NOPI: The Cookbook - Wine & Spirits Magazine

NOPI: The Cookbook


In a first for Yotam Ottolenghi, the Israeli-born, London-based chef who’s penned the award-winning cookbooks Ottolenghi: The Cookbook; Plenty; Jerusalem and Plenty More, he’s put out a cookbook that includes cocktails. NOPI: The Cookbook, focuses on the food chef Ramael Scully turns out of Ottolenghi’s high-end restaurant, with recipes adapted for home cooks. While it includes only ten cocktails, each is fascinating in its food sentimentality, like the coriander-and-ginger Martini or the rooibos Old-Fashioned, or his tiki riff: Banana and Cardamom, a sweet, tart take with apple, lime, white rum and velvet falernum.

NOPI: The Cookbook

Author: Yotam Ottolenghi

Publisher: Ten Speed Press

Price: $40


Coriander and Ginger Martini

Ingredients
  

  • 40 ml ginger syrup (see below)
  • 100 ml Ketel One vodka
  • 50 ml lime juice
  • 1 tsp coriander seeds, lightly toasted
  • 10 cilantro leaves

Ginger Syrup

  • 65 g (3-in/8 cm) piece of ginger, peeled and coarsely chopped
  • 150 g superfine sugar

Instructions
 

  • When ready to serve, place 1¼ oz/ 40 ml of ginger syrup in a cocktail shaker, along with all the remaining ingredients and plenty of cubed ice. Shake hard for about 20 seconds, then double-strain (through a Hawthorne strainer and into a fine-mesh sieve) into two pre-chilled martini glasses. Serve at once.

For the syrup:

  • To make the ginger syrup, place the ginger and sugar in a blender with ¾ cup/200 ml of water. Blitz for about 45 seconds, until fully combined: you will make about 1¼ cups/300 ml of syrup, which can be kept in the fridge, or frozen, for future use.

Caitlin Griffith knew her future career would entail food and drink when, at the age of six, she munched an anchovy from her father’s Caesar salad thinking it as a small strip of bacon—and was more than pleasantly surprised. While enrolled in New York University’s Food Studies program, she learned the secrets of affinage in the caves of Murray’s Cheese.


This story appears in the print issue of February 2016.
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