Ottolenghi Flavor: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi

Ottolenghi Flavor: A Cookbook Reviews

• 
  NILTON TEIXEIRA

  For the love of veggies and coconut!
  Brilliant!
  And delicious!
  The imagination (or talent?) is incredible.
  I want to try every single recipe.
  And I love that there is an interactive companion to the book, so that I can check for ideas anywhere and at any time.
• 
  Kimberly

  Ottolenghi Flavor is the third cookbook in a series that began with Plenty and continued with Plenty More. Recipes are described as "low-effort, high-impact dishes that pack a punch and stand out." Of the one hundred recipes, forty-five are vegan and all are plant based. The book is broken down into thirds. The first third pertains to process (what is done to the ingredients) and discusses charring, browning, infusing, and aging. The second third focuses on how ingredients are paired to intensify flavors in terms of sweetness, fat, acidity, and chile heat. The final third centers on the ingredients themselves: mushrooms, aliums, nuts and seeds, and sugar - fruit and alcohol.
  This is a very informative cookbook that in many ways resembles a textbook in that there is so much text. Recipes are well done and distinct and there is a photo for each. While the recipes may be described as "low effort," this does not mean fast. In fact, only five of the recipes can be made in under thirty minutes or in one pan. Most take more than an hour and involve multiple steps and pans. You have to really want to make these dishes. Many recipes focus on less common vegetables such as rutabagas and celery root. Recipes all seem highly unique and creative but tend to run on the exotic side. Fans of Ottolenghi will love this book.
  I received a free copy from Ten Speed Press in exchange for a free and unbiased review.
• 
  Luca Fois

  So, I always thought rating cookbooks was strange. But I have actually read this, and cooked some of the recipes and planning to do more. I am hooked.
  Date barbecue sauce with roasted celeriac and goats cheese - i used ricotta : flavour heaven!
  Cascabel chili oil for butter beans:very enticing flavours!
  Apart the recipes, between the various chapters lots of information regarding cooking styles and techniques and components.
  A must read for the people that like to cook and are not scared by long ingredient lists. It's well worth to make your mouth dance.
• 
  Paul (Life In The Slow Lane)

  My daughter spent her hard-earned money buying me this book for my Christmas present. She was fooled by its trendy looking cover and colourful photos.
  
  I have perused its 300 pages several times now and not found one, single recipe I want to try. In fact, some are utterly repulsive: "The Ultimate Traybake Ragu" looks like a plate of pasta with fried mince and nothing else. The dishes are quite complex and many of them use ingredients that are almost impossible to get here where I live. It's totally impractical for an average home chef like me.
  
  Not to my tastes at all, thought the photos are pretty. Into the book recycle cabinet it goes.
• 
  Carol

  I’m sure these recipes are all delicious but find myself uninterested in trying even one. Is it that it seems too fussy or have I grown tired of putting complex dishes together? I’ll say it’s me, not the book, and leave it at that.
• 
  Ella Shoup

  Like many of Ottolenghi’a recipes, the ones in Flavor often require an outrageous amount of time and ingredients. In fact, he doesn’t even care to list the cooking time on the recipes. It’s actually sort of cruel. But if you approach it in a Half Blood Prince sort of way - scribble your own notes on the margins, develop your own Plan of Attack - you’ll feel just like Ron did when he took Liquid Luck right before his first quidditch match: p fucking invincible. So whatever the downsides and frustration you may feel when you first start, know that it’s all worth it in the end.
• 
  Grace

  3.5 rounded up
  
  I've been wanting to flip through an Ottolenghi cookbook for a while, so when I saw this on a friend's shelf, I asked to borrow it! I hadn't realized this one is focused on vegetables and is entirely (I'm fairly certain!) vegetarian, which was cool! I definitely bookmarked several recipes to make later, but I wouldn't say this felt like the most accessible cookbook. Some gorgeous platings and flavor combinations, but there's something about the recipes that feels a bit fancy and finnicky, particularly when it comes to ingredients--in almost every one there was an ingredient I'd be unlikely to find at my local grocery store, though they're good about recognizing those and offering substitutions. These recipes feel like the kind of thing you'd pull out for a dinner party when you want to impress.
• 
  Karen Foster

