Beautiful photography draws you in. The ideas behind the recipes give you a reason to stay.
Some cookbooks make me hungry. Ottolenghi Flavor makes me want to cook. There’s a difference: one sends me looking for a snack; the other makes spending time in the kitchen feel like a good idea.
I own a copy, and the photography is a big part of its appeal. The food looks inviting enough to interrupt the usual dinner routine—the one where you open the refrigerator, stare for a while, and make whatever you made last Tuesday.
But there’s more to this book than beautiful food. Yotam Ottolenghi and Ixta Belfrage, with Tara Wigley, build it around a question that gives the recipes a purpose: how do you bring out the most flavor in vegetables?
A cookbook that explains its thinking
Flavor explores that question through three themes: process, pairing, and produce.
Process looks at what happens when you cook an ingredient in different ways, including charring and browning. Pairing considers how elements such as sweetness and acidity work together. Produce turns the attention to ingredients with distinctive flavor potential, including mushrooms, alliums, nuts, and seeds.
That structure gives the book an appealing sense of direction. You can approach it looking for something to make, but you can also follow an idea: what changes when an ingredient browns, or what a little acidity might bring to a dish.
For a curious home cook, that’s a compelling reason to spend time with a cookbook. There’s something to think about beyond the next set of instructions.
The photography is part of the invitation
The photographs are what keep drawing me back. They make me interested in cooking, which is a useful quality in a book competing with the considerable convenience of doing something else.
A cookbook has to make the effort feel appealing. Flavor does that for me visually. It makes vegetables feel full of possibilities and gives me a reason to look forward to preparing them.
That inspiration has value even before choosing a recipe. Sometimes the first step toward a more interesting dinner is simply wanting to make one.
Who I’d put it on the shelf for
Based on its approach, Flavor seems especially suited to cooks who enjoy understanding ingredients and exploring combinations. Recipes such as miso butter onions and spicy mushroom lasagne give a sense of the direction: familiar vegetables approached with curiosity and a willingness to build flavor.
If your priority is choosing the quickest possible dinner, look through a few sample recipes before deciding whether it suits your routine. The attraction here is the opportunity to explore.
For me, the photography is already a reason to return to it. The book makes cooking feel inviting, and its structure offers somewhere to take that enthusiasm. That’s a good combination for a cookbook to have.
Get the book at Amazon for $19.99.
