportunity to refill and restock. Cue Extra Good Things, which is about just that: filling your shelves, filling your fridges, filling your kitchens to your heart’s desire and, hopefully, feeling extra good in the process.

This book is based on the notion of abundance and creativity, of picking and choosing, of mixing and matching, of starting from zero and ending at 10 with plenty more room for expansion. It’s an exploration into the OTK pantry via sauces and dressings, oils and jams, sprinkles and crunchy bits, pickles, ferments, and cures, and dessert foundations (we refer to these as “one basics”). It’s all the added extras that dress up a meal, making an already good dish deliciously better.

To walk you through these pages, we’ve divided the book into condiment-driven chapters where each recipe has a takeaway or an extra—the extra, of course, being the condiment or dessert basic. The fun doesn’t need to stop there, we believe. In fact, this is arguably where the fun begins.

Alongside all the meals we really want you to cook, we invite you to join us in the Test Kitchen playground. There are 10,000 combinations to be had out of 0–9 digits which, when you juxtapose this against 75 different savory condiments then, well, that’s basically a baked potato dressed in many different outfits. Baked potato with harissa butter (p. 72), with fennel and sausage gravy (p. 88), or with blue cheese dressing (p. 35). Banana ketchup (p. 94) slathered onto grilled burgers. Everything seasoning (p. 120) sprinkled over cheese scones. A bottle of easy-peasy hot sauce (p. 26) drizzled onto rice. For the sweet tooths among us, this means 10 different pastry basics that can be carried over into something else: the one basic pumpkin caramel (p. 242), for example, but this time spooned into an apple pie. 

This, in essence, is the evolution of a meal, where one extra thing used in a multitude of ways becomes the gift that keeps on giving. It’s all the good things, plus plenty of playful opportunities for your own reinvention. So, by all means, play, stock, fill, and expand, and, in turn, always Ottolenghify.