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Communication Untangled
Untangling Recipes
Season 2, Ep. 5
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Chef and food writer Noor Murad joins Sue Keogh to Untangle Recipes. Part of Yottam Ottolenghi’s Test Kitchen team, she’s cooked trackside at Formula 1 and trained at the Culinary Institute of America in New York.
She explains how you how you test and proofread recipes, the difference in writing recipes in Arabic and English, and questions whether social media put us under too much pressure to make our food look glamorous.
We also look at a different kind of recipe – the formulations for beauty products – and the challenge for iconic brands like Chanel in not giving away trade secrets.
Sue Keogh: One of my early copywriting gigs when I first went freelance was to get hundreds of recipes from print – onto a new online portal. It had literally never occurred to me before that point, that there was a consistent structure in the way that recipes were written.
You list the ingredients in order of use, putting the most important ones first…and any the salt and pepper and other seasoning goes at the end. It suddenly seemed so obvious! But I’d just never noticed.
And the way a recipe is written affects how well we cook it too. So in this episode we’re going to untangle recipes and find out how it’s done.
I’m joined by Noor Murad, who is part of Yottam Ottolenghi’s Test Kitchen team. Her recipe books include Shelf Love and Lugma – an ode to the food she grew up eating during her childhood in Bahrain.
She’s cooked trackside at Formula 1, and trained at the Culinary Institute of America in New York. She now lives in London, and invited me over to the very kitchen where she develops her delicious Middle Eastern recipes.
She tells me how you test and proofread recipes, how social media puts us under too much pressure to make our food look glamorous, and the challenges of translating clotted cream into different languages.
We’ll also think about a different kind of recipe – the formulations for beauty products – and the challenge for iconic brands like Chanel who have to list the ingredients by law – but not give away their trade secrets.
Communication Untangled is a podcast from Cambridge communications consultancy Sookio. Got a knotty communication challenge you need untangling? Talk to us
About Noor Murad
Bahrain-born, London-based and New York trained, Noor Murad joined the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen in 2018, where she worked as a recipe developer for Falastin and Flavor as well as Ottolenghi's New York Times and Guardian columns.
She became the head of the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen, and wrote the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen books: Shelf Love and Extra Good Things.
Her own recipes have featured in the New York Times and she has cooked on BBC's Saturday Kitchen. Her Middle Eastern roots have a strong influence on her cooking, with Arabic, Indian, and Persian flavours making a prominent appearance in her recipes.
Useful links
Follow Noor on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/noorishbynoor
Buy Noor’s book Lugma (which means ‘a bite’ in Arabic, yum!
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/466601/lugma-by-murad-noor/9781837832019
Communication Untangled is a podcast from Cambridge communications consultancy Sookio.
Got a knotty communication challenge that needs untangling? We can help, through communications strategy, marketing consultancy and brand storytelling.
Start here: sookio.com/podcast
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1. Untangling Humour
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Communication Untangled series 3 trailer
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6. Untangling Sound
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4. Untangling Tickets
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3. Untangling Votes
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2. Untangling Instructions
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