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Yotam Ottolenghi

lines on the record: 34
first: 2023-08-24
most recent: 2023-08-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Need I say more? Like, should that not be improved on? And then I noticed the only people who were defending the rights of the Irish were English. And no Irish person had any problem with me playing with their traditional old recipe. And my mother-in-law especially didn't couldn't care less. She thought it was delicious. So that's a little story about how political it could get with actually no good reason.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To say, okay, this is all about. We need to redress a certain power imbalance, which is absolutely fine. But often I find that food is politicized for no good reason because in the conversation about cultural appropriation, often the people who defend the oppressed are actually not the oppressed themselves, but some other people and the people that actually are your food you are presenting they don't really care so much. And I have a really funny story to tell in that context because my husband Carl is from Northern Ireland. Years ago, I published a recipe in The Guardian for my variation on Irish stew. My mother-in-law always used to make fun of me about my cooking. And I said to her, Greta, you know what? I'll make a really good Irish stew. And because she's thanking, you know, it's so, so fancy. And what's so bad about an old traditional...”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, totally. And I'm very much very happy to embrace those questions. I think food is political because any human activity is political. It's political in the sense that a lot of decisions about people's lives and livelihood and way of life has to be made before you get a plate of food on your table. So it's political in that sense. And the food of the Middle East is actually politics in action. Like we've said, I think food is political when there's something at stake. And I think it's unnecessarily politicized when there is nothing at stake and people are finding it necessary to defend someone else's rights when they can't even be bothered. So if there is an inequality or a power issue within a certain system, food comes in, then it's very, very important to engage.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In our house a kids absolutely love tray bakes if you're cooking meat you do it with meat otherwise you can do it with vegetables I cook something big and chunky like chicken thighs or stewing lamp pieces and create a sauce from whatever it is that you're cooking you can do it with a butternut squash as well and there are aromatics and then once it's almost cooked I add a little bit extra liquid a stock or something like that and then I throw in a starch it could be rice or it could be vulgar wheat or or couscous or giant couscous and I cover it and let it steam and cook in the in the sauce around the main thing and then you've got a meal in a tray which is less washing up and kids absolutely love it the starches just absorb all the flavor that the main thing has created and it's super easy and delicious”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Understanding how we cook, so there is less waste in our house, so something would figure in the breakfast that was left over from the previous night's dinner. We really take care of making sure that we cook cook three meals a day because it's really important to kind of punctuate the day, otherwise you go crazy. So meals are great signifiers of the time as it happens in the day. And we're loving it, but with a whole new appreciation to what's going on, we made fritters with leftovers, cauliflower from the previous night, and Sammy's got this incredible fritters. I mean, anyone who's cooked from the first Otto Lengi book might know them, his mom's recipe. We take cooked cauliflower, mix it with a bit of cinnamon, cumin, turmeric, some egg, and fry it, a bit of chopped coriander. It is the most delicious thing in the world. And it is actually last night dinner recreated in the fritter form.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have to say that it really has because Carl and I were under lockdown with our two sons with Max and Flynn who were seven years old and four years old. We worked so hard. I don't think I've ever worked as hard in my life before just doing the housework and the cooking and the educating. And it felt so, in a way, novel, I'm saying it, because so many people's experiences every day to really be in charge of everything, everything that goes on in the house. And we're so used to being in charge of a slice. You know, you go to work, you're in the money and you do this. But it was sobering to do everything. And it was incredible hard work. I mean, we would start at 6.30 when the kids wake up and not be done before 9 or 10 o'clock to get everything done properly. So totally a new understanding of what it's like to cook for a family. And we actually really enjoyed the process.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For all the wrong reasons. And there is a very long screening process that involves social workers and healthcare workers that go and make sure and establish that everybody is there for the right reason. But it costs a lot of money. Not everybody can afford it. And so I know these things happen in completely different conditions in other parts of the world. And I think this is something that really needs addressing. And one of the things that I always say is a reason where surrogacy happens in a less than desirable situation in other parts of the world is because we haven't dealt with it here. The legal framework for surrogacy in the UK and in other European countries hasn't been set in a satisfying way. Because I think if we would deal with it and the legislation would be in, how it should be done here, we wouldn't have to go to other countries and have that kind of degree of exploitation that happens on occasion when this is not done properly.