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Meet Your Instructor: Yotam Ottolenghi
Lesson time 07:10 min
Yotam Ottolenghi is a celebrated chef, bestselling cookbook author, and restaurateur. Yotam shares some childhood stories, his passion for layered dishes with bold flavors and colorful ingredients, and his influences from across the Middle East.
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Topics include: Yotam Ottolenghi Teaches Modern Middle Eastern Cooking
Teaches Modern Middle Eastern Cooking
James Beard Award–winning chef Yotam Ottolenghi teaches you his recipes for delicious Middle Eastern platters layered with color and flavor.
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[00:00:00.98] [MUSIC PLAYING] [00:00:15.34] YOTTAM OTTOLENGHI: My cuisine is sunny food. Wherever the sun shines, that's where I find my food. It's the food with big flavors, big colors, and big generous gestures. I love food to create a drama in the mouth. It's kind of a metaphor to being alert, being sensitive, being mindful to what you're eating and really enjoying it, immersing yourself in something totally and utterly. [00:00:55.56] I've always had this love for ingredients and for food. I grew up in Jerusalem in the heart of the Middle East. And my sensibilities really evolved around the market foods, the Arabic food, and some of the Jewish foods that I had also growing up because Jerusalem was this big cultural mix. [00:01:18.45] I moved to London more than 20 years ago, where me and my business partner Sami Tamimi started cooking together. Then it was really all about serving fresh food to people, the food that we love food, that comes from our hearts and the heart of the Middle East. And it has grown and grown. [00:01:35.97] - This morning on the dish, one of Britain's most renowned Middle Eastern chefs-- after cooking school in London, he teamed up with his partners to found his namesake restaurant at Ottolenghi Delicatessen, where inventive vegetable dishes and gorgeous baked goods are the star attraction. [00:01:49.97] MAN: It quickly gained a cult following and led to five other restaurants. He's written seven cookbooks, two of which have won James Beard Awards. [00:01:59.34] YOTTAM OTTOLENGHI: I always think about this as kind of a natural progression from loving to eat to loving to cook to loving to feed. [00:02:08.74] [MUSIC PLAYING] [00:02:16.37] I'm inviting you into the world of Ottolenghi. This is a world of big explosive colors, of massive platters laden with flavors and aromas delightful for the eye and delightful for the mouth, a real joy. And once you've known them, you'll never look back. [00:02:43.22] [MUSIC PLAYING] [00:02:52.01] I wanted to teach this master class because I wanted to do a bit of mystification, really take a little bit of the old conceptions away and show some things are really much less challenging or complicated than there needs to be. I often think around food people get cold feet quite easily. They think, oh, I can't do this. This just looks too complicated. I can't cook Middle Eastern. I don't know how to make my vegetables taste delicious. [00:03:20.64] So I want to deliver this message through cooking that actually it's OK. It's really OK. You can cook those things that you think you can't cook and you can do it really, really well. It takes a practice. It's a skill. It's not something you learn from one day to the next. But once you've done it a few times, you can proudly do it. [00:03:44.84] I wanted to make my class a multilayered experience. For one, I wanted to get these big spreads that I love. There is a mezze spread, which really echoes my childhood in the Middle East. I'm goi...
About the Instructor
One of the most influential chefs working today, Yotam Ottolenghi creates dishes that layer color and flavor for maximum impact. Now the James Beard Award winner teaches you simple steps for making and mixing Middle Eastern–inspired recipes. Learn how to make generous platters—mezze and brunch spreads to homemade condiments, stunning stand-alones, and delicious vegetables—so you can entertain with ease.
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Yotam Ottolenghi
James Beard Award–winning chef Yotam Ottolenghi teaches you his recipes for delicious Middle Eastern platters layered with color and flavor.
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