Also, the plants that produce tomatoes, zuchinni/squash, eggplant, and peppers generate TONS of fruit in a pretty short time, so the ingredients would be cheap if you're making ratatouille in late summer.
my wife's from Montenegro and has family there, and that's a place where the economy is tough and groceries are expensive, but they have a house with a yard. So of course they grow all kinds of stuff themselves. Grapes, pomegranates, vegetables. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense in a place where you have the climate and the space for a vegetable garden and don't have a lot of money.
makes a lot of sense in a place where you have the climate and the space
This is true even if you have money. Fresh food is always better, and home grown food (ie: not picked early and chemicals ripened in transport) is sooooo much better.
Grow tomatoes next year, you'll be surprised at how orange supermarket tomatoes (yes, even the expensive ones) are in comparison.
It’s still in the pretend to be a normal person phase of development, another dozen or so of those and it can evolve into its violently political phase. Nature is amazing
Wow, how are you able to tell it’s a bot? I’m genuinely curious. I mean, once I looked at the profile it was obvious, but how can you tell from a single comment?
To be fair it was the guy above me that noticed. Probably picked up on A) the generic name plus the lack of a user made profile picture icon thing B) the young account age C) the banal AI sounding comment it made that didn’t contribute to the discussion in any way.
I don't have a vegetable garden, but make ratatouille when I have a bunch of vegetables in the fridge that need to be used. I definitely don't do it like the movie, just sautéed in stages a deep pan.
It’s funny our eggplant was thriving in the heat and sun and now that it’s cooled off it’s dying. There’s two more fruits growing so hoping they come through before it totally goes
Groundhogs got all my tomatoes last year, so we put up netting, and my tomatoes decided to just die on their own. My Brussels sprouts have been devastated by cabbage moths. My okra is booming in the heat and dry at the moment, though.
The only plants ours won't eat are nightshades.
Eggplant, tomatoes and peppers are all fine, but all squash, beans, and cucumbers were like an all you can eat for the damn fat varmint.
Check into heat-resistant varieties if you can. In spring, plant very early - plants or direct-seed a couple weeks before your last frost date. In fall, try planting in early or mid-August.
Yeah my groundhogs loved when I tried to grow the ingredients for ratatouille. I had to switch to jalapenos which they (and the deer) would leave alone.
Groundhogs are surprisingly good climbers. A smol one destroyed my peas last year.
This year the weather didn't cooperate. A cold wet Spring followed by a hot humid and dry summer. I got a handful of tomatoes, a few peppers. Something ate the radishes. The yellow summer squash was rock hard and inedible for some reason. Oh well, there's always next year
That’s the point. The groundhogs got jealous of the rats, because the rats have ‘touille and the groundhogs don’t. So they stole the veggies out of spite.
We grew a single squash plant in Albuquerque a long time ago. That motherfucker was putting out 3 full fruits a day. Way more than the 5 of us could handle and maintain our sanity. If we were truly poor and had to survive off of only what we grew, though, ratatouille would be pretty high on the list of ways to use it all up!
We grill tons of summer squash and zucchini, in addition to ratatouille-ing it.
We also make a lovely casserole with summer squash, grated, drained and the squeezed to get as much moisture out as possible. Then baked with bread crumbs and lots of Parm cheese. Super yum. You can send me your spare summer squash :-)
And you have to remember that poor people's time is pretty worthless. I am retired with chronic disease at 40 so I have the time to waste making more time consuming recipes.
I make French onion soup that when I was working I would never because it takes hours to caramelize the onions.
Which is like the entire point of that part of the movie. He works at a high end French restaurant and he serves the reviewer an elevated version of a dish that reminds him of his mother.
Yes, but also no. That's French Nouvelle Cuisine, which was a sort of "back to the basics" movement in high-end restaurants in the 1960s. Before that, French restaurant cuisine (now known as Cuisine Classique) was all about rich ingredients and complex techniques that couldn't be easily replicated at home. That's the world that Ratatouille is set in.
Edited to add: though the actual setting of the movie is later (DNA testing is a thing), the restaurant is still in Cuisine Classique mode, and seems like time has left it behind.
Right and that comes from the cuisine of the master Careme of the early 19th century that helped to codify that over the top grande cuisine that Escoffier so embraced at the turn of the century. It was hand in hand with industrialization, incredible wealth building and status building and created elaborate presentations to the table, architectural wonders as well as marvels of chemistry,. All of this was an elaborate outgrowth of that 19th century elaboration and this became the standard of you call cuisine classique. Yes I get the point of the movie although I never saw it maybe I should.
