Anyone who has ever opened a cookery book will probably know who Yotam Ottolenghi is, but Ramael Scully, who shares peak billing with him at next week's Kerrygold Ballymaloe Literary Festival of Food & Wine, may need a little introducing to an Irish audience.
He’s head chef at the Ottolenghi restaurant Nopi (the name stands for North of Piccadilly), and co-author, with Ottolenghi, of the restaurant’s cookbook, published last autumn. He is also, in Ottolenghi’s words, “generous, meticulous, able to blend Mediterranean and Asian in a thoughtful, modern way”.
When we meet in the softly glowing, burnished elegance of Nopi, Scully is carrying a bag of things he’s just bought in a new Asian shop – backing up Ottlenghi’s claim that he is apt to be found “meandering around Chinatown looking for any number of new ingredients while service is practically on its way”.
He is excited to have found calamansi limes, a favourite from his childhood. “Mum used to pound them with some white sugar and make calamansi lemonade,” the Malaysian-born, Australian- raised chef says, adding that his nurse mother’s family are half-Indian, half- Chinese, while there is Irish blood in his journalist father’s background.
He comes across as a relentlessly curious chef, always in pursuit of new ingredients, new ideas. Health food shops have been a source of inspiration recently. He’s working on dishes using spirulina, mixed through reduced apple juice, with sheep’s labneh, apple puree, pickled crab apples and poached mackerel; and a nutritional yeast, Engevita, which he adds to fried onion and garlic and it becomes a component in a dish with lamb and nettle puree.
When he needs inspiration, he goes shopping, or has a look through the bottles and jars that line shelves in the restaurant’s downstairs area, running alongside a massive communal table overlooking the kitchen. Its stores of precious pickles and ferments, as well as elaborate larder supplies, are a bounty that remains unplundered by the restaurant’s well-behaved clientele.
Scully is an avid collector of cookbooks, and doesn’t dispute the idea of him “vegging in bed with a pile of cookbooks by his side until inspiration finally hits” put forward by Ottolenghi. “Yes, it’s true. They’re my tools, basically,” he says of his 400-strong collection, whipping out his phone to show me a photo and explain his indexing system. “I’m not married, I’m single, and when I come home from work, before I go to bed I need to read something . . . and sometimes I do fall asleep on my cookbooks.”
So how did the reader find being on the other side of the process? “When Yotam approached me to do the book, I thought we were going to do a cool chefs’ book, but he was saying no, no, no, we’re going to do a restaurant cookbook for home cooks.”
The idea was to “modify and simplify Nopi’s recipes without losing their central core”, Ottolenghi has said. To Scully, that meant removing some elements while still achieving “that flavour that we had in the restaurant”. That was, he says, “the hardest thing”.
At Litfest the pair will be cooking recipes from the book, including a duck dish for which he has been promised a live duck. “They’ve got ducks on the farm, so I told Yotam I didn’t mind going over a day early and plucking it.”
It wouldn’t be the true Ballymaloe experience any other way.
