Chef and best-selling cookbook author, Yotam Ottolenghi is famous for bringing together Mediterranean and Middle Eastern flavors, creating vibrant, colorful recipes that are modern and fresh. It all started with his wildly popular eponymous London food shops and expanded to a weekly column in The Guardian, a TV show and cookbooks like Plenty and Jerusalem. If you’re into food, you need to know about this chef.
Ottolenghi’s cuisine crosses borders and breaks down barriers. When his book was published in the U.S., the combination of sumptuous food photography, exotic seasonings and farm fresh produce fit in with the farm to table movement, becoming an instant hit. No wonder Ottolenghi Recipes was named the No. 1 Food & Drink App in the United Kingdom — like everything Ottolenghi, it’s modern, fresh and original. The creators put a lot of effort into developing an app that’s beautifully designed and highly functional. Ottolenghi Recipes stands head and shoulders above the rest in this respect.
If you’re interested in expanding your palate with a collection of flavorful recipes influenced by Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisine, keep reading.
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Getting Started
Ottolenghi is not a vegetarian, but he’s most famous for creating eye-catching vegetarian salads, soups and main courses that combine ingredients in unexpected ways. It makes sense that the first images you see after launching the app are piles of tender leafy greens and stacks of colorful squash. This app is simply a collection of 54 recipes. About half of the recipes are brand-new and the other half are favorites from Ottolenghi’s cookbooks.
Ottolenghi is famous for his creative cooking with vegetables, evident in the app opening screen, left. The app is beautifully designed and easy to navigate, right.
The home screen is a central location with options to either Browse recipes by category or Find A Recipe using the search tool. You’ve also got easy access to your favorites and grocery shopping lists. If you’ve never been to Ottolenghi in London, take a virtual tour with Behind The Scenes, a collection of photos taken in the kitchens where the magic happens. The More From Ottolenghi button is a portal to the Online Store, where you can purchase ingredients central to Ottolenghi’s cooking, purchase his cookbooks or book a table at an Ottolenghi restaurant.
Browsing Recipes
You’ve got two choices for looking through the recipes. Select Browse on the home screen and you arrive at a screen where recipes are organized into six categrories: Vegetables, Salads & Greens, Fish, Meat, Sweets and those from Ottolenghi’s latest cookbook, Jerusalem. Tap a category to swipe through full screen photographs of the recipes. The food is mouth-watering, rustic and colorful. It’s quick and easy to swipe through the selection of recipes and with the tap of a button you’re back at the categories page. It would be nice to have a Home Screen icon, but unfortunately you’ve got to perform multiple actions to get home.
You can browse the recipes by category, left, or utilize the search tool, right.
Find A Recipe is the app’s search tool. It’s nice to be able to customize your search with filters. You can search a specific ingredient and apply the filters or don’t enter any text in the box and the filters will display results from the entire recipe collection. If you’re a vegetarian, you’ll be pleased to have the option to filter all recipes by whether or not they contain meat or fish. These are chef recipes, and less experienced home cooks or those who are short on time might be thankful for the Complexity filter, which can be set to Easy, Medium or Bit of Effort.
Cooking the Recipes
Each recipe in the app is introduced with a stunning full-screen photograph of the dish. The food looks real — like you could pull up a chair to the table and dive right in — not perfect or over-styled. Tap on the photo for options to view Yotam Ottolenghi’s Overview, Ingredients and Steps. Serving size and Complexity is conveniently displayed on the first screen. Ottolenghi’s introductions put these exotic dishes into a context everyday Western cooks can understand. For example, he describes the Chickpeas On Toast With Turmeric Yogurt recipe as a “Middle Eastern version of beans on toast.”
Each recipe is accompanied by a stunning food photo, left. Tap on a recipe for more info, right.
The Ingredients tab clearly lists all ingredients needed for the recipe in a text that’s attractive and easy to read. The Steps tab includes directions for the recipe that are clear, concise and easy to follow. To access your shopping lists, tap the icon in the top right corner (a box with lines inside). It’s unclear if users would actually be looking to access the shopping list while inside a recipe, rather than from the more convenient home screen. However, the touch-free icon just underneath is something you’ll definitely want to use.
It’s easy to read the ingredients lists, left, and recipe instructions are clear and concise, right.
Touch-free recipe navigation lets you follow a recipe step-by-step without ever having to touch your phone with sticky fingers. This functionality is really great and works well once you get the hang of it. The Support tab on the home screen walks you through the process with Touch Free Tips. Anytime you see the touch-free icon you can utilize this function by orienting the phone into landscape mode and laying it flat on the counter. Tap the touch-free icon so its color turns from gray to white, then wave your hand slowly from right to left to navigate through each step. It works best if your hand is about six inches above the phone. Only fourth-generation iPhone devices and above can perform the touch-free function.
Conclusion
The pairing of exceptional design and outstanding recipes comes together in Ottolenghi Recipes for a stellar app experience. Don’t be put off by the $6.99 price tag — it’s about quality not quantity here. The designers have really hit it out of the park with a handful of special features, including a sleek interface, the touch-free navigation of recipes and the quick app performance. Another design perk is that shopping lists are interactive, meaning you can check off items, add your own ingredients or organize your list by grocery store isle (dairy, produce, etc.). It’s great to see the Ottolenghi brand so beautifully represented on a mobile device.
The only downside to this app is that all the recipes are provided in metric measurements, so the U.S. audience is on their own having to figure out conversions. I say download a conversion tool on your phone and don’t let that stop you from buying the Ottolenghi Recipes app, but it would be nice if they provided both metric and U.S. measurements to make the app more accessible.