Our resident foodie Chris Gordon chats with chef Yotam Ottolenghi about his gorgeous new cookbook.

The Sydney Morning Herald recently called you ‘the man who sexed up vegetables’. What’s the one ingredient you couldn’t live without to spice up a veggie dish?

As it takes two to tango, I’ll definitely need more than one, please!

Something to provide the background strength to a dish – tamarind paste, for example, which I’m using a lot at the moment. It’s very easy to overuse the term ‘depth of flavour’ but it really applies here. Unlike the ready-made tamarind pastes – which can have too much vinegar in them and be a bit acidic as a result – if you start with a block of tamarind pulp and make the paste yourself, the result is like liquid gold. It’s very easy to make – you just soak a chunk of the pulp in a bit of boiling water for 15 minutes or so, squeezing it a few times before passing it through a sieve to strain out the pulp.

To finish off a dish, something like sumac is great. Its dark red looks stunning and it has a lemony astringency and freshness which can be just what a tray of roasted root vegetables or a simple weekday omelette needs to make them sing.

Your cooking style is perfect for bringing people together around a table with bright delicious platters of food, resulting in memorable occasions. What is your most memorable meal?

I’ve had lots of memorable meals, of course, but the ones that really stand out are often the simplest. A simple dish of Hainanese chicken rice from a stall in a hawker centre somewhere in Penang, Malaysia; a fried kale salad eaten out of a truck on the streets of Boston, a breakfast of freshly-made ricotta in Sardinia, having risen at dawn to help milk the goat’s. Eating outside, with my hands, informally, with family and friends.

What advice do you have for home cooks attempting your dishes?

My books are written for home cooks so, advice-wise, be assured that my dishes are meant for you! The ingredients’ lists can be, I know, longer than people are used to but there is rarely anything complicated about the method needed to put a dish together. Things which might look unusual or challenging are more often the result of their combination of ingredients – drizzling tahini over a salad or chargrilled broccoli, for example, or a tray of roasted carrot batons or even some grilled banana bread – but the method will generally be very straightforward. I’m a long way away from producing a ’15 minute supper’ recipe book, I grant you, but my cooking is actually about keeping things very simple.

Plenty More is available now.