Easy Ratatouille Recipe  (2024)

FAQs

What's the secret of a good ratatouille? ›

The success of ratatouille depends on the freshness of your vegetables. Take the time to choose fresh vegetables and your vegetable ratatouille will taste vibrant and delicious! Slice all the vegetables as uniformly as you can. This will ensure they cook evenly.

Ratatouille is a French Provencal dish that consists of stewed vegetables. Though recipes and ingredients vary, there are some ingredients that are almost always used: eggplant, tomatoes, zucchini, onions, and bell peppers.

How to Serve Ratatouille. Ratatouille can be the main dish with a side of crusty bread or a salad accompanying a meal, but it's also good served over polenta, pasta, mashed potatoes, quinoa, and rice. Use it as a filling for omelets and tarts or as a side for grilled or roasted meats.

Ratatouille is packed with dietary fiber, potassium, vitamins A, C and K, folate and much more. With so many vegetables included, you're bound to meet the recommended daily amount of veggies your body needs.

The trick to Ratatouille, is to sautée each vegetable separately. It takes a little more time, but it is so worth it. The texture and flavor is unforgettable.

What makes Ratatouille so special is that its story covers so many bases without feeling overstuffed: Remy's storyline deals with identity and finding one's passion, Linguini has to learn to grow a backbone, and the commercialization of good food even gets its nose into the picture.

So I decided one night to do for ratatouille what I do with other forbidden vegetables: Substitute a vegetable approved by the man of the house. I substituted portabella mushrooms for eggplant, which was not only delicious, but also shaved about 30 minutes off the cooking time.

Ratatouille can be served as a first course with bread; it can also be served as a side dish, as you would any vegetable side. However, I most enjoy serving ratatouille as a main-ish dish; that is, as an anchor to a summer's dinner.

Capers and green olives: Caponata typically includes capers and green olives, which add even more sour flavor. Ratatouille is not made with capers or olives; instead, it gets a jolt of flavor from garlic cloves, which are not often found in Italian caponata.

You can serve Ratatouille as a side dish, as a pasta sauce, over rice or just on its own with some crusty bread on the side.

What is ratatouille supposed to taste like? ›

The tomatoes, onions and capsic*ms add sweetness while the eggplant creates creamy undertones. It is a rich and flavoursome stew that is enhanced with the addition of aromatic herbs and spices, like garlic and thyme, which meld with the sauce and sink into the vegetables.

For example, some make Ratatouille with red bell peppers instead of tomatoes. Some others use potatoes instead of yellow squash etc. This time also I made this change. Instead of yellow squash I used potatoes, simply because it's almost impossible to find the yellow squash in Italy in a regular supermarket.

The word ratatouille is derived from the Occitan term “ratatolha” and the French words “rata” meaning chunky stew and “touiller” which means to toss food or stir up. Originating in the 18th Century in the region of Nice, it's known as a peasant's stew, created from the last of the summer vegetables.

The teeming summer gardens of Mediterranean France are the inspiration for and source of ratatouille, a dish whose name is taken from two related words: ratouiller, meaning to agitate or stir a liquid, and tatouiller, meaning to beat (as in the drumbeat called the tattoo) or to shake.

At its core, “Ratatouille” entertains one foundational question: Should we as a people choose ignorance or empathy? In the film, rats are stigmatized to only be troublemakers, and humans to only be killers. But, Remy the rat makes a different choice.

In this central story, then, Ratatouille presents its message about arbitrary limitations in terms of identity. People discriminate against Remy based on the fact that he is a rat, when the more salient identity is that he is a cook.

Modern ratatouille uses tomatoes as a foundation for sautéed garlic, onion, zucchini (courgette), aubergine (eggplant), bell pepper, marjoram, fennel and basil. Instead of basil, bay leaf and thyme, or a mix of green herbs like herbes de Provence can be used. The modern version does not appear in print until c. 1930.

In this classic Provençal dish, summer vegetables, like eggplant, onions, peppers, tomatoes and zucchini, are covered in olive oil and roasted separately, then all together, until they become a soft, harmonious stew.