Good morning, I'm Martino Ruggieri. I'm the chef of this restaurant, the Pavillon Ledoyen, which is a 3 Michelin stars restaurant by Yannick Alléno in Paris on the Champs Elysées. We're here today with
Italia Squisita to try to better understand a great classic of French
cuisine, which in my opinion is international anyway,
so we'll be making it in various ways, in different versions.
We're talking about ratatouille. We'll be making a first version, that is the really classic one that everybody makes, which is really very simple, but in my opinion contains the true essence of French cuisine.
Just like everything in France, as when we're talking about sauce, when we
talk about great French dishes, it's always an assemblage of products that are cooked together following a certain quantity or percentage to then obtain a final result. This is ratatouille, really: it is many vegetables put together, cooked for two hours and giving a final result that is in my point of view fantastic. I wanted Alex and Dorian
with me as they're two people who have been working
with me for a very long time. I liked the idea of shooting this video for Italia Squisita with the whole brigade and for it to be a video
about Pavillon Ledoyen instead of a video about Martino Ruggieri, it seemed very reducing. They'll be making the truly classic version. I wanted
them to make it as they're two French people who really like to
cook anything classic. They're always experimenting with classics. As we can see, Dorian and Alex cut the onion, making a mirepoix and then adding tomato, then they cut zucchini, they cut eggplant, they cut peppers and they cooked each of them separately as each of the three need to keep the same percentage of moisture basically. Then, one by one, they will add
them to the mirepoix and tomatoes. Those who work in this field should know that ratatouille is somewhat a tian de légumes in French people's opinion. We never read on Escoffier's, for example, that is the culinary guide here in France the name ratatouille, because ratatouille is almost the leftovers
from the fridge, or anyway, something that is made by recycling, with leftovers,
something that today, in my opinion, is increasingly present.
To really understand what a ratatouille is shouldn't be very difficult
for us Italians, but it's really what happens in the Mediterranean area
as a whole, it's basically these assemblages of vegetables, for us it could be caponata, ratatouille in Southern France,
a vegetables tajine in Morocco, there's thousands of examples that
can really span from Spain to past Turkey, until reaching Morocco, and maybe this is why, this is what is so beautiful, we should never stop to a definitive recipe. I can tell my opinion, but
I cannot claim it is the right one. They will then mix everything in a typical French cocotte and put it into a static oven, not a ventilated oven,
but a static one to obtain a uniform heat. We're allowing it to cook for a very long time, 2-3 hours, just as if it was our Bolognese, as if it was... It is called plats mijotes
in French, it's basically something that is put in a pot and cooked
in steam for a very long time. Oven for a couple of hours, 140-150°C depending from the kind
of oven you have at home. Anyway, these are traditional
dishes, so actually it is always difficult to explain what kind of vegetables to add in, which vegetables, what the right cooking time is or how to make it,
because just as it happens in Italy every 5 km there's a village that makes a dish in a different way. It is logical for everyone
to make it in their own way and it is righteously so. We've now seen the classic version, that is very not banal, but very simple even if it still very tasty, but in my opinion there's a version of ratatouille we all know that is much more spectacular, a bit more complex to prepare. I'm going to need Vincenzo, who is down in the kitchen already,
and I'm showing you what it is. So, here we are in the kitchen.
Welcome, we're in the kitchen of Pavillon Ledoyen. He's Vincenzo, one of the sous chefs in the Maison for some years now. As I was telling you, we're making ratatouille today, and we'll be making a more modern version
of ratatouille, the one that became famous thanks to the Pixar movie. We can call it a second version of ratatouille, so we need to start
from the onion and we'll make a brunoise. So, we're now cutting the onion.
Olive oil, we're using an olive oil that
is not very aggressive. Olive oil, onion. Ratatouille is a dish from Southern France,
Provence. The onion that is the closest to this region is the Cevennes one, very popular in France, it is a region of Lyon. These onions are very sweet and
these are the first onions to grow during the summer,
so this is their right season. We're basically sweating the onion and adding salt. It is important to cut the onion more or less
in the same way, same size, same dimension because it needs to cook at the same time. Otherwise we could get parts of onion
that are more cooked, while others are raw. We're now adding the tomato. So this is a very simple
tomato puree and we're allowing it to cook for at least a quarter of an hour. We made the tomato fond,
that is basically the most important thing, it's the key part, it's the sauce that then binds all of these vegetables together. Vincenzo will now cut the vegetables, the ones that will then create this écaille of legumes inside the tray, basically. So, the pepper needs to be peeled.
The pepper can be peeled in this way, or also in the oven, to give it a bit more taste, but I prefer it this way. We're now going to use Berkel. The thickness of the vegetables is functional to what we want to make. We want a tray that is really
full of vegetables, almost like a horizontal mille-feuille, so we're rather cutting it very thin. There's different reasons why, in my opinion a slicer is better than a knife: first, we can be very uniform in the cut, meaning that later, during the cooking all of the vegetables will be cooked to the same point, at the same time, without vegetables that are more cooked than others, and it's also a matter of seasoning. A thicker eggplant versus
a thinner eggplant need different kinds of salt and pepper. We're now cutting zucchini and arranging them in a tray. We need the same number of eggplants, zucchini and tomatoes.
We're arranging them in this way because we're seasoning them accurately. We're placing them in this way.
