reading

SEA TROUT AND BULGAR TARTARE WITH PRESERVED LEMON SALSA AND JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE CHIPS

PISTACHIO AND PINE NUT – CRUSTED HALIBUT WITH WILD ROCKET AND PARSLEY VICHYSSOISE

SOFT – SHELLED CRAB WITH SWEET BLACK PEPPER SAUCE, OKRA AND CINNAMON PICKLED CUCUMBER

LIST OF RECIPES

PISTACHIO AND PINE NUT – CRUSTED HALIBUT WITH WILD ROCKET AND PARSLEY VICHYSSOISE

SEA TROUT AND BULGAR TARTARE WITH PRESERVED LEMON SALSA AND JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE CHIPS

SOFT – SHELLED CRAB WITH SWEET BLACK PEPPER SAUCE, OKRA AND CINNAMON PICKLED CUCUMBER

ABOUT THE BOOK

Pandan leaves meet pomegranate seeds, star anise meets sumac and miso meets molasses in this collection of 120 new recipes from Yotam Ottolenghi’s London 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 flavours, with surprising twists along the way.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Yotam Ottolenghi is a cookery writer and chef-patron of the Ottolenghi delis and NOPI restaurant. He writes a weekly column in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine and has published four bestselling cookbooks: PLENTY and PLENTY MORE (his collection of vegetarian recipes) and, co-authored with Sami Tamimi, OTTOLENGHI: THE COOKBOOK and JERUSALEM. Yotam has made two Mediterranean Feasts series’ for More 4, along with a BBC4 documentary, Jerusalem on a Plate. www.ottolenghi.co.uk

Ramael Scully – Scully – was born in 1979 in Malaysia to a mother of Chinese and Indian heritage and a father with Malay and Irish blood. He moved to Sydney at the age of eight, with his mother and sister, where he went to school and then later to catering college. After several years cooking in Australia, Scully moved to London and started working at Ottolenghi Upper Street in 2005. He moved to the NOPI as head chef, when the restaurant opened in 2011. Scully’s distinct culinary baggage – the Malaysian flavours of his childhood, his training in the European tradition, his insatiable appetite for Asian ingredients – has been the creative force behind much of what is on the NOPI menu.

INTRODUCTION

If you happen to have any of my previous books – Ottolenghi, Plenty, Jerusalem or Plenty More – you will notice right away that the dishes in this book are somewhat more complex. Most of the recipes here will, therefore, be more challenging for home cooks. They are typically made up of a few distinct elements which 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 domestic kitchen. The recipes here were created from a different frame of mind; that is, in an environment where a team of professional cooks labours 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 mind-sets 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 which is, by its very nature, complex, at the same time as allowing a non-professional to feel that this is an undertaking which 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 that 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 on Gumtree 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, tonnes 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, chilli, 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 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 flavours that became synonymous with the name, the irreverent blends of ingredients, the vibrant colours 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 flavours, 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’s 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 Malay and Irish blood. At the age of eight, he moved with his mother and sister to Sydney, where he went to school and later to catering college. When he came to us, Scully had very particular culinary baggage. His Malaysian flavours were, like Sami Tamimi’s and my ‘Jerusalem flavours’, 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 a 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 first-hand, 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 favourite ingredients (miso, perhaps, or rehydrated dried chillies 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 chilli. 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 favourites: yoghurt, 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 marvellous 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 doddle. In every single case we’ve managed to find a compromise, with 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 in NOPI and in 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 that 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 flavours, 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 colourful 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, I believe it was, with miso cucumber and wasabi mayonnaise), two the following one, 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 sub-continent and South-east 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 I – 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 which included plenty of patina-laden brass, smooth-polished bloodshot marble, whitewashed brick, striking art and the famous loos, where a set of floor-to-ceiling concertina mirrors threw punters into a perplexing Wonderland and 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 laidback etiquette). Reception had to operate in full harmony with bar, shift managers and downstairs office; food dispenser to be alert to 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 sat down, 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 waiting staff 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 Honey & Co restaurant), Scully and me: an arrangement which generated a fair bit of confusion among our poor chefs. Even some exasperation, no doubt, when Scully’s garnish of fried chilli and baby coriander was replaced by Sarit’s fresh chilli and pomegranate seeds and finally by Yotam’s ‘Who needs a garnish at all?’ Nevertheless, the aim was to create a strong structure which benefited from Yotam’s 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’ 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 cheek, strained ricotta and coffee financiers – they were all there.