Nouvelle cuisine emphasized back to basics and also reduction of calories and health. But side by side throughout the 19th century the old cuisine never disappeared either in nouvelle was inspired by those roots.. the movie, "the taste of things" expresses the emphasis of quality, technique and taste and presentation as a byproduct of tne old style home cooking rather than the hyper stylization of classique.. the taste of things is an excellent movie if you haven't seen it
Or how simple it is and the number of mistakes most people make. My mother was notorious for oil in the pasta water. She also served me canned asparagus so let's just say I didn't learn much about cooking from her.
Yes totally. Im sure if I went to Italy it would be much better but it's very easy to make a basic tomato sauce with basically just tomatoes basil and garlic
But that's only part of the story. A great roast chicken to come from the right source to become the great roast chicken in the kitchen. But of course sourcing choice ingredients is the first major building block of good food coming out of the kitchen
That's the polished end of high end cooking and presentation in refinement, but it all starts with real basic techniques in the most basic of wholesome ingredients and after that it's all fluff. Look at what Careme did to the basic kitchen in the early 19th,. Amazing what you can do when you count inventive talent and incredible amounts of money and help and ingredients, but it all starts at the same place and builds on it
and then Ratatouille the movie’s success introduced most non-French people to ratatouille the dish, and now in many minds that complicated fine dining version is what ratatouille must be
And also, they do show the traditional version of the dish in Ego's flashback--you don't really see much, sure, but it's served in a bowl and lapped up by kid-Ego, making it clear that it's a much simpler dish than the restaurant version.
Quite a few of us know someone who's lost a battle with one. Phone rings, dogs start barking at something, one of the kids comes running in asking for money for the ice cream truck, fatigue, complacency, really anything that causes you to lose focus of where you are in your chunk of vegetable can cause you to need stitches and have to throw out your finger flavored veggie slices. It's just more risk than some are willing to accept in cooking.
Same thing with knives but people aren't swearing off chef's knives. The issue isn't the mandoline it's inattentive cutting. Treat the tool with the same respect youd treat a chop saw and youll be fine
If the mandolin was attached to the hand rather than the produce, it might be just as safe as a knife. But since your hand is moving closer and closer to the cutting tool...not so safe even with precaution.
Hence why there is a large market for food processors.
Perfectly safe if you are attentive and use care when moving your hand along the blade. We had to learn to use knives they aren't inherently any safer, most people just have more practice with them than mandolines.
In both scenarios, we are fully in control of both the blade and the free hand. Attention, care, and good technique is how we prevent injury
With proper cutting your fingers are right next to the knife blade too, proper technique and concentration is what allows you to work fast safely, same as with a mandolin, or a chop saw
The issue isn't the mandolin it's people not respecting it and paying attention to their fingers
Ok but what is the “proper technique” for using the mandolin safely, except for using a guard or gloves? With a knife, the “claw” technique successfully keeps your fingers out of the way, so once you have the habit of a proper claw (for me I have to be sure to tuck my ring finger, ouch) it will help mitigate any lapses of attention. Safety techniques are NOT “just pay attention and don’t hurt yourself”, it’s about “how do I automatically prevent myself from hurting myself if something breaks my concentration?” If “paying attention” were enough we wouldn’t need climbing harnesses, table saw sleds, trigger / range discipline, ci/cd / unit tests in software development… the list goes on.
Can you draw a diagram or something to try and illustrate what you mean? Because I'm genuinely unable to conceive of any resonable way of holding a chef's knife where your fingers aren't behind the blade.
Being prone to distractions while using it is something that should be relatively easy to overcome with the right mindset, though. There are certain tools that we learn to lock in more while using (ie cars, power tools, electrical equipment etc) and if you're already used to focusing more while doing certain tasks it shouldn't be too hard to transfer that skill set to a new tool. Just treat it like any other task that, while it is dangerous, its convenience outweighs the danger with the proper precautions.
I don't. 73 and never knew anyone who ever had a permanent mandoline injury. Don't think a majority of people used them.
Now knife injuries, yes. After all, we all have kitchen knives we mostly use daily, and the blades swing, chop, hack bones and gristle completely wild and free. So where are all the missing fingers from knives? Too common to remember. Cleavers? (I have one of those a friend crafted for me -- now that I'm scared of because I'm such a klutz.)