For the tomato, instead, we prefer to use a knife, since it contains a lot of liquids. We're cutting thin, precise slices. The pepper should be cooked together with the tomato, but I really wanted the sauce to taste like tomato, not like pepper, so we're dicing
these and adding them later in the final ratatouille. Eventually, the yellow zucchini. I chose these vegetables, but really, whatever
is in the market, what you have in the fridge or in the vegetable garden,
if you have one and you're lucky.
We don't have one here in Paris. I'd say we have everything now and we can start assembling. This is the
best part, because we'll really manage to obtain a precise, round cake, very beautiful. I took this, a Moroccan tajine. We're in France, so this is a great influence between cultures that is very nice. We can start assembling, so we will proceed in this way:
we'll start by seasoning from above, adding salt, and watching carefully where we're adding salt, where the salt falls, almost seasoning one by one. We're adding some herbs from Provence, meaning thyme, basil, olive oil, but for the olive oil I played the hometown
ace since I'm Apulian, so Apulian oil. We're adding some thyme. We're obviously adding basil
on the tomato, but not on all of the tomatoes, just sparsely, since basil is a very strong herb. When we realized we had to make this dish, we prepared it for two, three day consecutively
to understand how to obtain this precise arrangement, how to preserve colors.
So, we're now starting to assemble it. The whole mise en place is ready. Eggplant, zucchini and tomatoes, it is very important to add everything on top, because what we're looking for is the final color,
so we're making tall small towers and then placing them in the tajine. So, again, eggplant, then a different color of zucchini, a bit lighter, and then
we're starting it again. It is starting to be very colorful, getting colors and shape. Then a zucchini, green in color,
then the other eggplant. We will continue in this way,
starting again from the beginning
until we create small towers. The order of colors is not really important, since it is a cake, like a mille-feuille. The colors are there anyway, so it's not a problem. These are the colors of summer, then something important:
you need vegetables that are small and others that are big, otherwise the turret would be crooked, like the Pisa tower, so we need something big to hold the small parts and keeps them stabilized. So, we're closing it with this. Artistically speaking, there's colors that are brighter then others, yellow, red should be very present and it's better not to point towards green. What you can do is also overlap vegetables of the same color to make it stronger, maybe doing it with colors that tend to be weaker or parts of vegetables that are a bit smaller. Now, for the last layer we're closing with double zucchini. Done. V: Chef, I'm now adding the sauce. M: So, the base of this dish
is tomato sauce, and raw peppers. Let's start assembling. V: I'm first letting the excess water drip.
M: This is why it is better to cut the vegetables
24 hours in advance, so they're losing all of their
water and won't release it in the sauce, so the sauce will be thick and creamy, while the vegetables keep a consistency in texture,
quite marked. They need to be quite tight, the vegetables have to be nicely squeezed. What is interesting is to really understand how a recipe that was born in times of war, based on vegetable scraps, based on beans and tomatoes only, how it can one day become a dish like this. This restaurant, Pavillon Ledoyen, is a historical French restaurant par excellence. This story is basically very interesting. This is where the first paper menu was created, basically, and it kept being a place of culture, food, a place for refreshment, a place for meetings, for artists, and it is great for a French dish to be made
in a historical French Maison by two Italians.
V: I'm arranging the vegetables geometrically to then fill the center of the plate in the end, then we're cooking it. M: Technically speaking, this step is very important, because we might end up with non-sense vegetables.
Vincenzo is one of the people whose role in this restaurant is to create new dishes, so he works on development
and spends his days creating dishes. Every time he proposes,
or we want to create a new dish, when we're trying to launch a new project the first thing he does is to go and search in all of the historical books, may them be Italian or French. Great! Here there is going to be a lot of water from the vegetables since we squeezed the vegetables quite tight. It's important to remove it.
We need to remove it really carefully, because it's water anyway, it has no taste. We need taste, concentration
of tastes, of cooking. There's two options: first, we're going to cook this for half an hour and really preserve every taste, every tasting detail of the vegetables. And then there's the other one,
cooking it for two hours and that would really be a unique melange of flavors and tastes that is
ultimately what ratatouille is about. V: We're now baking at 150°C
for 30 minutes. It's been half an hour, right
Vincenzo? We have both ratatouille, a classic one and the other made just as in the movie with the mouse. Let's see if they're ready. So, here is both of them. So, this is the classic one
we can make at home, that every family makes at home with all of the vegetables at hand. This one, a bit more technical, but still classic, anyway. Notice the difference. In here is pure France.
Here is something that is much more Mediterranean, it baked
for half an hour only with a base of sauce.
We're really going to taste each individual element. It probably makes no sense to plate a work such as this, since we're talking about a main course in France. So, a bit of seasoning, salt. This is a centerpiece, so it needs no plating, in my opinion.
A drizzle of oil, maybe next to a trullo in Apulia. Basil, a bit of gloss.
Each and every chef tried to re-make it, from Pierre Gagnaire to Roger, Ducasse, everyone. Anyway, I want to thank Italia Squisita
for coming all the way here in Paris, in Pavillon Ledoyen,
chef Yannick Alléno in his restaurant. Thank you Vince, thanks to Berkel,
thanks to the three guys that are behind and you can't see since they're shooting, and...
à bientôt! Ciao!