  Read every word of this one, and feel totally inspired. Vegetable-centric, unique combinations and flavor driven recipes, that are totally doable plus the gorgeous photography make this the perfect cookbook to me... loved it...
• 
  Cassondra Windwalker

  This cookbook is an absolute delight. I like to think I'm a fair hand in the kitchen, but Ottolenghi introduced me to flavors and methods I'd never even heard of, much less attempted. Even better, Ottolenghi's voice is completely approachable, inviting even amateur cooks into the kitchen without a hint of pretentiousness. Explanations are clear and precise, and the book itself is a visual feast, with beautiful photographs for every recipe. Flavor is king, and even the staunchest meat-and-potatoes eater will find reams of dishes they can't wait to try. Suitable for everyone from the ace chef to the newcomer. I received this book through a Goodreads giveaway, which did not impact the objectivity of my review.
• 
  Sabina Hahn

  He is a talented chef but I find the recipes overly complex. I think it is a personal preference, I like when there is a solo instead of a choir.
• 
  Thomas

  A very close toss up between 4 and 5 stars.
  
  The good:
  * I want to cook almost everything in this book - it's rare for me to want to make such a high proportion of the dishes.
  * Most recipes include an ingredient or technique outside of my comfort zone, but not so far outside that it's intimidating. It's in the Goldilocks zone of cookbooks and very inspiring for the amateur fusion cook!
  * Beautiful photos of every dish, with great attention to detail on presentation.
  * Summarises all the cool sauces, marinades and dressings that can be made in batches and stored for later use to spice up other meals.
  * Includes pairings for each recipe in case you don't know how to incorporate it into a meal plan.
  * Very nicely presented and just the right length of preamble to chapters and recipes to add context but not detract from the main purpose of cooking.
  
  The not so good:
  * Intros to the chapters feels very comparable to Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat but without so much of a clear direction, so probably unlikely to reuse these for reference.
  * Grouping together multiple recipes steps in one bullet point is a real bugbear of mine - I don't like one step in a recipe to be a dozen lines long with a dozen substeps and taking several hours to complete. Feels like a case of trying to hide the complexity when the recipe could also afford to be a little simpler.
  * A little cringey at times.
  
  Would very much recommend for the unique recipes.
• 
  Lana

  Reading this made me feel inspired to start cooking again! These recipes look straight forward and delicious. I love that the back has a section showing which recipes compliment each other. I didn't realize all the recipes were vegetarian because I was so engrossed and mesmerized. I appreciate when a cookbook has photos that increase a recipes appeal. Some cookbooks look more like a meal photography art book and others that don't have any photos are not exciting at all. This cookbook had the perfect balance of photos to recipes. I'm so giddy and I'm already planning my next dinner party and I don't even know where to start because it all looks so amazing!
• 
  Mairzi

  Gorgeous book with unnecessarily complicated recipes and ingredients that are not always easy to source. Also Cookbooks should not be so heavy that they are difficult to carry.
• 
  Savanna

  I love Ottolenghi’s previous cookbooks, but I thought he had more or less exhausted what he could do. As he says, “how many ways can there be to roast an eggplant?” But this cookbook is an evolution from his previous work. Where most of his previous recipes have been focused in Middle Eastern cuisine, this cookbooks is… not “fusion,” which to me implies a mixing of different cuisines, but rather post-national cuisine. With the help of Ixta Belfrage, Ottolenghi is now into using ingredients with big, bold flavors. Sometimes this is in context of the cuisine they come from, other times, like with the cascabel chile oil with butter beans, it’s just because that’s the big flavor they want to play with for the dish.
  
  This cookbook isn’t for everyone. It is generally meat-free and vegetable based, and it features more adventurous ingredients like rose harissa, black garlic, and a wide array of chiles. If you’re a somewhat experienced and adventurous cook and a fan of big flavors (like me), this book will be great for you.
  
• 
  Jill

  I feel bad for vegetarians. I think they need a superhero. For those of us who eat meat, there are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of cookbooks out there just for chicken. Since we need to come up with new and interesting dishes for dinner every night, cookbook authors offer up every conceivable option for meat they can come up with—roasted, fried, braised, sauteed, grilled, and so on. Imagine that many cookbooks out there for kale, or for cauliflower. They just don’t exist yet.
  
