Pure & Simple: Minimalist Recipes With Maximum Flavour

Food Savour
Pure & Simple: Minimalist Recipes With Maximum Flavour
intro
No matter how much we love cooking complex and elaborate meals, there’s always a time and a place for recipes that have only a few ingredients, require little time, and yet still impress to the max. The unfortunate truth, however, is that minimalist recipes are often the opposite of impressive. Here, we’ve selected 12 recipes that go back to basics, without sacrificing flavour.

By Irene de Vette

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Food Savour
Pure & Simple: Minimalist Recipes With Maximum Flavour.
Maple
Roast Butternut Squash Soup With Maple Syrup And Sage – Gaz Oakley, or the Avant Garde Vegan, points out in this ‘5 Ingredient Vegan Meals’ video that when you’re cooking with only five ingredients, you need to maximise the flavour of each ingredient through various techniques – such as cooking onions for a long time to bring out all their natural sugars. We can totally understand why this silky smooth butternut squash soup with maple syrup and sage is his favourite.

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Pure & Simple: Minimalist Recipes With Maximum Flavour.
Roasting
Perfectly Roasted Vegetables – Speaking of maximising flavour: Roasting your vegetables is the way to go. This popular video isn’t a recipe video per se, but once you’ve mastered the trick of properly roasting your vegetables, you won’t be needing a ton of other ingredients to serve up a quick and flavourful dish.

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Pure & Simple: Minimalist Recipes With Maximum Flavour.
Celeriac
Whole Roast Celeriac With Coriander Seed Oil – Yotam Ottolenghi is known for his recipes with lengthy ingredient lists and obscure ingredients (that are wickedly good, it has to be said), but this recipe surprisingly lists only five items. From his book Simple, it lets the oven do its magic, transforming the humble, knobby celeriac into a richly flavoured showstopper.

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Food Savour
Pure & Simple: Minimalist Recipes With Maximum Flavour.
Pasta e ceci
Really Simple Garlicky Pasta – Pasta e ceci, meaning ‘pasta and chickpeas’, is a humble but genius Italian classic. It has various renditions, the most traditional only adding olive oil, garlic and some chopped parsley to small-shaped pasta and chickpeas. In this recipe, tomato paste is added to garlic fried in olive oil, and then the pasta and chickpeas are cooked in this lip-smacking, umami-laden sauce.

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Food Savour
Pure & Simple: Minimalist Recipes With Maximum Flavour.
lentil
Warm Lentil Salad – Chef Jamie Oliver published an entire book full of five-ingredient recipes in 2017, and it’s still a mainstay of bestseller lists. This warm lentil salad is one of our favourites. Adding anchovies is a great trick to have up your sleeve: they impart a salty, savoury backbone to your dish – it’s the umami coming into play again! Together with preserved lemon and fresh chillies, this simple lentil dish is packed with flavour and comes together in under 15 minutes

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Food Savour
Pure & Simple: Minimalist Recipes With Maximum Flavour.
figs

Roasted Radicchio And Figs With Stilton – John Whaite is another British chef who published a book on recipes featuring only five main ingredients. This roasted radicchio and figs, paired up with Stilton and balsamic-marinated onions, is a hearty winter salad: not only beautiful to look at, but rich in flavour, too.

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Food Savour
Pure & Simple: Minimalist Recipes With Maximum Flavour.
zoodles
Savoury Five-Ingredient Peanut Zucchini Noodles – Going low-carb in January, but still need comfort? This five-ingredient peanut zucchini noodle dish hits the spot. The sauce is made with just peanut butter, sriracha and lime, and gives the ‘zoodles’ the right kick. If carbs are your lifeline, go ahead and make the dish with regular noodles. Craving gone.

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Food Savour
Pure & Simple: Minimalist Recipes With Maximum Flavour.
creamy
Creamy White Wine Chicken Stew – Adding a splash of (leftover) wine to your food is always a good idea, because it adds acidity and depth of flavour. This is a simple one-pot dish with mushrooms, potatoes and chicken, in a sauce that is silky, tangy and comforting. An unoaked wine with good acidity is best for cooking.

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Food Savour
Pure & Simple: Minimalist Recipes With Maximum Flavour.
lemon
Lemon Garlic Butter Salmon – Wild salmon is already flavourful as is, but a mix of butter, lemon, garlic, freshly chopped dill, pepper and salt makes it shine. Simply combine the ingredients, smear the mix over the fish, and cook it in tin foil in the oven. This recipe adds a three-minute broil to lend some colour to the dish.

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Food Savour
Pure & Simple: Minimalist Recipes With Maximum Flavour.
slow
Slow Cooker Simplicity – If you own a slow cooker, you have a great tool at hand to maximise flavour: time. Slow cooking allows flavours to meld together and develop depth, and it makes meat – even cheaper cuts – fork-tender. Whip up a simple Crock Pot Chili, Baked Beans with Bacon or this chicken teriyaki.

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Food Savour
Pure & Simple: Minimalist Recipes With Maximum Flavour.
Granola
Healthy Five-Ingredient Granola Bars – For many of us, WFH includes numerous trips to the kitchen, and not necessarily only around mealtimes. You won’t be tempted to reach for that candy bar if you have these five-ingredient granola bars at hand: They’re naturally sweetened, gluten-free and packed with plant-based protein and fibre. Now, that’s an excuse for a 4 o’clock sweet treat.

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Food Savour
Pure & Simple: Minimalist Recipes With Maximum Flavour.
Treat
Healthy Lemon Bars – Staying on track with resolutions to live healthier means including a few treats here and there. Healthy-ish ones, of course, and definitely unprocessed. These easy lemon bars contain only five ingredients and fit the bill: They’re not overly sweet, but hit the sweet spot wonderfully.

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Pure & Simple: Minimalist Recipes With Maximum Flavour

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