Best Ottolenghi Cookbooks: Where to Start with Yotam Ottolenghi

Yotam Ottolenghi changed the way a generation of home cooks thinks about vegetables — bold, abundant, layered with flavor, and never an afterthought. His cookbooks are some of the most beloved (and most-gifted) in modern cooking, but with several titles to choose from, new readers often ask where to start. This guide compares his two most popular books and helps you pick the right one for the way you cook.

The short version: start with Ottolenghi Simple for approachable everyday cooking, or Plenty if you’re here for the vegetables.

The Ottolenghi Cookbooks at a Glance

The Vegetable Bible: Plenty (2010)

Plenty: Vibrant Vegetable Recipes from London’s Ottolenghi is the book that made Yotam Ottolenghi a household name. Drawn from his newspaper column, it’s a celebration of vegetables as the centerpiece of a meal rather than a side — eggplant, squash, beans, grains, and greens transformed by bold spicing, fresh herbs, and the bright, layered flavors of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East.

This is the book for anyone who cooks vegetarian, wants to eat more vegetables, or simply wants to understand what all the Ottolenghi fuss is about. The recipes are more ambitious than his later “simple” work — they reward a well-stocked pantry and a little time — but the payoff is food that’s genuinely exciting. Plenty remains a staple recommendation for vegetable-forward cooking and a gorgeous book to own.

The Everyday Entry Point: Ottolenghi Simple (2018)

Ottolenghi Simple was written, in part, as an answer to the most common complaint about his earlier books: that the recipes could be long, with hard-to-source ingredients. Simple keeps the signature Ottolenghi flavor but streamlines it, flagging each recipe by how it qualifies as “simple” — short on ingredients, made ahead, ready in 30 minutes or less, easy to assemble, or relying on pantry staples.

For most home cooks, this is the better first buy. It delivers the bold, vegetable-forward Ottolenghi style in a format that fits a real weeknight, making it the most approachable way into his cooking. Once you’ve fallen for the flavors here, the more ambitious books feel far less intimidating.

Which Ottolenghi Cookbook Is Right for You?

The two books aren’t really competitors — they’re two doors into the same kitchen:

• Choose Ottolenghi Simple if you want the easiest, most weeknight-friendly path into his cooking. It’s the best first buy for most people, especially if you’ve found his other books daunting.
• Choose Plenty if you cook mostly vegetarian, want to put vegetables at the center of the plate, or want the iconic book that defined his reputation.

Many fans eventually own both — Simple for busy nights and Plenty for when they want to cook something special — but either one is a wonderful place to begin.

Cooking the Ottolenghi Style: A Few Tips

Ottolenghi’s flavor comes largely from a handful of pantry ingredients that are worth seeking out if you plan to cook from his books regularly: sumac, za’atar, pomegranate molasses, tahini, preserved lemon, and plenty of fresh herbs. Stocking even a few of these unlocks a huge swath of his recipes and is the single biggest thing you can do to make his food taste the way it does in the photos. Ottolenghi Simple is forgiving if your pantry is bare; Plenty rewards you for building it up.

His recipes also tend to be generous with herbs, acid, and finishing touches — a scatter of herbs, a squeeze of lemon, a drizzle of good oil at the end. Don’t skip those final flourishes; they’re where a lot of the magic lives.

Who Each Book Is For

If you’re still on the fence, think about how and what you cook. Ottolenghi Simple is for the busy weeknight cook who wants big flavor without a project — the reader who has admired Ottolenghi from afar but worried his recipes were too involved. It’s the gateway, and the one most people should buy first. Plenty is for the cook who’s genuinely excited about vegetables: the vegetarian, the flexitarian, or anyone who wants to make produce the star rather than the supporting act. It’s more ambitious, but it’s also the book that defined a movement, and cooking from it feels like an event.

There’s also a practical case for owning both, since they serve different moods rather than competing. Simple handles the Tuesday-night scramble; Plenty is what you reach for when you have a weekend afternoon and want to cook something that fills the kitchen with the smell of toasting spices. Together they cover the full range of how most people actually want to eat.

Building an Ottolenghi-Friendly Shelf

Ottolenghi’s books are flavor-and-inspiration cookbooks rather than technique manuals, which makes them a great complement to a foundational reference. Pair them with a fundamentals-first book like Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat — whose emphasis on seasoning, acid, and balance dovetails beautifully with Ottolenghi’s bright, layered style — and you’ll have both the why and the wow of good cooking. For more in the eastern-Mediterranean register, Zahav by Michael Solomonov is a natural companion.

More Cookbook Guides

• Best Cookbooks for Every Kitchen: Essential Reference and Recipe Books
• Books Like Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Cookbooks That Teach You to Cook

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