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closeWednesday, Sep. 10, 2008
Let it stew: Size matters when making ratatouille
By Pervaiz Shallwani, The Associated Press
In Provence, every grandmother worth her Dutch oven has a ratatouille recipe that family members swear is unsurpassed. But in the U.S., this divine stew of late summer and early fall vegetables too often is a victim of kitchen sink syndrome, resulting in a sloppy hodgepodge of ingredients lacking focus and definition.
"The first thing that people don't understand is that ratatouille consists of very specific vegetables, not just what you have in your refrigerator," says Mediterranean food expert Clifford Wright.
Historians have traced ratatouille's origins to the French coastal town of Nice early in the last century. It entered the American culinary lexicon thanks to Julia Child and Gourmet magazine, then became firmly entrenched last year after Disney turned the recipe into a movie.
Ready to do it right? Here's what you need to know:
The vegetables
Though many Americans have come to think of ratatouille as just a fancy name for vegetable stew, traditional versions call for specific vegetables -- onions, garlic, zucchini, squash, green peppers, eggplant and tomatoes. Within this mix, chefs mix it up by using different colored peppers and squash, but that's where the improv should end. Other flavorings are limited to fresh herbs, such as thyme, basil and bay leaves, and extra-virgin olive oil.
The prep
The most time-consuming part of a ratatouille is cutting the vegetables. And that's because size matters. Each vegetable cooks at a different speed, so cutting each to the optimal size to ensure even cooking -- and cooking that is evenly paced with the other ingredients -- is important. Generally speaking, the faster a vegetable cooks, the larger the pieces it should be cut into. Likewise, vegetables that take longer to cook get cut into smaller chunks.
The cooking
There are two common approaches and neither works well for the home cook.
The traditional method sauts each vegetable separately, then combines the ingredients over low heat to allow the flavors to blend. The alternative often is to dump everything in the pan together. While this does save time, it also invariably leaves some vegetables overcooked and some undercooked.
Better is to borrow a bit from each method. By following cutting the vegetables according to the speed at which they cook, it's possible to divide the ingredients into two batches (one slow, one fast).
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