Mushrooms add flavour

• Published date: 04 February 2021

In this stunning cookbook Yotam and co-writer Ixta Belfrage break down the three factors that create flavour and offer innovative vegetable dishes that deliver brand-new ingredient combinations to excite and inspire.

Ottolenghi Flavour combines simple recipes for weeknights, low-effort, high-impact dishes, and standout meals for the relaxed cook.

Packed with signature colourful photography, it not only inspires us with what to cook, but how flavour is dialled up and why it works.

Following is a recipe from the book:

SPICY MUSHROOM LASAGNE

This lasagne contains one of two epic ragù recipes in this book — the other is the ultimate traybake ragù, — which, we believe, give any meat ragù a terrifically good run for its money.

This particular ragù pays homage to penne all’Aconese, the first dish that Ixta fell madly in love with. It’s served at Ristorante Pizzeria Acone, a community run restaurant in the Tuscan village of Acone, perched at the top of the mountain on which she spent her formative childhood years. The recipe is a closely guarded secret, but the complex, earthy and deeply umami flavour of dried porcini mushrooms is impossible to miss. This is our meatless take on that mythical sauce.

The ragù can easily be made vegan if you lose the cream. It can also be made ahead and refrigerated, ready to be served with pasta or polenta, saving yourself the trouble of constructing the lasagne if you’re short on time.

Reduce the black pepper and lose the chilli for a child-friendly version. If you want to get ahead, the lasagne can be assembled, refrigerated and then baked the next day (once it’s come back up to room temperature).

Ingredients750g chestnut mushrooms, halved

500g oyster mushrooms

135ml olive oil, plus extra for greasing

60g dried porcini mushrooms

30g dried wild mushrooms

2 dried red chillies, roughly chopped (deseeded for less heat)

500ml hot vegetable stock

1 onion, peeled and quartered

5 garlic cloves, roughly chopped

1 carrot, peeled and quartered (90g)

2–3 plum tomatoes, quartered (200g)

75g tomato paste

130ml double cream

60g Pecorino Romano, finely grated

60g Parmesan, finely grated

5g basil leaves, finely chopped

10g parsley leaves, finely chopped, plus an extra tsp to serve

250g dried lasagne sheets (that’s about 14 sheets)

salt and black pepper

Method

Preheat the oven to 230C fan.

Put the chestnut and oyster mushrooms into the large bowl of a food processor in three or four batches and pulse each batch until finely chopped (or finely chop...