Yotam Ottolenghi: Spaghetti alle vongole
Your Last Meal with Rachel Belle
Rachel Belle
4.8 • 730 Ratings
🗓️ 19 February 2026
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you're an adventurous cook, chances are you’ve made on Ottolenghi recipe! The chef and newspaper columnist has written nine bestselling cookbooks, including Jerusalem, Plenty and Comfort, and co-owns 12 restaurants and delis, mostly in London.
Yotam and I talk about how he found his way to a food career (he has advanced degrees in completely different subjects) and tackle philosophical questions like: Is cooking an art form? Do homely, but delicious dishes belong in cookbooks despite their lack of beauty?
For the past decade, the brand’s creative hub is the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen, where a team of diverse cooks create and test recipes with Yotam at the helm. So I chat with a man who has run many magazine test kitchens, Hunter Lewis, editor-in-chief of Food and Wine Magazine. He takes us behind the scenes of the test kitchen to see how the sausage is literally and figuratively made.
Get tickets to see Yotam Ottolenghi on tour!
Get the recipe for Ottolenghi's Clementine Almond Syrup Cake!
- Become a Cascade PBS member and support public media!
- Watch Rachel’s Cascade PBS TV show The Nosh with Rachel Belle.
- Sign up for Rachel’s (free!) biweekly Cascade PBS newsletter for more food musings.
- Follow along on Instagram.
- Order Rachel’s cookbook Open Sesame.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Rachel Bell, and this is your last meal. |
| 0:12.0 | The show where celebrities share stories about the foods they love most, and we dig into the history, culture, or science of those meals with experts from around the world. |
| 0:21.4 | Today on the program, Yotem Otolengi, chef and author of nine best-selling cookbooks, |
| 0:27.3 | including Jerusalem, Plenty and Comfort, co-owner of 12 restaurants and delis, most of them |
| 0:32.9 | located in London, and a longtime columnist for The Guardian and the New York Times. |
| 0:37.9 | And for the past decade, the brand's creative hub is the Otolengi Test Kitchen, where a team |
| 0:43.5 | of diverse cooks create and test recipes. With Yotum at the helm, the Otolengue website says |
| 0:49.8 | there's a building in North London built from equal parts brick and tahini, walls coated in olive |
| 0:55.7 | oil and floors stained with spice, habanero and fenigreek, Aleppo chili, and Ross Elhanute. |
| 1:02.3 | This is the Otolengi Test Kitchen. |
| 1:04.7 | Later in the show, you'll meet Hunter Lewis, editor-in-chief of Food and Wine Magazine. |
| 1:10.0 | Hunter has run many magazine test kitchens |
| 1:12.2 | and takes us behind the scenes to see |
| 1:14.5 | how the sausage is literally and figuratively made. |
| 1:18.9 | Yotem is on tour now in Australia |
| 1:21.0 | and he'll be in the U.S. and Canada in just a couple weeks. |
| 1:24.6 | We'll talk more about that at the end of the show. |
| 1:27.0 | But first, my conversation with Yotem Otelengi. |
| 1:33.3 | Hello. Hello. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. How are you? I'm good. How are you doing? Very good. Thank you. |
| 1:46.3 | Where are you? Are you in the U.S.? Or are you at home? At home in London. |
| 1:50.2 | Oh, okay. I'm instructed to tell you that all of my friends say hello. Are there's many? |
| 1:57.8 | Oh yeah. All of them. They all say hello. |
... |
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