On the day that NOPI opened to the general public – 17 February 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.

COOKING NOPI AT HOME

As mentioned earlier, there’s no denying that some of the dishes in this book are pretty involved. Even after all our adjustments and simplifications, this is still a restaurant cookbook and certain recipes will remind the home cook why it’s such a joy to eat out at a restaurant in the first place, where all the hard work is done by someone else. There was even a point when we were only half-joking about including a chapter called ‘epic’ where the more complex recipes could go: the chicken pastilla, beef brisket, twice-cooked baby chicken, pig cheeks and a couple of others.

We’ve tried to balance the epic with other, more simple dishes (see ‘sides’ here). Some of these aren’t dishes we serve at NOPI. They are there, however, so that you can take one of the more involved dishes, pair it with a simple side and have a complete meal as a result.

We have also compiled a list of meal suggestions (see here) with some ideas for recipes which work well together to make a balanced meal. These will satisfy different appetites, both for food and for hard work in the kitchen. A list of ingredients (here) is there to help you navigate through the seas of unusual flavours we love to cook with. As we mention there, seeking out and cooking with new ingredients should always be fun and never intimidating. If you’re not in the mood for something new or haven’t got the time to go looking for it, we almost always offer alternatives which are readily available.

For both epic recipes and simpler ones, always keep in mind the rule we were told at school before taking an exam: first read through the text in its entirety. It is really useful to read the whole recipe before you start so that you can work out what can be done in advance, what needs to be done at the last moment and so forth.

We also make a point of suggesting alternative routes for different cooks: more complicated cheffy options for those with a bit of time and an overall adventurous disposition, simpler alternatives for those who are after an impressive result but want to get there pretty swiftly. Please don’t hesitate to choose our shortcuts, ready-made alternatives and quick substitutes; we use them all the time when cooking at home. Most dishes are rich and multifaceted enough to easily withstand at least one or two of those.

To cook NOPI dishes we also highly recommend that you act a little bit like a chef and do your mise en place, that is, getting ahead with all the chopping and weighing up of ingredients before you actually start to cook. You really don’t want to be left trying to finely chop 2 green chillies when they are meant to be thrown into a pan 2 minutes after the diced onion has gone in.

Kit-wise, there are certain pieces of equipment which will make your life much easier when cooking our food, although none of them is absolutely essential. We’d recommend investing in a mandolin for those restaurant-like thin julienned vegetables; a spice grinder will save you heaps of time and plenty of elbow work on the old pestle and mortar; an up-right food blender will enable you to make super smooth soups and sauces; and, finally, an ice cream machine will also save you a fair bit of arm ache and will make you some pretty impressive puddings.

RECIPE LIST

ROASTED AUBERGINE WITH BLACK GARLIC, PINE NUTS AND BASIL

CELERIAC PURÉE WITH SPICED CAULIFLOWER AND QUAIL’S EGGS

FRIED BABY ARTICHOKES WITH PINK PEPPERCORN AIOLI

BURNT SPRING ONION DIP WITH CURLY KALE

BURRATA WITH BLOOD ORANGE, CORIANDER SEEDS AND LAVENDER OIL

CHARGRILLED ASPARAGUS WITH ROMESCO SAUCE AND APPLE BALSAMIC

PURPLE SPROUTING BROCCOLI WITH SKORDALIA

BUTTERNUT SQUASH WITH GINGER TOMATOES AND LIME YOGHURT

BABY CARROTS AND MUNG BEANS WITH SMOKED LABNEH AND CRISP PITTA

TRUFFLE POLENTA CHIPS

SHARP AND SPICY WATERMELON SOUP

PEA SOUP WITH ROLLED GOAT’S CHEESE CROUTONS

JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE SOUP WITH HAZELNUT AND SPINACH PESTO

