Today I learned...
…not to trust anything you see on the silver screen. Again.
It appears that not only can a man not fly; New York has not been destroyed umpteen times by aliens, monsters, or Avengers; and the case for invisibility cloaks may have been overstated, but even ratatouille isn't what Ratatouille led us to believe. The dish served by Remy to Anton Ego was, in fact, a confit byaldi.
An authentic ratatouille is made from separately fried aubergine, courgette, capsicum, and onion stewed in tomato sauce. And very good it looks too! I think I shall try the recipe, although the almost inevitable lack of Niçois trompette
courgettes in my local supermarket may leave my efforts falling sadly short of a true ratatouille Niçoise experience.
I doubt that Remy would approve.
As expected, my local supermarket doesn't stock Niçois trompette
courgettes, so I had to make do with the watery supermarket
ones. FWP, eh?
I also applied some additional shortcuts refinements of my own. I went for a more rustic
approach by only coring the tomatoes, not peeling and deseeding them, which I never do for a tomato sauce anyway. I also omitted anything listed as optional; the saffron; and the sugar cube, since I only buy vine-ripened tomatoes, which have enough of their own natural sugars.
I had to think about how much anchovy paste represents a dollop
—not a very helpful descriptor at the best of times. So I opted for a squirt from the tube—and, no, that doesn't mean Boris BoJo
Johnson exiting the London Underground!
Overall, it was okay, but I found it too watery and more acidic than I expected, at least from my personal experience of making ratatouille to nothing approaching a traditional
recipe; perhaps that's why they need the sugar.
It does need sweetening, but adding sugar is never the right answer IMO.