When Experts Speak, We Listen: 10 Interviews That Caught Our Attention The Kitchn's Best of 2012

Yotam Ottolenghi & Sami Tamimi's 5 Essential Tips for Fresh, Vibrant, and Flavorful Home Cooking

There is so much talent and expert knowledge available in the food world that sometimes you just have to go to the source. So we did. We spoke to a number of chefs, food writers, cookbook authors, and other experts this year to get their take on everything from diabetic-friendly cooking to budget-friendly kitchen tile. Read on for their advice:

TOP ROW
1 Yotam Ottolenghi & Sami Tamimi's 5 Essential Tips for Fresh, Vibrant, and Flavorful Home Cooking
2 Ken Albala's 5 Essentials for Home Cooks
3 Deborah Madison's 5 Inspired Essentials for Home Cooks
4 John Beaver's 5 Essential Herb and Spice Tips for Home Cooks
5 5 Essentials for the Home Cook: Chef Preeti Mistry's Best Flavor Boosters

BOTTOM ROW
6 Cooking Teachers Jodi Liano & Catherine Pantsios' 5 Essential Tips for Home Cooks
7 Cookbook Author Andrea Nguyen's 5 Essentials for Home Cooks
8 What Drink Do You Order at a Bad Bar? 25 Food Writers Share Their Safety Drinks
9 Tips for Choosing Kitchen Tile on a Budget: Going Beyond Subway Tile
10 Cooking Diabetic-Friendly Meals: 4 Tips and a Recipe From an Expert

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Welcome to The Kitchn's Best of 2012 roundup!
From December 17 through January 1 we are rounding up some of our favorite (and your favorite) posts from the past year.

(Images: See linked posts for full image credits)

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Yotam Ottolenghi & Sami Tamimi's 5 Essential Tips for Fresh, Vibrant, and Flavorful Home Cooking Expert Essentials

When Yotam Ottolenghi's cookbook Plenty was published here in the United States last year, it was an immediate hit and consistently found its way to the top of everyone's best cookbook lists, including our own. Yotam has followed up that effort with an equally stellar but perhaps more personal cookbook called Jerusalem, which he co-authored with his co-chef and business partner, Sami Tamimi. They sat down with me over mint tea last week to generously share some of their kitchen wisdom for home cooks.

Yotam and Sami wer both born (in the same year) and raised in Jerusalem, Yotam in the Jewish west and Sami in the Arab east. They first met in the late 1990's on the London restaurant scene and soon opened a restaurant of their own together. Several very successful restaurants and cookbooks later, they travelled back to their origins with Jerusalem, to explore and highlight the vibrant and varied cuisine of their home city.

Both chefs are passionate home cooks and in fact develop most of their recipes at home, with ingredients from the supermarket. Yotam explained it was very important to them that their cookbooks are accessible to people cooking at home, that they are not too fancy or chefy. While Sami and Yotam both are handsome and somewhat glamorous men (to my eye at least) they are equally warm and down to earth, much like the food they make: vibrant, beautiful, satisfying and very welcoming.

Sami and Yotam's 5 Essentials for the Home Cook

1. Immerse yourself in a single cuisine. Yotam's encourages a deep and thorough study of a specific cuisine. Set yourself up with the proper ingredients, equipment, spices, and study the terms and techniques, he advises. Cook it as often as possible and you will become quite a confident, focused cook.

2. Don't take on too much, read your recipes, and remember joy. Sami cautions home cooks to not get to complicated. Choose a few good recipes and always read them from A to Zed before cooking, he cautions. And always cook the recipe as written first and then change it next time around if you want. Remember that cooking is supposed to be a joyful, happy thing to do!

3. Knives and simplicity. Sami also advises that every cook should have one good knife, or more specifically one good larger chef's knife and one smaller paring knife. You don't need a lot, he says. Two good knives and maybe a spice grinder - that's it. Simplicity is very important.

4. On cooking vegetables. Yotam rarely boils vegetables and cautions against overcooking them when you do. Maybe 3 or 4 minutes for green beans, he suggests. He prefers to roast or grill most vegetables (beetroot, cauliflower, okra were a few that he listed) as this concentrates their flavors. He also likes to keep the vegetables as whole as possible or, if cutting is required, to slice them in relation to their natural shape and architecture. Fat wedges for beetroot or long slices from root to stem for carrots, for example. Avoid dicing everything and allow the integrity of the vegetable to come though.

5. Slice, dice, chop - know and obey these terms! Both Sami and Yotam agree: it's vital to understand and follow prepping directions in recipes. They are very important and usually there's a reason why something needs to be chopped finely or sliced thinly. Ingredients need to be a certain size in order for a recipe to work. We were obsessed with the details in our books, said Yotam. If you follow them exactly, they will work perfectly.

Bonus suggestions

Like all of the cooks and chefs I spoke with, Sami and Yotam were enthusiastic and generous in sharing their knowledge. Here are a few other points they raised. Always taste as you go: don't wait until you are finished. Fresh ingredients are too random in their strength, texture, and degree of moisture, so you you will probably have to adjust for that by tasting at each step of the recipe. Yotam and Sami notice that people fail to do this all the time when they teach classes and feel it's really, really important to take on this habit.

A list of favorite ingredients: Sumac, za'atar, pomegranate molasses, good Lebanese tahini, rose and orange blossom water, date syrup, ground cardamom, allspice, saffron, chervil, cilantro, fresh herbs in general. Use fresh herbs as an ingredient, not just as a garnish, says Yotam.

Try to find dried barberries, an Iranian spice. Barberries are sharply sweet/sour (emphasis on sour) and a vibrant red in color. Use them in a rice pilaf, or in meat, fish, and chicken dishes, or as a part of a fruit salsa. Yotam sometimes poaches them in a sugar syrup before using.

