Ottolenghi Simple

The Gateway to Ottolenghi

Yotam Ottolenghi is arguably the most influential cookbook author of the twenty-first century. His vegetable-forward Middle Eastern-inflected cooking has changed how millions of people think about vegetables, spices, and the possibilities of everyday cooking. His earlier books — Plenty, Jerusalem, Nopi — are celebrated but demanding.

Ottolenghi Simple is his attempt to make his cooking accessible to weeknight reality. The SIMPLE categories — Short on time, Inspired by ten or fewer ingredients, Make ahead, Pantry, Lazier, Easier than you think — provide practical guidance for when and how to use each recipe. The result is the most accessible entry point to his cuisine, and one of the most dependable cookbooks of the past decade.

The Flavour Philosophy

Ottolenghi’s cooking is defined by the combination of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean ingredients — tahini, pomegranate molasses, sumac, za’atar, preserved lemon, fresh herbs in quantities that feel excessive until you taste the result — applied to techniques that are largely simple: roasting, baking, assembling, occasionally frying.

The key insight is that boldness of flavour does not require complexity of technique. Roasting cauliflower at high heat until caramelised, then dressing it with tahini, lemon, and toasted pine nuts is a ten-minute process (after the roasting) that produces a result that tastes like it required professional training.

The Hero Ingredients

A shopping trip oriented around Ottolenghi Simple will introduce most home cooks to ingredients they may not have used before: preserved lemons (acidic, intensely fragrant), tahini (sesame paste, transformative in dressings and sauces), sumac (tart red spice), rose harissa (peppery and fragrant), and Medjool dates. Once these are in the pantry, dozens of the book’s recipes become genuinely quick to prepare.

The Roasting Principle

If there is a single principle that defines the book, it is: roast vegetables at high heat until they are deeply coloured and beginning to caramelise. This applies to cauliflower, carrots, chickpeas, cherry tomatoes, aubergine, courgette, and almost everything else. The Maillard reaction and caramelisation that occur at 220°C transform mild vegetables into deeply flavoured ones.

Who Ottolenghi Is, and Why It Matters

To understand why Simple was such an event, it helps to understand the phenomenon behind it. Yotam Ottolenghi — an Israeli-born, London-based chef, restaurateur, and longtime Guardian columnist — has done more than almost anyone to reshape modern home cooking, pushing vegetables from the side of the plate to its centre and introducing a generation of Western cooks to the Levantine pantry. His earlier books, Plenty, Jerusalem, and Nopi, were rapturously received but had a reputation, fairly or not, for sprawling ingredient lists and weekend-project ambition. Simple, with its 130 recipes and its clever filtering acronym, was his deliberate answer to the most common complaint about his food: that it was wonderful but impractical. A James Beard Award finalist and New York Times bestseller, it succeeded precisely because it kept the flavour while shedding the friction.

Honest Caveats

The “Simple” label deserves a small asterisk. The book’s own acronym admits that a recipe might qualify as simple in only one of six ways — a dish can land in the book for being make-ahead while still asking for a dozen components — so a handful of recipes are more involved than the cover promises. And while many ingredients are now stocked in mainstream supermarkets, cooks in some regions will still need to source za’atar, sumac, or rose harissa from a specialist or online. None of this undercuts the book; it simply means Simple is best understood as “simplified Ottolenghi,” not as a beginner’s first cookbook. Paired with a technique reference, it shines.

Recipes That Earn Their Reputation

What keeps the book in steady kitchen rotation is the reliability of its dishes. The “curried lentil, tomato and coconut soup,” the “tomato and pomegranate salad,” and the much-loved “braised eggs with leek and za’atar” have become genuine modern classics, passed cook to cook by word of mouth. The roasted aubergine with curried yoghurt, the slow-cooked chicken with clementine, and the many tray-bakes all share a quality rare in cookbooks: they look impressive, taste layered and exciting, and yet collapse, on inspection, into a handful of straightforward steps. Crucially, the recipes work as written — quantities are accurate, timings honest, and substitutions thoughtfully suggested — which is why so many cooks report that Simple is the Ottolenghi book they actually return to, rather than admire from a shelf.

Final Verdict

Ottolenghi Simple is the book that converts people to Ottolenghi’s cooking and makes bold Middle Eastern flavours achievable on a Tuesday night. The photography actually shows you what each dish should look like, the flavour-to-effort ratio is among the best in any modern cookbook, and once the hero ingredients are in your pantry, dozens of its recipes become weeknight staples. It deserves its place on every interested home cook’s shelf.

For anyone who has admired Ottolenghi’s restaurants or Guardian columns from afar but felt daunted by his reputation for complexity, this is the book that finally brings that cooking within everyday reach — and, more than likely, the one that turns an occasional experiment into a permanent change in how you cook vegetables.

In a crowded field of celebrity cookbooks, it stands out for one unglamorous virtue above all: you will actually cook from it, again and again, and the results will reliably outshine the modest effort they demand.

Our rating: 4.7/5 — The most accessible Ottolenghi cookbook and one of the most dependable. Start here if you haven’t cooked his food before.