Y’all know by now that I love food—both cooking and (especially) eating. The BF and I are different in many ways, but one thing that brings us together is our mutual love of good food. While neither of us are that adventurous in the kitchen on our own, we often team up to tackle projects that are a little more “involved.” (Inevitably, such a project results in one of us yelling at the other after butting heads, but we still have fun.) One dish that has been on our to-make list for a long time is ratatouille. I’m not talking about traditional ratatouille, which is more of a rustic stew (and one of my favorite things). I’m talking about the Pixar-style ratatouille shown above (technically confit byaldi), with the perfectly cut vegetables assembled in a beautiful spiral and then plated in such a way that you almost forget you’re just eating squash. This week, we finally gave it a try. Spoiler: We got the beautiful spiral down, but the rat has us beat on plating.
The ratatouille was only a side dish in a larger dinner we were making, but it was by far the most time consuming—mainly because of all of the vegetable preparation. Fortunately, we used a mandolin to cut down on the slicing time and keep everything uniform. This could be done with just a sharp knife, but I don’t even want to think about how much more tedious that would be. Unlike with traditional ratatouille, this dish requires precision.
We started out with a large yellow onion, half a head of garlic, two zucchinis, two yellow squash, a Japanese eggplant (you need a Japanese eggplant because it is similar in diameter to the other vegetables), and ten roma tomatoes. The first step was blanching the tomatoes and removing the skin. Then came the slicing. The zucchinis and yellow squash went through the mandolin, but the eggplant and tomatoes needed to be sliced by hand. We reserved all of the “scraps” (the imperfect ends of the vegetables and any failed slices)—those are not wasted. About twenty years later…
Next up, the sauce. We finely chopped the onion and garlic. In a good amount of olive oil, we cooked the garlic for a few minutes and then added the onion, plus all of those reserved scraps. We cooked that down until the onion was tender, and then everything was transferred to the blender and pulsed until smooth. This could be a good morning smoothie, if you want people to stay away from you all day. Just a little of that sauce needs to be spread in the bottom of a large cast iron pan.
Now, the assembly. Here is where we butted heads, because the BF is a perfectionist about presentation in a way that I am not (frankly, I’m just not very good at making things look right). So my job was stacking the vegetables and handing them to him for assembly. He gave me an important job to make me feel like a big boy.
All assembled! A little salt and olive oil, and it’s ready for the oven (where it will cook for about 90 minutes).
When we were done assembling, we had a ton of vegetables and sauce left over. We ended up making three pans of ratatouille—and we still had leftovers! I snapped a final picture of the most attractive pan…
While we didn’t get a perfect Pixar-style plating, the end result was fantastic. It’s so good that it’s hard to believe it’s just olive oil, salt, and vegetables. We enjoyed the ratatouille alongside some sous vide chicken breast with romesco sauce and wild rice pilaf with mushrooms and toasted almonds. Why yes, we did make dinner as pretentious as possible.
Anyway, that was our cooking adventure this week. I never thought I would have reason to say this, but I’m ratatouilled out.
What do you want to kibitz about tonight?