A Test Kitchen Grows In London

There are many bold ideas in the debut cookbook from the test kitchen team for Yotam Ottolenghi, the London chef with a collection of restaurants, method columns, packaged goods, and cookbooks. The book— Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Shelf Love: Recipes to Unlock the Secrets of Your Pantry, Fridge. Freezer —was dreamed up during the pandemic, and it’s filled with tips on how to Ottolenghify the frozen and the canned, the bagged and the boxed. But the book’s biggest takeaway is that the world’s next culinary superstar is likely to be Noor Murad , Shelf Love ’s primary author and the lead in the Ottolenghi test kitchen, now cleverly nicknamed the OTK.

Like Ottolenghi himself—the Big Y to the OTK—Murad is gifted at bridging the gap between the flavors produced by professional kitchens and the home cook. My editor told me, “You have to ask, ‘How did you decide on just one hummus recipe?’” So now that I’ve read the method, I have some thoughts on why you chose just one, but I’ll ask you first. It was during the first lockdown, and we were doing a lot of things on Instagram.

Everyone was on social media, and that was how we kind of connected with people—by cookery. Someone asked me, “Oh, can you share a hummus recipe?” And I was like, “Yeah, you know, why not? I have time.” [Laughs at the pandemic irony of “I have time.”] Then I went through all these tips , like, “Okay, you have to do this .

Peel the chickpeas, get rid of those skins.” And people were like, “WHHAAAT?” The funniest part is that so many people actually did that, and they’re like, “Oh my God, we can’t go back now. This is how hummus should be.” Were those tips that you developed in the testing part of your life, or are they things you gleaned from relatives or while making hummus growing up? I was like, “Yeah, of course you have to do that.” So sharing it was just pulling from what I knew and sharing that knowledge with people, which is kind of what we do at the test kitchen.

And then when I was writing the introduction, he read it, and he was like—he has very calm temperament, you know?—he was like, “Big Y. You in addition mentioned that, even when you were all pandemic-bound at home, you realized you could turn anything into Ottolenghi style.

I think, definitely, “Ottolenghi” has become a verb now: How do we Ottolenghify it? In the test kitchen, generally, any idea that we have, or anyone has, most of those ideas have been done.

But we always have this conversation, at some point, where we’re like, “Okay, well, how do we Ottolenghify it? I think the cool thing about working with the team is that all of us have come from the restaurants or the delis, so we’re well-versed in that Ottolenghi language, that language of knowing what makes the dish Ottolenghi. So you use it as a verb all the time—that’s what you say to each other?

We say, “How do we Ottolenghi it?” Which, I mean, I don’t know how Yotam feels about that, but even he’s like, “Yeah, how do we make it Ottolenghi?” THREE EXCITING RECIPES FROM SHELF LOVE SWEET POTATO SHAKSHUKA “A far cry from a classic shakshuka, yes, but we’ve found that sweet potatoes provide just the right amount of moisture and heft to serve as a base for these eggs. Serve this vibrant dish as a weekend brunch; it sure looks the part.” ZA’ATAR SALMON AND TAHINI “If you haven’t yet paired fish with tahini, then you’re in for a real treat.