BABY SQUID WITH ALMOND TARATOR AND LIME RELISH

SEARED SCALLOPS WITH PICKLED DAIKON AND CHILLI JAM

SEA TROUT AND BULGAR TARTARE WITH PRESERVED LEMON SALSA AND JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE CHIPS

STARTERS

ROASTED AUBERGINE WITH BLACK GARLIC, PINE NUTS AND BASIL

We’ll be thinking we’ve done pretty much everything that can be done with a tray of roasted aubergines and then a new ingredient comes along to shake things up. We discovered black garlic around the same time that NOPI opened, and quickly became hooked. It has an addictive mellowness and depth of fermented flavour: part balsamic vinegar wine gum, part liquorice allsort. Black garlic starts off as white garlic. Nothing is added to the cloves to make them change so fundamentally from one thing to another; they simply undergo a 3-week heat process that transforms their natural sugars and amino acids. It’s sold either as a whole bulb, whose cloves you then need to peel, or in a small pot of slightly smaller cloves, already separated and peeled.

This benefits from being made a few hours before you want to eat it, for the flavours to really absorb and develop. The roasted wedges don’t fully keep their shape once they’re tossed in the garlic sauce, so don’t worry if the result is slightly mushier than you’d expect: it’ll be all the better to spoon on top of some toasted sourdough or pitta bread.

With thanks to Gena Deligianni for this dish.

1 Preheat the oven to 220°C/200°C fan/gas mark 7.

2 Cut each aubergine in half, lengthways, and then again, widthways. Cut each section into wedges, about 3cm wide and 10cm long, and place in a large mixing bowl along with the olive oil, 1 tablespoon of sea salt and a good grind of black pepper. Mix well, then spread the aubergines out on two parchment-lined baking trays – you don’t want them to be overcrowded – skin-side down. Roast in the oven for about 40 minutes, until well cooked and golden-brown. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool.

3 Place all the ingredients for the dressing in the small bowl of a food processor, along with ¼ teaspoon of salt. Blitz for about 2 minutes, until a very smooth paste is formed.

4 Place the aubergine in a large mixing bowl. Add the garlic dressing and use your hands to stir very gently: you want the aubergine to be coated without disintegrating completely. Leave for an hour or so, if there is time to spare. Spread the yoghurt out on a platter or individual plates and arrange the aubergine wedges on top. Sprinkle over the basil leaves – tearing the large ones as you go – and pine nuts. Finish with a drizzle of olive oil and serve.

Roasted Aubergine with Black Garlic, Pine Nuts and Basil

CELERIAC PURÉE WITH SPICED CAULIFLOWER AND QUAIL’S EGGS

Ras el hanout is a North African blend of sweet and hot spices, finely ground. There’s no definitive list of the spices which are combined – hanout means ‘shop’ in Arabic and every shop has its own ‘top-of-the-shop’ variety – but it usually includes ginger, cardamom, allspice, nutmeg, cloves, black pepper and cinnamon. Ready-made varieties are widely available and generally fine, but feel free to add to them for your own top-of-the-shop creation. We find that we often need to add a bit more cinnamon when using ready-made varieties.

The celeriac purée works well as an alternative to hummus, if you want to make just this to snack on before a meal. With the additional elements, though, it’s a substantial starter or even a little meal in itself, served with some warm crusty bread or white pitta.

We like to fry the eggs here – the crispy edges of a fried egg work particularly well with the purée – but soft-boiled also works, if you prefer.

As with many of the dishes in this book, the main elements here can be made in advance, ready to be put together just before serving and, in this case, before the eggs are cooked. If you make the purée the day before, just cover it with cling film – actually touching the surface of the purée – to prevent it forming a skin. It’s better at room temperature rather than fridge-cold, so bring it out of the fridge at least half an hour before serving.

1introduction

CONTENTS

LIST OF RECIPES

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION

RANDOM MEETING

TAMING SCULLY

OUR ‘GROWN–UP’ RESTAURANT

COOKING NOPI AT HOME

RECIPE LIST

STARTERS

ROASTED AUBERGINE WITH BLACK GARLIC, PINE NUTS AND BASIL

CELERIAC PURÉE WITH SPICED CAULIFLOWER AND QUAIL’S EGGS