🎄Christmas Special: Yotam Ottolenghi 🎄
Homo Sapiens
Christopher Sweeney
4.7 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 25 December 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s Christmas Day — Merry Christmas, everyone! 
Is the turkey in the oven yet? Or are you already wondering where it all went wrong?
Fear not. Today's co-host is a man who changed the way many of us think about vegetables, flavour, and generosity at the table, Yotam Ottolenghi. And yes, he might just be able to save your Christmas Dinner.
Born in Jerusalem and based in London, Ottolenghi didn’t just popularise Middle Eastern cooking in the West — he reframed it. His food is bold, comforting, and always delicious.
We dive in to the inbox to hear all about how you spend the day, your frankly hilarious triumphs and disasters and a few calm, practical tips from Yotam to help everything run more smoothly — whether that’s finally getting the potatoes right, surviving family dynamics, or knowing when it’s time to gently (or not so gently) call out your homophobic aunty.
Pour yourself an eggnog, take a breath, and click play now 
Chris & Yotam x
Shout outs in this episode to
Tom Crewe @jonathancapebooks
Gareth Russell @_garethrussell
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Listeners, it's Christmas morning. |
| 0:15.4 | What better Christmas present could I have for you than one an episode of Homo sapiens, |
| 0:20.4 | but two, it's not just me on my own |
| 0:23.1 | your Christmas present this year is my co-host Yottam Otolengi welcome to the show hello Yotam |
| 0:29.5 | hello Chris you know this is going out happy Christmas thank you you know this is going out on |
| 0:34.9 | Christmas day I do yeah so far away but I, but I'm going to be there before we know it. |
| 0:42.1 | Well, you see, we're talking to listeners, we're recording before, obviously, because, um, uh, |
| 0:47.8 | that wasn't supposed to reveal this. No, I think it's fine. I think it's fine. We're, |
| 0:51.8 | you know, this is a podcast about truth, |
| 1:00.6 | about vulnerability, and here we are telling the truth. This was not, this is not live. |
| 1:07.5 | So we're, we're sort of recording a bit before Christmas, but in a place where everyone's excited. And I, I suppose we're talking to people in the thick of it now, you know. |
| 1:14.2 | Some people will be waking up with a hangover. |
| 1:16.5 | Some people are waking up with presents at the end of the bed. |
| 1:21.1 | Paint us a picture listeners. |
| 1:22.8 | Hello at homo sapienspodcast.com. |
| 1:24.6 | Writers, tell us what environment you're listening to now. |
| 1:30.0 | Your term, can I start by asking on Christmas Day? How do you celebrate Christmas, if at all? |
| 1:38.6 | I didn't grow up with Christmas. I grew up in a Jewish household. There was no Christmas. I mean, we didn't do Jewish |
| 1:46.6 | holiday very well either, so we were kind of like a pretty agnostic way to holiday. But I married |
| 1:54.6 | a Catholic person. And so we have two kids and we, so I've had Christmas, how it was like, talks to me. |
| 2:09.6 | I was, yeah, I was there, I was kind of brought into the world of Christmas. |
| 2:17.8 | And I think, I mean, it's something that I like doing. |
... |
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