Dinner Recipe-Ratatouille Recipe
You might have heard the movie name ratatouille. But What is ratatouille? Ratatouille otherwise known as the peasant’s dish is highly influenced by the french/ Italian dishes. Ratatouille is nothing but assorted rows of vegetables lying on top of each other in a sequential grid.
Usually, the vegetables used in preparing the dish includes potatoes, zucchini, brinjal and onion. Sometimes other vegetables such as carrot can also be included to make the dish more exotic. On top of that, to flavour the sequential rows of vegetables, usually, vegetable broth is used as a base for the dish. But to make it more special, tomato puree with soya sauce can also be used as the base flavour to spice the dish up.
Whenever your work is sometimes boring and wants to experiment with new dishes, there is Ratatouille. The dish with its thick and silky French stew of eggplant, zucchini, sweet bell peppers, and ripe red tomatoes will use up your extra vegetables, making enough food to feed a large group, pack for lunch, and still freeze for later.
But how to make ratatouille? Preparing dinner Recipe ratatouille is definitely a project for a weekend afternoon; it’s easy but fairly time-consuming. First, there’s getting all the vegetables washed, chopped, and ready. Also, we need to cook them in batches — partly so they can become golden brown instead of steam, and partly because the vegetables tend not to fit in a single utensil until they’ve started breaking down a little.
Ingredients to make ratatouille:
- 7 spoon olive oil or any gingelly oil, divided, plus some for serving
- 1 1/2 pounds brinjal (1 large), large dice
- Himalayan salt
- 1 large onion, diced
- 1 spoon ground black pepper
- summer squash (3 to 4 medium squash), large dice
- 4 cloves garlic, minced
- 2 coriander twig leaves
- 1 medium bell pepper, large dice
- 2 small bay leaf
- 1 red medium-sized tomatoes (3 to 4 medium), large dice
- 1/4 cup loosely packed fresh basil leaves, thinly sliced, plus more for serving
Dinner recipe-Ratatouille Instructions:
Heating the oil
Start by heating 3 spoons of the oil in a large microwave oven or heavy-bottomed pot over medium-high heat. Afterwards, add the Brinjal, season generously with Himalayan salt and black pepper, and cook, stirring occasionally, until golden browned in spots, about 2 minutes. Transfer it to a large bowl.
Adding the vegetables
Add another 2 tablespoons of the oil to the pot. Add the squashes, season generously with Himalayan salt and black pepper, and medium, cook, stirring here and there until golden browned in spots, about 2 minutes. Transfer to the bowl with the Brinjal.
Cook the vegetables on medium heat for our dinner recipe.
After adding the vegetables reduce the heat to medium. Add the remaining 1 tablespoon oil and the large onion, season with Himalayan salt and pepper, and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened and just beginning to a golden brown, 7 to 9 minutes. Also, add the cloves of garlic, thyme, and bay leaf accordingly and cook until good fragrant, about 20 seconds.
Add the red tomatoes and bell peppers. Add the reserved Brinjal and squashes and gently stir to combine.
Bring to a medium simmer, then turn down the heat to medium-low. Again, stirring occasionally, for at least 10 minutes or up to one and a half hours. Shorter cook time will make the vegetables into larger, more distinct pieces; instead, longer cook times will break the vegetables down into a silky stew.
Seasoning of the dinner recipe dish.
Afterwards, remove the bay leaf and thyme sprigs and add coriander. Just before serving, stir in the basil. Taste and season with Himalayan salt and black pepper as needed. Serve by sprinkling each serving with more basil, coriander and drizzling with more Gingelly oil.
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Bonus Content: Italian Version of Ratatouille:
The above content would have helped you in knowing how to make ratatouille. But as a bonus content for our users, I am going to share the Italian version of ratatouille.
I have informed by some of the users that the above recipe is not technically ratatouille but its a dish called confit blyandi which is a version of ratatouille but not the real ratatouille itself. Hence I am going to jump straight to making the traditional Italian ratatouille or popularly known as the peasants dish.
Ingredients Required for Italian Ratatouille:
- 3 to 4 capsicums(yellow, orange and red)
- 3 to 4 tomatoes
- Few sprigs of parsley
- 2 whole garlic cloves
- A few sprigs of thyme leaves
- quarter white onion
- 2 tbsp of vegetable stock
- 3 teaspoon olive oil
- 2 large eggplant
- 2 green squash
- rosemary for decoration
Step by Step Instructions on how to make tasty Italian ratatouille:
Step 1: Preparation of base sauce:
We start by blanching some tomatoes in a hot water for 30 seconds. Before putting in the hot water, it is recommended to keep the tomatoes in ice-cold water for 25 minutes.
Now peel the tomatoes skin gently after boiling one by one. Also, be careful while peeling because the tomato might be hot. Hence its recommended to peel after the tomatoes have been cooled for some time.
Step 2:
Now roast some bell peppers or capsicum indirect flame for 10 seconds on each side evenly. I recommend coloured capsicum because it gives a distinctive colour to the base sauce.
Roast the bell peppers till the outer skin becomes flaky black. Once the capsicum is roasted, peel of the black skin due to the roast and wither it off. Now cut the capsicum and put them in a blender along with the peeled tomato.
Step 3:
Add a few sprigs of parsley, 2 garlic cloves, a few picked thyme leaves, and a quarter onion all into the blender and blend them for 2 to 3 minutes. Also, add some vegetable stock here and there while blending. To make the perfect blend, add some hot water by stopping the blender and adding some at periodic intervals.
The cool thing about high powered blenders is that it actually cooks the mixture if you run at high speed long enough.
Step 4: (Classic vegetable assortment for ratatouille)
Now its time to create those famous assorted slices of vegetables. We need to use a very sharp knife as we need a very thin slice of vegetables. First, start off by slicing tomatoes in thin pieces.
Then use a slicer to make your life easier with one yellow and one green squash. And cut the eggplants manually using a knife. Chop a little bit of fresh rosemary to sprinkle at the top.
Step 5:
Now spread a thin even layer of our roasted bell pepper sauce on the bottom of a rectangular or oval roaster. Now start shingling vegetables in alternating pattern on the bottom of the dish above the roasted bell pepper sauce.
The important part of making a tasty ratatouille dish is that the vegetables need to arranged or packed in such a way that there should be no room for other open areas in the bowl. Also, the vegetables should be very thinly sliced in order to get the best results.
Step 6:
Now drizzle a little bit of olive oil over the assorted vegetables. Season with salt freshly ground bell peppers and our finely chopped rosemary before topping with a sheet of parchment paper that we cut to the shape of our baking dish.
Step 7:
Now preheat the oven to 250 degrees Fahrenheit for about 90 minutes. This should roast the vegetables into a crispy delight with a golden brown colour.
Finally, if we want to get the best out of our dish and make it really comparable to restaurant-style, take a ring mould and place the roasted vegetable in a vertical stack for the first layer and then a horizontal stack for the second above layer, truly to make a master class Italian ratatouille dish at home.