  Well, put a cape on Yotam Ottolenghi, because he is a superhero for vegetarian and vegan cooks. He is doing everything he can think of to add interest and flavor to vegetables. His cookbooks are a love letter to the taste and texture of vegetables, and his latest, Flavor, is his strongest missive to date.
  
  In Flavor, Ottolenghi, along with his test kitchen chefs Ixta Belfrage and Tara Wigley, focus on 3 Ps: process, pairing, and produce. Add in his homemade condiments (aka his secret weapons: flavor bombs), and you can find vegetable recipes for main dishes, sides, and even desserts for the most vegetable-averse out there.
  
  We start with process, meaning a way of cooking a vegetable that brings out the most flavor. For this, he focuses on four processes: charring, browning, infusing, and aging. Charring bumps up the taste of dishes like Calvin’s Grilled Peaches and Runner Beans, Herb and Charred Eggplant Soup, and Slow-Cooked Charred Green Beans. Whereas browning adds depth and color to the Hasselback Beets with Lime Leaf Butter, Celery Root Steaks with Cafe de Paris Sauce, Curried Carrot Mash with Brown Butter, and Lime and Coconut Potato Gratin.
  
  Garlic-infused olive oil adds extra flavor to the White Bean Mash with Garlic Aioli. The Pappa al Pomodoro with Lime and Mustard Seeds gets its unique taste from an olive oil infused with chilis, curry leaves, and mustard seeds. And the Black Beans with Coconut, Chile, and Lime are also infused with garlic to add an extra burst of savory satisfaction. An aged miso butter adds a level of depth to the Rutabaga Gnocchi with Miso Butter, miso and wine add the complexity of aged flavors to The Ultimate Roasting-Pan Ragu, and parmesan adds a new level to the Spring Vegetables in Parmesan Broth with Charred Lemon Sauce.
  
  Pairings of ingredients can also add depth of taste, from adding sweetness to the Butternut, Orange and Sage Galette to adding acidity to Rainbow Chard with Tomatoes and Green Olives. Adding fat can add flavor to Kimchi and Gruyere Rice Patties, and chili heat can add pungency to the Spicy Berbere Ratatouille with Coconut Sauce.
  
  Produce shows the way to bring out the best in your vegetables, by adding the umami of mushrooms, the magic of onions and garlic, the texture of nuts and seeds, and the sugar in fruit and alcohol. The Spicy Mushroom Lasagne, Dirty Rice, Radish and Cucumber Salad with Chipotle Peanuts, or Tangerine and Ancho Chile Flan can demonstrate this with ease.
  
  Yotam Ottolenghi has long been known as the chef who can make vegetables sing. Flavor takes that melody he started in Plenty, the harmony he added in Plenty More, and added orchestration to his dishes in Flavor.
  
  That being said, I would not suggest these recipes for beginning cooks. These dishes are elevated and elegant, the equivalent of meals from a four-star restaurant, and the ingredients he uses as his go-tos are hard to find on the shelves of many local American grocery stores. These are intermediate to expert dishes, with the refinements that come from many years of cooking. But there is nothing wrong with getting the cookbook to read and aspire to, trying one of the simpler recipes to add a dramatic flair to a holiday dinner or dinner party, and then working up to the more complicated recipes.
  
  And those who are looking to elevate their vegetarian or vegan cooking will definitely find new ideas that can expand their cooking horizons and inspire new levels of taste and texture. The gorgeous photos used liberally throughout the entire book will entice and encourage all readers to try new recipes for their meat-free nights or side dishes.
  
  A copy of Flavor was provided by Ten Speed Press for an unbiased review, with many thanks.
• 
  Jay Gabler

  Thank you Random House for the free book.
  
  “How many more ways are there to fry an eggplant?” asks Yotam Ottolenghi in his new cookbook. The answer: “Many.” 🍆🍆🍆🍆🍆🍆🍆🍆🍆 Even for those of us who don’t forsake steak, “Flavor” is full of tasty adventures in the land of vegetables.
• 
  Swetha

  One of the best vegetarian cookbooks that I have found to date! Recipes supersede Plenty and provide vibrant delicious fusion options! Don’t miss out on: Eggplant Dumplings, Tofu Meatball Korma, Cardamom Tofu and Sweet Potato in Tomato and Lime Sauce.
• 
  Loz

  Absolutely beautiful, respectful, wide-spanning homage to and springboard for cooking
• 
  Jen W