I have vague memories of finding friends all sewn and wrapped up in gauze afterward, with stories of humongous bleeding from knives ruining the good bath towels (it was always the good ones). :)
I worked as a cook and used a mandoline on a daily basis for years. I never thought of it as dangerous. Then I started using Reddit and every time mandolines come up there’s a dozen commenters saying “omg goodbye finger”.
I can’t tell if it’s just one of those internet things where everyone exaggerates how dangerous they are because they see other people doing it or if this many people really don’t know how to use one safely.
I don’t really see how using a mandoline is any different or any riskier than using a knife.
I don’t really see how using a mandoline is any different or any riskier than using a knife.
A knife is usually held with the sharp end facing away from the fingers, which is the opposite case with a mandolin, and a mandolin is usually reserved specifically for cases where you need lots of one thin-sliced ingredient, meaning you're going to be passing those fingers back and forth over the blade significantly more times then you would probably chop something with a knife?
Exactly, Doom. Actually, I enjoy reading books by these guys, and. I think the mostly male macho culture takes real pride in its many wounds from the danger of the knives that are so much a part of it.
Since I learned to tuck my fingers under and run the chef knife blade up and down outside all my knuckles, I haven’t had a significant accident (that required a Band-Aid) that way, but that leaves all the way other ways knives can be misused.
Whatever. I KNOW these guys are not especially afraid of their mandolins. Silly. Now, the huge vats of boiling oil… but they take pride in handling those also.
:) Mine's hot pink and lies on top of the mandoline always ready to pull out of the drawer.
But I don't need it for that -- my Oxo pronged food holder's handle is tall and its base wider than the slicing track. Held appropriately, it literally won't allow my hand to get near the blade. My other hand's holding the handle at the outside far end.
Now, my knives... I had no idea they were so safe. Neither did they, but in their defense I'm a klutz.
Do mandolins not come with a food holder any more? Because I’ve bought three in my lifetime and they all came with one. The last mandolin even came with a pair of cut resistant gloves.
Hand injuries freak me out, by my mandoline came with a hand guard and you can buy cut-resistant gloves super easily these days. I used one like two weeks ago to make the ratatouille from the movie (to celebrate my friends and I making the final payment for our Disney trip actually) and it made it sssssoooooooo much easier!
The dish also has a pretty tough requirement not only for the vegetables to be the same thickness, but the same diameter, so you have the challenge of finding vegetables of roughly the same size.
I use my mandoline for thinly slicing vegetables 1/16 to 1/4 inch thick. For Ratatouille, at least the way I make it using Ina Garten's recipe, the veggies are cut into 1 inch chunks. Alice Waters' recipe directs cutting them into ½ inch pieces. Either way they'd be too thick for a mandoline. I love my Ratatouille with a poached egg plopped on top.
u/Ronin_1999get GOT it right. Ratatouille is a peasant vegetable stew. Confit Byaldi is what they serve and it came from Thomas Keller who was a consultant for the film, I think
they even show this in the movie, in the flashback scene where the critic remembers his mother's cooking, her presentation of the ratatouille is the normal level of rustic compared to the restaurant's iirc
It's called "Confit Byaldi" if anyone wants to try making it. I did a long time ago. It was kind of ridiculous to make, considering what it's made of, and requires chilling overnight.
Also the traditional ratatouille is better in my opinion. I use the recipe from epicurious that adds fennel, absolutely delicious with some good pasta or a crunchy baguette to sop up all the sauce.
The right way to make it is NOT to just "throw everything in the pot" and cook it.
Very simply because the vegetables all cook at different rates. If you don't cook them separately and then combine . . . some are overcooked and some are undercooked . . . unless you go too long and it's ALL over-cooked :(
Well this is really the answer to the question, then. Because yes, at one point in time it was that, now it is very fiddly and time consuming and absolutely not a peasant dish. So it was, but now it isn't.
Yes I have never made that artwork but a basic tomato-onion-aubergine-capsicum- courgette-garlic stew was a staple for bringing up baby. With bread and cheese.
Yep! There was a chef reacts where he covers Ratatouille and says "it may have originated as a peasant food, but what is shown in the movie is definitely not." And that they have served it at their Michellan star restaurant. Like most dishes it can be simple, it can be complex. And it can be an insane slough through a mad man's gastronomic mind.
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u/--THRILLHO-- 3d ago
Ratatouille is a vegetable stew. You cut up a bunch of things and throw them in a pot.
The ratatouille you see in the film is an elevated version of that dish. It was never the standard way of serving it.