Yotam Ottolenghi has published Simple Too, a cookbook built around 135 recipes for home cooks who want to make food in half an hour with ingredients they already have. That is a clear shift from the elaborate style that made his name. Here, he is selling speed, flexibility and a looser reading of the rulebook.
135 Recipes in Simple Too
The book follows 2018’s Simple and was developed and written with Verena Lochmuller. Ottolenghi said the goal was to make cooking easier and more forgiving, especially after he no longer wanted to start from scratch every time he went into the kitchen during the pandemic.
He put that shift in blunt terms: “I just felt like, oh my God, I’m not going to start from scratch every time I go into the kitchen.” The recipes are spread across breakfast, lunch and dinner, so the book is not built as a one-meal novelty. It is structured as a full-day home-cooking manual.
Tomato Sauce With Five Ingredients
One tomato sauce recipe shows how far the style has moved. Ottolenghi describes it as “a big roasting tray with a whole lot of barely chopped tomatoes, a bunch of thyme, two whole heads of garlic and tonnes of olive oil,” and says it can take sugar if the tomatoes are not ripe enough, plus a splash of vinegar if available. He also uses tomato skins, and he calls the method “It’s everything that I’ve been taught not to do in cooking school.”
That recipe matters because it turns the old criticism of his work into the point of the book. Ottolenghi said some people had called his recipes “just impossible. Why are you making us go through all these loopholes before we even start cooking?” and he answered: “I ask for forgiveness.” In practice, that is a retreat from precision for its own sake and an admission that home cooks want fewer steps, not more.
Tesco Metro And Jarred Foods
The book also sits inside a wider change in what home cooks can buy and use. Ingredients that once felt specialist are now available in a Tesco Metro, and jarred foods have become more popular. Ottolenghi’s own range of jarred condiments already includes jams, dressings and pesto with added miso, which lines up with the book’s more forgiving approach.
He is not pretending that every dish has to be made the hard way. On pesto pasta, he said, “I’m very happy for people just to throw it in with some pasta and some extra olive oil,” adding, “That’s absolutely perfect.” That is the practical line Simple Too seems to draw: use what you have, cut the ceremony, and stop treating home cooking like a test.
Verena Lochmuller And The Shift
For readers, the useful takeaway is simple. Simple Too is not a volume of shortcutless restaurant recipes repackaged for the bookshelf; it is a cookbook designed around ingredients already in the kitchen, meals that fit into half an hour, and methods that accept substitution without apology.
Ottolenghi also makes the equipment point in the same spirit: “you want a really beautiful, nice roasting tray that works really well and you’re happy to bring to the table” and “I don’t have a high-tech kitchen. I have a really good knife – I don’t have a knife fetish.” The open question is how much of this simplicity is a permanent rewrite of his style rather than a response to how people cooked after Covid, but the book itself already answers the commercial side: there is an audience for Ottolenghi without the faff.
