Hi Foodies of Hive!
Today I have a post about the dish: Ratatouille from the Pixar movie Ratatouille. The actual name of this dish is "Confit Byaldi". There are many great recipes, very detailed as well, to be found online. The New York Times has a recipe, but my favorite is from Andrew Rea from the Youtube Channel: Binging with Babish.
The dish is rather simple regarding ingredients and there is a lot of room to add your own touches with spices and flavorings that you want to add. Firstly, we started off with making a delicious bell pepper and tomato sauce. We flavored this with some fresh thyme, basil, parsely, onions, garlic, and some paprika powder. Lastly, we added some powered vegetable stock, salt, and pepper to bring it up to taste. After blending the sauce, we also passed it through a very fine sieve to make it into a velvety smooth sauce.
When the sauce was done, we used a mandoline to slice the zucchini, green, and yellow into very thin slices. Then, with a very nice sharp knife, we sliced the tomatoes and the eggplant.
In this picture, you can see the velvety smooth sauce. Once you spread out a very thin layer on the bottom of the tray that you are making the confit byaldi in, start layering the sliced vegetables in a pattern, making sure that you always repeat the same pattern to ensure the confit byaldi looks good when presented. The end result should look something like this! Remember; a round baking tray may be easier to use because it allows you to make a full circle with the vegetables.
Here is the picture of the dish before it went into the oven. After covering the top of the whole baking tray with oven-safe parchment paper, the confit byaldi is roasted slowly at around 130 degrees Celsius or 265 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 hour.
After coming out of the oven, it should resemble something like this. The vegetables should not have been browned and just slowly roasted in the sauce maintaining a lot of their color. You can also see in the pictures that I paired the Confit Byaldi with smoked and 1-week dry-aged duck breast that I later seared off in a hot pan. The dry-aging makes the duck breast buttery soft and the smoking gives it such an amazing flavor. There was one vegetarian at the dinner party, so I also make some pan-fried king oyster mushrooms that I marinated in a little vegetable stock and smoked to impart as much flavor as possible.
End result: an amazing dish for a dinner party that completely blew away all of my friends. Something I will be making again, very soon!
Have a great day, Foodies of Hive!