(Pictured above)
Autumn brings the promise of rain and colder weather, which means we have fungi on our minds. Yotam Ottolenghi uses many at once with this combination of king oyster, oyster, chestnut and shiitake mushrooms, capped with dried porcini. Roast them with shallots, then saute with butter beans and a touch of mustard. Throw in a chive and parsley salsa that hums gently with cumin, and it’s proof that vegetarians really do have more fun.
There’s a two-for-one deal with this recipe. The last baby eggplants of summer are preserved to extend your enjoyment for one more month, while the spiced oil for the confit is excellent spooned over future salads and roast vegetables.
Put away your soggy summer bircher: on weekends, we’re making savoury oats. It’s bowl food without being “bowl food” – spoonable, yes; but with delicate fruit and sprouts swapped out for heavy hitters like freekeh, ghee, turmeric, ginger and chilli. Crown with a crisp fried egg and a wonderful, allium-weighted “garlic spinach” topping, and you’ll have a new reason to get out of bed on Saturday.
The avocado wars have reignited, but if you’d rather unsubscribe from the discourse altogether, this recipe is for you. It’s “beans on toast, all grown up”, writes Ottolenghi, and it’s only a little more effort than scraping your pre-made Heinz from the can.
Quick-pickle some onions, saute some tinned butter beans with garlic and ginger and stir through some cream, cheddar, and coriander. At this point, you could pile the lot on to toast and call it a day, but more patient cooks will grill some sourdough, spoon over the beans, and grill the open sandwich until it becomes lovely, golden, and bubbly. Either way, the winner is you.
When you have leftover roast chicken, you make chicken soup. Kreplach is the Yiddish word for dumpling, and this recipe takes inspiration from Roma Felstein, the mother of one of Ottolenghi’s colleagues. The kreplach are wrapped in wonton skins, filled with shredded chicken meat and kimchi, and bob about in a broth simmered from the chicken bones. Soul-reviving stuff.
Warm spices, earthy chickpeas, sweet and soft carrots: this slow-boiler has Big Autumn Energy. Dried chickpeas give a superior flavour and texture than the tinned variety for this dish, so plan for enough ahead for an overnight soak. Saute with garlic and ginger, cumin and cinnamon, carrot and medjool dates; let it stew away in an oven for a couple of hours, and the results are rich, saucy and made for scooping with bread.
“I could eat pasta every day of the year,” writes Ottolenghi. Here, he turns his attention to pizzoccheri, a toothsome buckwheat tagliatelle from northern Italy that’s made for minimalist kitchens – you don’t need a machine to make it from scratch. The nutty pizzocherri works beautifully with burnt butter and lemon, and another savoury combination: white miso and cabbage.
There’s an alchemy that happens when you add salt, acid or chilli to desserts, and this dish has all three. The salted lime salsa and urfa chilli flakes add a spikiness and dimension to the sweet caramel, while the burnt honey base is an elegant riff on the traditional recipe.
A Dutch baby is neither Dutch, nor a baby (as opposed to this half-Dutch nepo baby). It is, however, a voluminous pancake of German origin best served with cold soured cream. Do like Ottolenghi does and snap up figs while they’re at their peak (the front end of autumn), simmer them in syrup, then serve with your fluffy baby. The rest of the figs will keep in a fridge for up to a month.
A pretzel and pecan crust. A salted rum-caramel filling. Rum-caramel bananas. Maple syrup cream. This is the pie that proves that more is more, and as far as recipe instructions go, this one builds to a dramatic crescendo: “Drizzle one and a half tablespoons of the caramel over the top … and pour the rest into a bowl or jug.” Autumn baking has never looked so good.
