The 8 Cookbooks to Get Next If You Love Yotam Ottolenghi Recipes

Yotam Ottolenghi is a household name for many. Certainly in London, where has cultivated an influential culinary empire, beginning with his first Ottolenghi Deli in Notting Hill. But at this point he’s probably most widely known for his many best-selling cookbooks, Flavor, Jerusalem, and Plenty that champion vegetable-forward cooking, accented by flavors and ingredients from the varied food cultures that fall beneath the umbrella of “Mediterranean cuisine”.

Ottolenghi and his team are known for celebrating vegetables as stars in their own right. In a given Ottolenghi cookbook, you’ll find recipes that are simple, and others that will test and expand your skills as a home cook, but what remains consistent throughout is an emphasis on communal, elevated cooking that’s held to an exacting and vetted standard.

If your copies of Ottolenghi’s books are all dog eared and sauce spattered, or if you just want to expand your cookbook library with more veg-forward recipes, below you’ll find a selection, picked by our own exacting staff. Besides a common focus on the ability of vegetables to play a starring role, these are cookbooks that have roots in Mediterranean food cultures, and emphasize food as something to be shared.

Both Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley are longtime Ottolenghi collaborators. Tamimi is his business partner and co-founder of the eponymous restaurants, while Tara Wigley co-authored several of his cookbooks, and is a key figure in the Ottolenghi test kitchen. Needless to say they share a similar ethos and approach to food. Falastin is Tamimi’s celebration of Palestinian cooking containing roughly 110 recipes that cover contemporary renditions of traditional Palestinian dishes and flavors. Preserved lemon, za’atar, and fresh herbs make frequent appearances, and there are several spectacular fish dishes—a fish kofta flecked with sumac and chile, and spiced salmon skewers—that are worth bringing into your regular rotation.

This cookbook, penned by the owners of famed Moro restaurant, is partly grounded by the foods of Moorish Spain and Morocco that they are known for, but it’s more so an homage to their multicultural community in their East London garden allotment. The recipes are simple, and practical, many requiring just a few ingredients, yet they maintain a creativity that exalts the joys of cooking from the garden. These are unfussy soups, bountiful salads, and one pot vegetable dishes meant to be shared with neighbors and friends after a long day toiling in the dirt, and are somehow simultaneously unpretentious and spectacular.

London-based Helou has authored many cookbooks exploring the food of the Middle East and North Africa, and Levant is perhaps her most personal. In it she focuses on recipes from Syria and Lebanon, where she grew up, and interspersed between traditional and comforting dishes are memories from her life and childhood. In place of photos, Helou’s beautiful prose brings these dishes, and the stories surrounding them, to life with striking detail.

Cookbook authors have been using seasonality as a guiding principle (and a bit of a thematic cliché) in their books for a while now, but McFadden, who hung up his fine dining apron to help manage an organic farm in Maine, comes to the subject from the perspective of someone for whom growing food and cooking food are inextricably linked. Six Seasons, as you can probably guess, is divided up by six seasons—spring, early summer, midsummer, late summer, fall, winter—with each containing recipes employing vegetables at their peak. Meat makes an occasional appearance, but platters of jewel-toned produce are really the stars here.

Tucked away on a quiet Greenpoint, Brooklyn side street is Edy’s Grocer, a small, sugar pink market stocked with Lebanese pantry staples and prepared foods. Inside you’ll find abundant mounds of fresh-made mezze, jars of capers the size of your head, and a Barbie television playing old reruns of Oprah. Massih’s strength is in foods for big crowds or special gatherings, and his cookbook reflects that through its party-friendly recipes for dips, salads, and festive bakes. Lebanese flavors are the foundation here, but Massih loves a remix. His recipes are more Lebanese-by-way-of-a-Brooklyn-revival diner. That means dishes like Tahini Caesar salad, a rosewater Dutch baby, and Aleppo garlic shrimp cocktail are on the menu.

We’re partial toward McKinnon, who’s a regular BA contributor responsible for gems like Sesame Tofu with Broccoli and ​​Creamy Cashew Udon With Crispy Mushrooms, but it’s only because her recipes are really, really good. This cookbook showcases her knack for simple, unfussy vegetarian recipes grounded in bold and savory flavors. Nearly all the dishes are weeknight friendly, and most utilize pantry staples like dijon mustard, chili oil, tahini, and soy sauce. There’s definitely a bent toward Chinese cooking methods, though not strictly so, as her cooking style embodies the eclectic palette of a contemporary home kitchen. Also, be sure to read the front matter of the book, especially if you’re looking for a good cry (no spoilers).

A major influence on Ottolenghi himself, Claudia Roden is a name to know for anybody interested the vast landscape of Mediterranean cuisine. She published her first cookbook, A Book of Middle Eastern Food in 1968, and has written over a dozen since covering the food from just about every corner of the region. This particular collection includes Mediterranean recipes accented by classic French cooking techniques. Dishes like a roast chicken presented over a spiced bulgar pilaf with raisins and chestnuts, or eggplants broiled tender with pomegranate and yogurt sauce demonstrate Roden’s expert mixing of traditional and modern.

Since its initial release in 1997, Deborah Madison’s New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone has become certified classic in the library of vegetarian cookbooks. It’s a particular fave of former BA staffer Carla Lalli Music, who loves it for its abundance of practical advice. Beyond merely being a collection of vegetarian recipes, Madison’s book is a thorough and instructive course on vegetarian cooking techniques, which she guides you through in fine detail, vegetable by vegetable. She provides insights on how to pick out good produce, proper storage methods, and ingredient pairing to riff on beyond the supplied recipes. When you don’t know what to do with all those parsnips in your CSA, or if you feel like you always cook squash in the same exact way, this is the book to reach for.