Ratatouille, stewed vegetables from Provence - a French family recipe
Enjoy a delicious zucchini, eggplant, tomato, onion, shallot, garlic and herbs stew from Provence, backed by olive oil. There's no single ratatouille recipe; here's my family recipe.
Serves: 8-10
Preparation: 50 minutes (as a linear function of the number of servings)
Cooking: 80 to 90 minutes (non-linear)
This recipe is special to me, it’s one of my madeleine de Proust. It triggers memories from the past, as my brain associates the smell and the taste of ratatouille with childhood moments. I have flashes of previous homes, in the South of France, remembering my parents cooking this dish. I remember the smell of ratatouille filled our home with the distinctive fragrance of the stewed vegetables, onion, garlic, and thyme. Ratatouille was always cooked in big batches, so our freezer contained ready-to-(h)eat family-sized servings.
Like for most, if not all, traditional dishes, different recipes exist. Some require to fry vegetables separately; others include bell peppers (a very valid addition, in my opinion), or basil. This is my family recipe, which I found in a manuscript grocery list written by my father, a decade or so ago.
Why doesn’t it look like the dish in Ratatouille, the Disney Pixar movie?
In Ratatouille, Rémy the rat cooks a dish to wow the culinary critic. He serves a ratatouille, which definitely looks like art compared to what the present recipe will guide you to prepare. As I wrote, there are different recipes to cook a ratatouille, and the one in the movie is a confit byaldi. This variant of ratatouille uses mostly the same ingredients, and has a different presentation. It was created in 1999 by American chef Thomas Keller, who served as food consultant to Pixar on the movie Ratatouille. If you wish (and have plenty of time), you can slice instead of chop ingredients of the recipe, pick slices after cooking, and dress the dish like a confit byaldi. Taste will not change, though.
Ingredients
8 zucchinis ~ 2.480 kg
10 tomatoes on the vine ~ 975 g (weighted with their vine)
2 eggplants ~ 500 g
4 onions ~ 260 g (yellow in my case, white one work, red ones don’t)
2 shallots ~ 85 g
3 garlic cloves ~ 17 g
50 g flat leaf parsley
2 table spoons of dried oregano
4 bay leaves
2 table spoons of thyme leaves (separated from the sprigs)
4 pinches of salt
4 to 8 soup spoons of olive oil
Preparation
This recipe will require you wash, peel, chop, all ingredients. And if you abide to the number of servings this recipe targets, you’ll spend a sizable amount of time handling the knife — the 50 minutes of preparation time are true. Consider completing all the preparation steps before even heating your stewpot.
Wash the zucchinis, cut both ends, then half peel them, leaving green skin bands alternating with peeled bands (see picture further below for an illustration); slice into 0.5-1 cm wide pieces
Wash the tomatoes, dice them in 8th
Peel onions, then chop into thumbnail-sized pieces
Peel shallots, then chop into thumbnail-sized pieces
Peel garlic cloves, then chop into thumbnail-sized pieces
Wash the flat leaf parsley, cut straws out, keep only leaves; divide the quantity of parsley into thirds
Wash the eggplants, remove both ends, slice them like the zucchinis (however leave their skin on) — do this last so they spend less time oxidizing
Cooking
I used my stainless steel stewpot. Any cookware would work as the cooking is long and doesn’t require heavy heat. The key is to be sure that all ingredients fit in — don’t hesitate to divide the quantities in half if you don’t have a large enough stewpot. The recipe requires you to act quickly in the beginning; you need to complete all Preparation steps before proceeding with Cooking ones. Anyway, it’s a good practice I repeat for most of my recipes: have a plan, prepare all ingredients before heating your cookware — of course there are exceptions, however not today.
Heat your stewpot to medium flame/power
Add 4 soup spoons of olive oil, wait a minute for it to become hot
Add chopped onions, stir occasionally for 2 minutes
Add chopped garlic, shallot, and one third of the parsley; stir occasionally for 2 minutes
Add oregano and thyme; stir for 1 minute
Add chopped tomatoes, sliced eggplants and zucchinis, another third of the parsley, and bay leaves
Lower the heat to a third of the maximum flame/power; cover, and let it cook for 30 minutes
Open the lid, stir to swap ingredients at the top with ones at the bottom — the latter have received more heat than the former
Raise the heat to medium flame/power; cover, and let it cook for 30 minutes
Open the lid, stir, stop heating the stewpot
Add salt to taste, the last third of parsley, and 4 more soup spoons of olive oil if you wish — since this olive oil will not be heated, set aside the residual heat of the ingredients, you can use a high quality, flavorful olive oil
Close the lid until you serve
You can serve this right away, just be careful that the vegetables can be steaming hot. Remember to let it covered until you serve, so the surface stays warm, and flavors continue to mingle. Also, remove the bay leaves when serving — or warn your guests. As I wrote in the beginning, this dish freezes and unfreezes very well. Anytime I cook it, I go for a large batch and save half for the future. You can eat ratatouille hot, or cold — cold vegetables are very refreshing during Summer.
You can serve it as is, or as a side dish. If you choose the latter, I recommend serving Camargue red rice, or even my very own Camargue red rice, basil tofu, zucchini, onion, shallot, garlic, and thyme — without the zucchini, of course, there’s already enough!
Enjoy!
If you’ve tried the recipe, and would like to comment - whether you loved it, or hated it - please do so. I’m welcoming ideas, even if these are non-vegan recipes I’ll have the challenge to “veganize”.
Here’s a tip before you go
Sometimes, the ingredients don’t fit into the cookware (see above the picture captioned “That’s a lot of zucchini slices! (step 6)”). It’s usually not a problem with vegetables, which spill water out while cooking, except if the recipe instructs to cover the stewpot. In such case, I borrow the large glass lid from a wok, and it does the job. Compared to usual stewpot lids, this one is transparent, and curved. Even if the glass is in contact with the ingredients, it won’t heat them like a metal lid would. Since it’s transparent, I can check when to replace the lid with the original cookware’s. The drawback of this larger lid is that you can loose the condensation if it drops outside of the stewpot. My glass lid has a special shape at the bottom which traps condensed liquids, so I can return them to the pot if I’m handling it carefully.
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