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I totally know it, and it's something that Carl and I had talked about a lot because when I describe our journey to parenthood, we have tried to co-parent with women so not to go down the surrogacy route. And that didn't work out for us, the two attempts that we've had to parent with women didn't work out. And then we chose a surrogate. It's a highly complicated subject. I think one of the reasons why I felt that I could defend our experience was that we had to go to America for circrosy. And in the States in America that allow surrogacy, the rules, the laws under which this operates are very strict. So women who are surrogates should be quite well established. They should have children of their own and families and be in a particular financial place that does not, they're not forced into it for also.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much before the challenges of gay parenting. I thought, okay, well, and I've written about it in a piece that I've written for The Guardian, say, okay, I'm an out-gay man, but there's certain places where I don't go. I don't always necessarily present myself in every context as a gay man. I wasn't so keen to tell people that I'm having a son with my husband. I mean, I told my close friends, but I wasn't out with it. And I think it's the experience of maybe my generation, people who were out, but not in every sense of the word and like capturing that little segment of being gay was something that people of my generation experienced and maybe now that's not even necessary anymore.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I mean, in Israel, in the 1990s, it was very possible to come out as a gay person, but only in particular places. So I lived in central Tel Aviv, which is the cosmopolitan city, the secular city. I don't care city of Israel, while the rest of the country takes quite a while to follow. This is probably the main reason why I left Jerusalem, because Jerusalem doesn't have that quality, quite the opposite. Tel Aviv was very open and very embracing. I've never experienced blatant homophobia in Tel Aviv in all the years that I was living with a boyfriend. I think one of the things that I've talked about quite a lot when Carl, my husband and I had our first child, Max, was about a kind of conquering bits of gay experiences we were scared to take over. I mean, gay parenting was something that wasn't really talked about.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You read stories, you actually get much more than the recipes. You get a cultural experience that Instagram has no means of conveying. But on balance, I think it's a very good thing, and especially now where people are so isolated.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have to say that I was then a reluctant Insta adopter, but then when I realized how effective it is in delivering a message, I actually start enjoying it. This renaissance of food, especially now in Corona times, is due to the fact that technologically we are presented with so many options in terms of delivering messages. I realize how instantaneous the reaction is when I put a beautiful image on Instagram. As a recipe writer who sells books, you can only dream of the immediacy of an Instagram post. You can put a poster recipe now and people will be cooking it for dinner in 25 minutes. It's that instantaneous. And it's very gratifying. There's other sides to it because sometimes I think there is too much on Instagram. It's hard to take in when you sit with a book and you read recipes.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is the story to tell, right? It's the story of Homus, it's the story of the cuisine of a particular nation or another nation. And a lot is at stake in the Middle East. It's not just food. Normally it's livelihood. It's land, it's property. The story of the food is often interwoven into the other stories. So it's very hard to separate and it's not always desirable to separate. I'm trying to talk about it in a kind of a general concept, but it is. It's often quite heartbreaking to see that it's our food and then it's not their food and vice versa. And the answers are never simple. They're really never simple because it's not only Palestinian food. The food of the Middle East has also been the food of Jews who had lived in the Middle East and then immigrated to Israel and brought it with them. So there was never a clear-cut answer.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, well, that's a sensitive question on its own because it's fun for one, it's not fun for someone else, right? It's a very subjective thing. You could have homose arguments that are really fun because it's all about that one-upmanship between restaurants over who makes the bus homos. It's a real delight to behold because, you know, those are just things that could happen in every household. Who makes the bakes cakes? Who makes the best stew, anything else? When it's devoid of a political and social context, then it's real fun. The difficulty is, and I've been asked a lot about this question in the context of cultural appropriation, is that”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think I have no doubt about that. I think one of the reasons why our partnership has lasted as long as it did is because in London we don't really face the same challenges, daily pressures and challenges that we would have had we lived in the Middle East. I mean it's just the reality and it is a sad reality and we have to we think about it quite a lot you see very few collaborations of that nature in Jerusalem and you'd see more of them outside Jerusalem unfortunately”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sammy and I always say we're way more famous all over the world apart from the Middle East. We are kind of non events there, which is a funny thing because the first book we ever published, Dr. Lenke cookbook was published in Hebrew and got a Hebrew translation, never got an Arabic translation. I think it is perhaps almost too difficult to stomach this partnership in the Middle East. That could be one explanation. And the other is that I don't know that necessarily in the Middle East people want to be taught by someone who is kind of left so very long ago how to cook the regional food of the moment.