Plenty — Vibrant Vegetable Recipes from London's Ottolenghi

The Book That Changed Vegetable Cooking

When Plenty was published in 2010, it arrived at a moment when the culinary world was beginning to question its relationship with meat — not for ideological reasons but for flavour ones. Ottolenghi, an Israeli-born chef with restaurants in London, had been writing a vegetable column in The Guardian for years, demonstrating week after week that vegetables, treated with full culinary seriousness, could produce food that was extraordinary rather than merely virtuous.

Plenty collected these ideas into a complete vegetable cookbook that has influenced professional and home cooks around the world. It did not advocate vegetarianism — Ottolenghi himself eats meat — but it insisted that vegetables, when given the same creative and technical attention as meat, could produce food that no carnivore would miss the absence of.

What Ottolenghi Does to Vegetables

The key to Ottolenghi’s vegetable cooking is the combination of intense heat, bold spicing, and generous quantities of fat and acid. He roasts cauliflower until the florets are deeply charred and caramelised, then dresses them with a tahini sauce spiked with lemon and garlic and scattered with pomegranate seeds, toasted pine nuts, and fresh herbs. The result is a dish with at least six distinct flavour and texture elements that together produce something that feels complete and satisfying.

The same principle applies across the book: courgettes with herbs and a sharp cheese, aubergine with multiple preparations in the same dish (roasted, puréed, fried), tomatoes with a diversity of textures and temperatures. Ottolenghi never lets vegetables be boring.

The Middle Eastern Pantry

Plenty is where many Western home cooks first encountered some of the pantry ingredients that define Ottolenghi’s cooking: za’atar (a herb and spice blend), harissa (North African chilli paste), sumac (tart berry spice), preserved lemons, pomegranate molasses, rose water. Building this pantry requires an investment, but once in place, it multiplies the potential of every vegetable dish.

The Recipes That Define the Book

The cauliflower dish (mentioned above), the roasted butternut squash with burnt aubergine and pomegranate, the shakshuka (eggs poached in spiced tomato sauce), the caramelised fennel with goat’s cheese — these are the recipes that made Ottolenghi’s reputation and have been reproduced in millions of home kitchens.

Final Verdict

Plenty is the vegetable cookbook that changed how the food world thinks about vegetables. More demanding than Simple, it rewards the investment.

How Plenty Changed Vegetable Cooking

It is difficult, in retrospect, to overstate the influence of Plenty. When it appeared in 2010 — collecting recipes from Yotam Ottolenghi’s “New Vegetarian” column in The Guardian — vegetables in most Western cookbooks were still treated as side dishes: boiled, steamed, dutiful. Ottolenghi made them the centerpiece, and he did so not through restraint but through abundance. His approach piles on bold spices, fresh herbs by the handful, contrasting textures, bright acidity, and the layered, sweet-sour-savory flavors of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. The result was food that vegetarians and committed carnivores wanted to eat equally — a quiet revolution that reshaped restaurant menus and home cooking alike over the following decade.

Crucially, Plenty is not a vegetarian cookbook in the apologetic sense. Ottolenghi (himself not vegetarian) never frames these dishes as substitutes for meat or as exercises in virtue. They are simply some of the most exciting things you can cook, and their meatlessness is incidental. That confidence is a large part of why the book persuaded so many skeptics, and why its influence is now visible in nearly every ambitious vegetable-forward menu.

Cooking From Plenty Today

A practical note for new readers: Plenty rewards a well-stocked pantry. Ingredients that were once exotic — sumac, za’atar, pomegranate molasses, tahini, preserved lemon — are central to its flavors, and building up even a few of them unlocks a large share of the book. The recipes are more involved than those in Ottolenghi’s later, deliberately streamlined Ottolenghi Simple, so it best suits cooks who enjoy the process rather than those hunting for fast weeknight dinners. For the full picture of how his books differ and where to begin, see our guide to the best Ottolenghi cookbooks. For most cooks serious about vegetables, though, Plenty remains the essential starting point — the book that made the case, definitively, that vegetable cooking can be the most interesting cooking of all.

It is worth noting how Plenty fits into Ottolenghi’s wider body of work. It was followed by Plenty More, a second volume of vegetable recipes organized by cooking method, and sits alongside his restaurant-driven books such as Ottolenghi: The Cookbook and the eastern-Mediterranean landmark Jerusalem, co-written with Sami Tamimi. Among all of these, Plenty remains the title most responsible for his global reputation and the one most often named when cooks describe the book that changed how they approach vegetables. If you cook from it regularly, you begin to internalize its principles — the generous hand with herbs and spice, the insistence on contrast and acidity, the refusal to treat vegetables as an afterthought — and those lessons carry into everything else you cook. That is the mark of a truly influential cookbook: not just a collection of recipes, but a reeducation of the palate.

The book’s presentation matters too. Plenty is beautifully photographed, with the vivid colors of its dishes — jewel-bright vegetables, deep spice tones, scatterings of herbs and seeds — making it as much a pleasure to browse as to cook from. That visual abundance is part of the argument: Ottolenghi wants you to see vegetables as celebratory and generous rather than dutiful, and the photography makes the case before you have cooked a single dish. For cooks who eat with their eyes first, it is one of the most appetizing cookbooks on the shelf, and a reliable source of inspiration even on the nights you end up improvising rather than following a recipe to the letter.

Our rating: 4.6/5 — The most influential vegetable cookbook of the twenty-first century. Essential for anyone who takes vegetable cooking seriously.