Thank you, Yotam and Sami!

My favorite video clip on Yotam and Sami and why their food is so good (hint: love)

For more information on Yotam and Sami and their restaurants, visit their website.
Our review of Plenty with recipe, and our review of Jerusalem.

Previous Expert Essentials:
Preeti Mistry's 5 Essential Things for the Home Cook
Cooking Teachers Jodi Liano & Catherine-Pantsios 5 Essential Tips for Home Cooks

(Image: David Sandison/The Times of London)

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Adam Richman Cookbook Recipe Database Growing up in the food mecca of New York City, Adam Richman began his love affair with food early on, sampling all the diverse culinary specialties The Big Apple had ... Real Fast Food Nigel Slater - Cookbook Recipe Database Online ... Colman Andrews is living the life most culinarians would be envious of. Travelling the globe, enjoying great regional food and wine, and getting to write about it in ...

Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi New Cookbook

The city of Jerusalem may be "an intricate, convoluted mosaic of peoples," as Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi describe in the introduction to their new cookbook. But they are also quick, and very insistent, to state that this doesn't mean that there isn't a sense of cohesive local cuisine. There are threads that bind the diverse and layered foods of this city closely togetherthe flavor of lemon juice, the presence of pickled vegetables on a table, an extra drizzle of olive oil, figs, pomegranates, apricots, cucumbers, and tomatoes. Jerusalem is as much a map as it is a cookbook, and following it leads to some very unexpected places.

Quick Facts

Who wrote it: Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi

Who published it: Ten Speed Press

Number of recipes: 120 recipes

Recipes for right now: Chermoula Eggplant with Bulgur and Yogurt; Roasted Cauliflower and Hazelnut Salad; Wheat Berries and Swiss Chard with Pomegranate Molasses; Lamb-Stuffed Quince with Pomegranate and Cilantro; Braised Eggs with Lamb, Tahini, and Sumac; Semolina, Coconut, and Marmalade Cake; Spice Cookies.

Other highlights: Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi are in a unique position to write this cookbook. They are both insiders, having spent their childhoods in different parts of the city, and outsiders who have now spent more time away from Jerusalem than in it. They know the flavors and dishes of this city in their bones, but they also have enough perspective to write about them in a way that speaks to those of us who have never been there. The fact that Ottolenghi and Tamimi had different cultural upbringings also adds richness and depth to the stories and recipes in this book.

Turning a page in this cookbook is like turning a corner and discovering a new restaurant or street vendor or tea shop. Each recipe is more enticing and crave-inducing than the last. And the authors are totally right: each individual recipe is as unique as a fingerprint, but if you step back and look at the collection as a whole, there is a clear sense of cohesiveness.

I have only had the chance to make one dish so far, the Burnt Eggplant with Garlic, Lemon, and Pomegranate Seeds. It is a completely simple dish with surprisingly complex flavors. I'm making it again tonight. And I have no doubt that I will be making many more dishes from this book in the coming weeks and months.

Who would enjoy this book? Would it be cheating to say "everyone"?! I really do think that there is something in this book to appeal to each of us. Once you find one recipe that needs to be made right this instant, it's easy to find another....and another...and another.

Find the book at your local library, independent bookstore, or Amazon: Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi

More Ottolenghi on The Kitchn: Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi: Cookbook Review and Recipe

(Images: Emma Christensen)

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Ottolenghi: The Cookbook: Yotam Ottolenghi,Sami Tamimi ... "The stage is set for a new era of simple pleasure . . . The philosophy of serving food that is not industrialized is a joy to behold . . . [There is] beauty in the ... Yotam Ottolenghi's Jerusalem: meat recipes Life and style The ... Beef and lamb meatballs, lamb shawarma and roast chicken with jerusalem artichokes recipes by Yotam Ottolenghi Jerusalem (Book) by Sami Tamimi, et al. (2012): Waterstones.com Synopsis. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi are the men behind the bestselling Ottolenghi: The Cookbook. Their chain of restaurants is famous for its innovative ... Jerusalem: Amazon.co.uk: Yotam Ottolenghi, Sami Tamimi: Books The long-awaited third cookbook from Yotam Ottolenghi About the Author Yotam Ottolenghi completed a Masters degree in philosophy and literature whilst working on the ... Ottolenghi - The cookbook It took us, Yotam and Sami, a whole year, and many hours of testing and tasting to put together our first collection of recipes. The Cookbook, finally out on the 1st ... Jerusalem: A Cookbook: Yotam Ottolenghi,Sami Tamimi: 9781607743941 ... A collection of 120 recipes exploring the flavors of Jerusalem from the New York Times bestselling author of Plenty, one of the most lauded cookbooks of 2011. Ottolenghi - Home From our little kitchens underneath the shops, using an abundance of fresh produce and an outrageous attitude to cooking, Ottolenghi offers a unique culinary ... Yotam Ottolenghi interview: 'If I didn't use more unusual ... Yotam Ottolenghi interview: 'If I didn't use more unusual ingredients, people wouldn't read me' How Yotam Ottolenghi built a restaurant empire and became a ... Ottolenghi: The Cookbook: Amazon.co.uk: Sami Tamimi, Yotam ... Britain's most eagerly awaited cookbook ( The Guardian ) Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi...are purveyors of some of the city's most beautiful food. In this sleek ... Jerusalem (Ebury Press) : Hardback : Yotam Ottolenghi, Sami Tamimi ... Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi are the men behind the bestselling Ottolenghi: The Cookbook. Their chain of restaurants is famous for its innovative flavours ...