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In hindsight, I realize it does. I remember we were setting the counter and the Otolengi counter is quite famous for how luxurious it is and how bold and how colorful it is. And Sammy was putting his salads beautifully presented in with heights. You know, when you go to the market, there's always a really good stallholder knows how to create height because that's how you create that kind of sense of abundance. And you also fill up the field of vision because that's what you want. You want the buyer to see nothing else but this fantastic food. Sammy did that with his salad and I did that with my cakes. And afterwards, someone says to us, you know, it looks like a marketplace. It looks like the suk in Jerusalem or in Istanbul or in some kind of Spanish market. And it did. As soon as we looked at it, we saw that actually that's what we created. But I think we did it subconsciously. We didn't quite realize that that's the effect that we were after.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kilometers distance from each other when we were born in the same year. And it was just, it was Providence. It felt a bit like that because the stories, the parallels were so incredibly clear as soon as we met each other, we were also both gay and we were living with our boyfriends. It was kind of insane how similar we were and how unbelievable it was that we have actually never met up until that moment.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did feel a little bit like destiny. So when I met Sammy, I worked, I became a kind of a certified pastry chef. And there was a small takeaway cafe in Delhi in Knightsbridge called Baker and Spice. And Sammy was running the kitchen there, making the most incredible food. And I applied for a job as a pastry chef. And I remember I walked in and the manager was not really there. And so Sammy was the only person that I could talk to. I said to him, look, I want to hand in my CEV because this place looks amazing and I'd love to work here. And Sammy said, I don't know, the manager of here, I'll pass it on. But would you like a cup of coffee? And he took a break and we sat down. We have a coffee. And we spoke for like five, ten minutes about just where do you live, what do you do, et cetera, before we realized that we could actually speak Hebrew to each other because Sami speaks fluid Hebrew and that we grew up within”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Food that I want to eat that I want to cook and not the food that I think other people want to eat. And that was a revelation. And that actually was a way that I still think about the food that I cook and serve in my restaurants. It's never this kind of platonic idea of what food should be. It's much more about what I really deep down inside in my most Galotso self actually want to eat.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I never wanted that. That was not what I wanted. That was really hard. It was not only so much in terms of physically, but also for my morale. It was doing the same thing all over again every day and getting very little satisfaction from it. And I left that environment quite quickly and I was very lucky because I was taken to work at Kensington Place, which was a great restaurant. I started to see different environments working in these places was not necessarily a way to get forward or get ahead, but actually it was about just giving a really good time to customers and creating fantastic food of great traditions. And I think Rowly Lee, the head chef there, was someone that I really looked up to because he always used to say, you know, just make it the best you can and the food that you really want to eat. And I realized at that point that it's...”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I went to the Cordon Blux, I started working in various restaurants. And the ethos was that you really need to work in the very best restaurants if you want to get ahead in the world of food. So I've immediately landed as assistant to the pastry chef in a Michelin star restaurant in Knights Bridge called a Capitol. So I worked in the evenings while studying during the day. And I loved it. But as soon as I had to work full-time when I finished my studies after about six or eight months, I found it incredibly hard. The hours were insane. I think I started often I started 9 or 10 o'clock and not be home before one or two o'clock in the morning that day and then working the same double shift the next day. And I went through a bit of a crisis because I thought I'm doing what I'm supposed to be loving. I've always loved cooking and eating as you've established my Golozzo title.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I went to university and I studied literature and philosophy, which I was really interested in. I loved it, but I never felt totally fulfilled. I finished my dissertation for my MA degree and I worked on it for a very long time, I'd say a couple of years. It was a very well-researched document about the development of photography from a philosophical perspective. I handed it in and my supervisor was very happy and she wrote me a very good report.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“See what I mean. So his presence is always with us, and we kept very close contact with his girlfriend who's now married and has her own children. But we went through a very hard time. And I think one of the reasons that I chose to leave was because it was not too long, a couple of years after my brother had died. And I just felt it was just perhaps a bit too much for me to withstand that all that pressure, as my sister and I were the only ones left. And it was very difficult.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very hard to break it down. My brother died a very young man in his early 20s and he was a very vivacious, very life-loving person. He was much less complicated than I was. He was just literally an eager beaver in every possible way. And he also extremely charismatic. And everybody loved him. He would become an actor or something very eccentric. And he was just that kind of person that was very easy to connect to. And he was kind of the center of jokes in our house. And he would sing and he was just that kind of person. And when he disappeared from one day to the next, it was as it does when you lose a sibling. It was the biggest shock for all of us. And it took my parents in particular, but also myself and my sister a very long time to come to terms with it. I mean, you never do come to terms, but to learn to live with him, without him.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did have a very pluralistic house in terms of food, and my mom was very and still is a very adventurous cook. She always looks for the next thing.