Tonight’s dinner: sautéed ratatouille!

After seeing Disney Pixar’s animated film, Ratatouille, some time ago, I felt how I assume many people felt: wanting to try this supposedly overwhelming French vegetable dish, known as ratatouille. After researching what ingredients make up the dish, I discovered that there are a couple ways in which the dish can be prepared. The first being Michel Guérard’s gorgeous, concentrically layered and baked version, referred to as confit byaldi, and the other being the sautéed altogether on the stove version. I was fortunate enough to come across a recipe for the version seen in the animated film shortly after its release, but I left it bookmarked for countless months before I would ever try my hand at it.

The first time I actually made a ratatouille dish was in the food science course that I took this past semester at Syracuse University, my last semester as a SUNY-ESF undergraduate. It was one of the dishes we were allowed to prepare during our vegetable lab and was called garden ratatouille. Having wanted to try ratatouille and create it for quite some time, I selected it as my dish to prepare. Initially, it seemed like it might be difficult to complete. I’d never cooked much with zucchini or eggplant, so I had no idea how to dice either of them, being cylindrical fruits and all.

Fortunately, with some help from our chef and pointers on the technique, I was well on my way to making ratatouille for the first time. The version I created that day in lab was the simple sautéed version. It was much easier to prepare than I originally imagined and it was delicious. I used this recipe a few more times for dinners at my college apartment until I wanted to change it up and create the baked version. I came across the recipe on one of my favorite food and cooking websites, Smitten Kitchen.

Creating this masterpiece, however, required a few tools that I didn’t have on hand: a mandoline slicer to speed up the uniform slicing of all those colorful fruits/vegetables and a stoneware baking dish that would accommodate them. After a brief trip to Target, an inexpensive mandoline slicer and a killer baking dish from Giada De Laurentiis had joined our kitchen armada in the fight against hunger and bad food.

Almost as soon as we got home, I washed and set up the mandoline and began slicing away at the fruits/vegetables. The slicing process was so much faster and the slices came out much more uniform for everything except the eggplant. This mandoline slicer did not do so well with slicing eggplant. The eggplant’s unfamiliar spongy interior and tough skin must have confused the mandoline and so it retaliated by destroying much of the eggplant. Thus I believe that it is probably easier to slice eggplant by hand for this recipe unless you have a top notch mandoline.

We carefully arranged all of the ingredients in the baking dish, took many photos, painstakingly cut an oval of parchment to cover the dish, and baked it to absolute perfection.

After having tasted both versions that I know of for ratatouille, I much prefer this version. There is so much more texture and flavor present in this dish. If you’ve been thinking about giving this recipe a try, stop thinking about it and just do it. Your taste buds and your stomach will be grateful.