Summary
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Yotam Ottolenghi, Noor Murad, and the test kitchen superteam behind Shelf Love deliver maximum-flavor recipes with make-ahead condiments, sauces, and more toppings that transform any dish into an Ottolenghi favorite.
IACP AWARD FINALIST * ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, Delish, Epicurious
Extra Good Things is all about the secret culinary weapons--condiments, sauces, dressings, and more--that can make a good meal spectacular. The abundant, vegetable-forward recipes in this collection give you a delicious dish plus that special takeaway--a sauce, a sprinkle, a pickle!--that you can repurpose time and time again in other recipes throughout the week, with limitless opportunity. These extras help you stock your fridges and pantries the Ottolenghi way, so you can effortlessly accessorize your plates with pops of texture and color, acidity and heat, and all the magical flavor bombs that keep you coming back for more.
And this is where the fun really begins, with extras like marinated feta, featured in a dish of oven-braised chickpeas, that can then be spooned onto your favorite salad or swirled into soup. Slow-cooked za'atar tomatoes top a polenta pizza for dinner but will also make the best-ever bruschetta or pasta sauce. Or a crispy, crunchy panko topping full of ginger, shallots, and sesame that you first meet on soba noodles but you'll want to put on . . . well, just about everything.
Whether it's a spicy kick of pickled chile or an herbaceous salsa to lighten and brighten, Extra Good Things shows you how to fill your kitchen with adaptable, homemade ingredients that will make any dish undeniably "Ottolenghi."
Author Notes
Yotam Ottolenghi was born on December 14, 1968 in Jerusalem. He is a British-based chef, cookery writer and restaurant owner. He started out as a writer working on the news desk of Haaretz, one of Israel¿s largest papers. In 1997 he moved to the UK planning to start a PhD, but before he enrolled he signed up to train at Le Cordon Bleu cookery school in London for six months. He got a job as head pastry chef at the London boutique bakery Baker & Spice and this is where he met Sami Tamimi and Dan Lepard.
Ottolenghi's cooking style is rooted in, but not confined to, his Middle Eastern upbringing: a distinctive mix of Middle Eastern flavours Syrian, Turkish, Lebanese, Iranian, and Israeli. His particular skill is in marrying the food of his native Israel with a wider range of textures and flavours from the Mediterranean, Middle East and Asia. Before turning to food and cooking, Ottolenghi was in both academia and journalism. He was a sub-editor on the news desk of Haaretz, Israel's oldest daily newspaper, and a student in Tel Aviv University.
Following a six-month course at the London-based French cookery school, Le Cordon Bleu, in 1997, Ottolenghi worked as a pastry chef at The Capital, the Michelin-starred restaurant in Knightsbridge. From there he moved to work in the pastry section of the Kensington Place restaurant and that of the sister restaurant, Launceston Place, for a year, under the chef Rowley Leigh. He eventually became head pastry chef at Baker and Spice in Chelsea, London, where he met Sami Tamimi co-founder of their delicatessens and restaurants and co-author of the Ottolenghi and Jerusalem cookery books in 1999. In 2015 his book Nopi: The Cookbook Ramael made The New Zealand Best Seller List. Ottolenghi Simple was published in September 2018.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Excerpts
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. Excerpted from Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Extra Good Things: Bold, Vegetable-Forward Recipes Plus Homemade Sauces, Condiments, and More to Build a Flavor-packed Pantry: a Cookbook by Noor Murad, Yotam Ottolenghi All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.