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the funny things, I mean, Jews in Israel are less traditional and less law-abiding in terms of Judaism than the ones that live in the diaspora and other countries. So you will find a big chunk of Israeli population that wouldn't follow kosher rules. And pork is a bit of a taboo that is more difficult to cross. But my mother comes from a very assimilated German family and they could just not give up their ham. You know, it was just too deeply ingrained. So she corrupted my dad. And I have to say that it was a kind of a taboo growing up. There was only one butcher in West Jerusalem that would sell pork under the counter to my mom in brown bags. And she would bring it home. And for the sandwiches from home to school, I really had to declare to present it as turkey to my friends. And my mom made me swear that I wouldn't give anywhere a bite of my sandwich just because most of them wouldn't eat pork. So that was a bit of a thing.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was a part of many jokes in our house, which is about my appetite. I had it in me from a very young age. I was a galzzo. I couldn't stop eating. And my dad and my mom were very good cooks. As I said from very different traditions. But the beautiful thing about growing up in Jerusalem at the time that I did was that I've had that kind of European tradition at home. But as soon as you left the house, there was all this incredible other influences, the Middle Eastern influences, and particularly the Palestinian influence. We used to go a lot to East Jerusalem at the time, go to the local bakery and buy fresh pita bread. We used to go and buy all the marmules and the Palestinian cakes. We used to go and have takeaway Homus and Labnet. And for me, my love of food was actually formed in the streets of Jerusalem where the market with a”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Incredible. All my memories of Italian food are kind of, I latch onto her. So she used to make these incredible Simolina Nocchis, like little...”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had two grandmothers that couldn't be more different from each other, so the one that we talked about was my German grandmother, my maternal grandmother. And she was a character. You know, you could love her or hate her depending on the time of the day. She was so intense. She was very, you know, she was, as you can imagine, a Mossad agent. And her food was very Germanic. We used to go there and we had our lunch on a Saturday afternoon, like a Swiss clock. It started at 2 and it finished at 2.45 and we were out by 3.30. And she always used to serve the same food, which I kind of liked. There was cured ox tongue slices, cauliflower blanched in water and no aromatics with a kind of a buttery breadcrumby sauce on top. She was a good cook, but very much in the Germanic tradition of cooking. My other grandmother never worked. She was more of an introvert, but her food was...”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know that I didn't know about it until I was in my teens or my mid-teens where this family story came to light. My mother didn't know her mother, my grandmother was working for the mossage. She thought she did some official job in the prime minister's office, it was called at the time, but she didn't know exactly what she was doing. When Eichmann was abducted and delivered to Israel from Argentina, I don't remember the exact year, but it was in the early 60s. My grandmother was involved in this operation from Israel. My mom remembers the morning where Eichmans arrived and the news came, my grandmother telling my grandfather, he's here. And she asked, who's here? And they said, oh, you know, that's nothing important, some relative. But my mom made a connection. And then years and years later, the story came out in a book by the head of the retired head of the Mossad. It was confirmed. And then my grandmother had more stories about day sojourns into Hean and all sorts of things she used to do as a young woman working for Mossad. So we were growing up under this kind of the shadow of my...”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Orange blossom and a wonderful food. It was all very evocative. And Jerusalem is a beautiful city. It's sensual. It's historic. It's very spiritual. And with that, there is a good side and a bad side. So the good side is all this wonderful food and all these wonderful emotions. But it was intense. It was very intense. You always felt that kind of, I always say the weight of history on your shoulders, people who grew up in Jerusalem often can't wait to leave because it is intense, but they also look back with a lot of fondness because it's something that is really hard to replicate elsewhere.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jerusalem in the seventies and the 80s was slightly more peaceful place in the sense that the tensions between the Muslims and Jews were more under the carpet that were kind of slightly hidden because it was the whole business of 1967 war in which Israel occupied eastern Jerusalem was a very recent development and the animosity that it kind of erupted later has not yet, that genie hasn't come out of the bottle yet. So it was actually a very peaceful place. I remember going out with my father and my younger brother. We went cycling to Jericho down the hill from Jerusalem and then sitting down for a very peaceful meal underneath a tree and having incredible kebabs and hummus and all the wonderful Palestinian food that was on offer. And in Jericho you really smell the orange blossom because oranges, the oranges of Jericho are particularly famous. So it was that kind of sense of”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Used to go and buy all the Ma Mules and the Palestinian cakes. We used to go and have takeaway Homus and Labne. For me, my love of food was actually formed in the streets of Jerusalem. Sammy and I always say we're way more famous all over the world apart from the Middle East. We are kind of non events there. I think it is perhaps almost too difficult to stomach this partnership in the Middle East. Parenting was something that wasn't really talked about that much. I'm an out gay man, but there are certain places where I don't go.”
2023-08-24 · Intelligence Squared · Yotam Ottolenghi: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT