Yotam Ottolenghi changed how a generation cooks. Now, he’s embracing a new simplicity

Our cookbook of the week is Ottolenghi Simple Too by Yotam Ottolenghi and Vera Lochmuller.

Jump to the recipes: breakfast potatoes, baked chicken thighs with yogurt and za’atar, and braised halloumi with tomatoes and beans.

In Yotam Ottolenghi’s new era of simplicity, shortcuts aren’t just tolerated — they’re encouraged. Condiments and pantry ingredients are pillars, and using a pre-made sauce or a marinade is preferable if it means people are cooking.

He notes that there’s a presence in cooking food. “It’s from buying the ingredients, from preparing the dish, serving it, sitting down to eat it, and then even clearing up and washing up,” says the chef-owner of the Ottolenghi restaurant group and author of 11 cookbooks from his home in London, England. “And I think we all suffer from a bit of absence in our lives.”

In writing Ottolenghi Simple Too — the companion to Ottolenghi Simple, published eight years ago — he was struck by how much had changed since 2018.

“I think we all know why it’s such a different world. We’ve been through a pandemic. We’ve been through increasing conflict and strife and hatred and negativity and screens that shout at us,” he says. “I realized, as I was writing the book, that people just need a bit of therapy. They need a bit of quiet. They need a bit of escapism in the best possible way.”

Over his nearly three-decade culinary career, our relationship with food has become more complicated. Whether “proteinmaxxing” or the rise of GLP-1 drugs, it’s “much less instinctive than it used to be,” he adds. “We’ve completely stopped being the authorities of our own culinary journeys.” People shift from one diet to another thinking it’s the silver bullet. “Whilst, in actual fact, the answers are so complicated and are so related to us and what we like, and the notion of joy never comes into the equation.”

Ottolenghi sees cooking as “an antidote to life in 2026” — one way to take a break from the screens and the noise. You might go for a walk or a run, meet up with friends or throw a pot in a pottery studio. “Cooking is one of those top three or four things that will fill up your life with joy, and is so fundamental to humanity.”

In Ottolenghi Simple Too, he and co-author Verena Lochmuller captured how they cook today. Recipes are streamlined, such as “The One Sauce” that comes together in a single roasting pan and can be used for many purposes, from poaching fish to making pasta and meatballs.

“When I think about my own cooking, it has become much more about the day-to-day, much more about the immediate, much more about the ingredients that I find easy and comforting: rice, chicken, potatoes, cabbage, cauliflower, zucchini,” says Ottolenghi. “I just love them, and I’m very happy to indulge them and cook them, but without setting the very hard technical challenges.”

After the interview, Ottolenghi was planning to make the sweet potato fritters in the book for his two kids. Before he introduced the crisp cakes, they had refused to touch sweet potatoes. “It doesn’t take any work. You put them in the oven, you take them out, you scoop them out, you add an egg, and then you dollop it into a pan.”

The accompanying recipe for baked chicken thighs with yogurt and za’atar was another “lightbulb moment.” It’s four ingredients — excluding the olive oil, salt and pepper — mixed in a baking pan and roasted for roughly an hour. “It’s a miracle to get something so delicious with such ease. So this is the way I see things now. Set your bar really low, make sure you don’t challenge yourself too much and just enjoy the process.”

Serves: 6

2 lb (905 g) Yukon Gold potatoes, unpeeled and thinly sliced
2 red bell peppers, seeded and thinly sliced (1 1/3cups/200 g)
4 oregano sprigs
3 large shallots, thinly sliced (1 3/4 cups/200 g)
1 head of garlic, top 1/2 inch (1 cm) removed
1 tsp sweet smoked paprika
2/3 cup (160 mL) olive oil
6 large eggs
Fine sea salt and black pepper

Preheat the oven to 400F (200C).

Put the potatoes, peppers, oregano, shallots, garlic, paprika and olive oil on a rimmed baking sheet (about 18 x 13 inches/46 x 33cm), along with 1 1/4 teaspoons of salt and plenty of pepper. Mix together well and bake for 30 minutes. Remove from the oven, turn everything over, and bake for another 30 minutes (turning the vegetables over again halfway through), until the potatoes are soft and jammy and the peppers and shallots are frizzled. Remove from the oven, squeeze the garlic cloves out of their skins, and fold them into the roasted vegetables.

Crack the eggs into a bowl, season with a pinch of salt and some pepper, then lightly break with a fork — just enough to burst the yolks. Create a few small pockets in the potato mixture, then pour in the eggs. Return to the oven for 5 minutes, or until the eggs are just cooked through.

Serves: 6

4 1/2 lb (2 kg) chicken thighs, skin on and bone in
Scant 1 cup (200 g) plain whole-milk yogurt
1/4 cup (40 g) za’atar
1 tbsp olive oil
Lemon wedges, to serve
Fine sea salt and black pepper

Preheat the oven to 375F (190C).

Put the chicken, yogurt, za’atar, 1 3/4 teaspoons of salt and plenty of pepper into a medium baking pan, roughly 9 x 13 inches (23 x 33 cm) in size (the chicken will fit very snugly at first, but will shrink during cooking). Mix well, then rearrange the chicken skin side up, drizzle with the oil, and bake for about 1 hour, basting a couple of times, until the chicken is a deep golden brown. Set aside to rest for 10 minutes, then serve with the juices from the pan spooned over the top along with a generous squeeze of lemon.

Make ahead: The dish can be prepared 1 day in advance and left sitting in the baking pan all ready to go into the oven.

Cook’s tip: The chicken renders a lot of fat in the pan — don’t throw this away! Pour off any excess and keep it in a jar in the fridge; it’s absolutely brilliant for roasting potatoes or other veggies.

Serves: 2

12 oz (340 g) cherry tomatoes (a mix of colours looks great), half cut in half and the remainder left whole
1 x 15-oz (425-g) can of black-eyed peas (or lima beans), drained
5 garlic cloves, 4 thinly sliced, 1 crushed to a paste
5-6 thyme sprigs, plus 1 tsp finely chopped leaves
1 lemon, zest thinly shaved to get 4 strips, the remainder finely grated, 1 tbsp juice
1/3 cup plus 1 tbsp (95 mL) olive oil
9 oz (250 g) halloumi, cut into 6 slices
1 tsp za’atar
Fine sea salt and black pepper

Preheat the oven to 375F (190C).

Put all the tomatoes into a 10-inch (25 cm) round (or similar) shallow ovenproof dish, along with the beans, sliced garlic, thyme sprigs, lemon zest strips, lemon juice and 1/3 cup (75 mL) of the olive oil. Add 1/2 teaspoon of salt and a good grind of pepper. Mix together and nestle the halloumi slices among the beans, making sure the cheese remains exposed. Drizzle the remaining 1 tablespoon of oil over the cheese and bake for 30-35 minutes, until the tomatoes have collapsed and released their juices and the halloumi is golden.

Mix together the crushed garlic, thyme leaves, grated lemon zest and za’atar. Once the dish is out of the oven, swirl this through and serve.

Recipes and images excerpted from Ottolenghi Simple Too by Yotam Ottolenghi and Vera Lochmuller, copyright ©2026. Photographs copyright ©2026 by Jonathan Lovekin. Published by Appetite by Random House®, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.