  What an amazing cookbook to add to my library! This was a Christmas gift that will be used over and over again! Have already tried 3 recipes and they were all a hit!
• 
  Nelly Santanna

  My favorite from all the Ottolenghi books! Everything I did was amazing!
• 
  Haley Stricker

  I loved the educational component to this cookbook! The book is set up in three sections: cooking methods, pairings, and produce. There was so much helpful information to enhance plant-based meals. I’ll be working through the recipes for a while but the ones I have tried have been great.
• 
  Taylor

  Stunning food photography and a great introduction with good food tips. Lots of obscure ingredients are needed and for a book titled 'Flavor', I've found the few recipes I've tried so far to be lacking in flavor. I'll continue to try more recipes but am disappointed so far. I'd be interested in trying his previous books to see if there are stronger recipes.
• 
  Kim Sanders

  I love this cookbook. I have made 5 recipes from it, and all have been absolutely incredible. While he calls for a million ingredients and many specialty, the introductory materials specify which will keep appearing throughout the book. That list is small, and he offers where to purchase or what to substitute right there.
  I was able to get makrut lime leaves and curry leaves fresh from Etsy for a very reasonable price--and I would recommend buying them as they appear in the most recipes. Rose harissa is great, but I find that I prefer more spice and less perfume, so I have been fine with the brand I use. Sumac and other spices he relies on are readily at Wegmans. So this is classic "I need a lot of things" but less frustrating than in some of his other recipe collections.
  AND...the organization of this is just wonderful. Flavor profiles and cooking technique really helped ground me in how to serve this stuff up. Love this book overall.
• 
  Carola

  Dit boek heb ik aangeschaft bij boekenkraam.nl. Ik verzamel kookboeken waarbij veel met groente wordt gekookt. Deze stond al een poos op mijn wishlist. Blij met deze aanwinst.
• 
  Nadia

  The best cookbook I've read this year by one of my favorite chefs. Gorgeous photograhy and delicious recipes, plus cute little illustrations in the non-recipes parts of the book.
• 
  Cristina Muresan

  This may well be my favourite cookbook ever. Got it for Christmas and been cooking lots out of it already - basically every day in the first week or two back home in the new year, slightly reduced to once or twice a week recently (sadly, work and life have been getting in the way of extensive bouts of kitchen extravaganza). The title isn't lying, everything I've made from it so far has been so. damn. flavoursome!! A lot of the recipes do tend to be a bit involved, time-wise and ingredients-wise, though it certainly is possible to skip some of the more exotic ingredients and still get perfectly lovely results; plus some of the recipes (have prep steps that) are "pop it in the oven and forget about it till your alarm goes off", so they are more realistic even for weeknights, especially if you're working from home and can get away from your laptop for a cheeky 10mins food prep! I must say though, even the "more difficult ones" have well explained steps which make sense and aren't overwhelming so the overall cooking experience is a joy. The only minor drawback maybe is that a lot of recipes tend to be quite chilli heavy, which, after a while, my stomach was complaining about! Easily sorted by going easy on the chilli amounts in the recipes....and maybe not choosing one of the spicy meals every single time!
  
  Overall, I'd say this book is perfect if you're looking to cook more vegetarian meals, it has lots of creative ideas and interesting combinations! Even inspired me to try some of my own creations in a similar vein. :)
• 
  Lana

  Amazing and unique flavor combinations that blow up your tastebuds. Ottolenghi's creative writing and informative advice with how-to help is appreciated. I feel that this book makes anyone who reads it and cooks through it a better chef.
  The book has straightforward recipes that seem complex but are actually very doable even for a novice cook, if the recipe is followed correctly. Some ingredients may be a little difficult to find but can generally be substituted. I haven't had the need to tweak any recipes...well, except the spice levels, as I'm not a big spicy person.
  All in all this is a massive hit of a book that truly let's Ottolenghi's mastery shine. It's easy to make a quick meal out of common flavors, it's a whole other ball game to make approachable Michelin star worthy dishes in 30 minutes to 1 hour. And the desserts in this book are excellent, too! Incredible cookbook! I have 2 other Ottolenghi cookbooks Simple and Jerusalem. I can say that this one is a beautiful addition to the collection with unique flavors and the recipes from Flavor are not a regurgitation of his other cookbooks.