What is ratatouille? Cartoon!
This is a delicious vegetable stew, a favorite summer dish of the inhabitants of Southern France, which peasants from Nice, and after them the whole world, have been preparing for more than 200 years! Only in different parts they call it differently: the French say “ratatouille” (rata - food, touiller - stir); Spaniards – “pisto”, Italians – “caponata”; Catalans – “samfaina”; Hungarians call it “lecho”, and we call it “stew”! You found out, right? Yes, yes, that very summer stew of eggplants, zucchini, peppers and tomatoes! This simple but delicious summer recipe became the signature dish of the tailed chef from the cartoon of the same name. Only the presentation there was unusual - not in the form of diced vegetables, but in the form of sliced into circles and laid in a spiral. Effective and original. What happens if you put ratatouille... in a pie?
Thin, crispy dough, and under the golden brown crust - lots and lots of juicy vegetable filling!
This pie is for those who like vegetable stews, but by the way, a little ham is added to the filling. So it turns out to be a very flavorful, filling, big pie for the whole family! There are vegetables, meat, and bread (dough) - such a pie can replace a whole lunch! I've baked this vegetable pie twice already :) Well, let's try it?
Ingredients:
For a mold with a diameter of 29 cm:
For the test:
- 400 g flour;
- 150 g butter;
- 2 small eggs;
- 50 ml cold water;
- 0.5 teaspoon of salt.
For the vegetable filling:
- 2 young zucchini;
- 2 small eggplants;
- 3 red bell peppers;
- 3-4 ripe, large tomatoes;
- Basil, parsley - several sprigs each;
- 100 g ham or tasty sausage;
- Salt, ground black pepper to your taste;
- 0.5 teaspoon of sugar;
- Vegetable oil for frying vegetables;
- Butter for greasing the pan;
- 1 egg white;
- 50-100 g of hard cheese that melts well (I added egg white and cheese to the filling, since in the original version, just with vegetables, the tasty filling fell out of the pie onto the plate when bitten. And the egg and cheese slightly bind the filling, and the pieces It’s better for vegetables to “keep to the heap”).
- 1 yolk and 1 teaspoon milk for greasing the pie.
How to bake:
Let's knead the dough. It turns out to be very similar to shortbread in terms of preparation technology and taste, but more elastic, since it contains not only yolks, but also proteins. Therefore, the dough rolls out easily, does not tear, and you can use it to make decorations for a pie, almost like yeast dough.
Keep the butter at room temperature for 20 minutes until it becomes soft. Sift the flour into a bowl with butter and rub it into crumbs with your hands.
Add eggs, salt and knead the dough, gradually pouring in cold water - not all at once, but as much as it takes until the dough stops crumbling and becomes a whole kolobok, soft but not sticky.
Place the dough in the refrigerator, and in the meantime prepare the vegetable filling for the pie.
Wash all the vegetables. Cut zucchini or zucchini into 1-1.5 cm cubes. If the skin is thin, you don’t have to peel it off. Heat 1-1.5 tablespoons of vegetable oil in a frying pan: olive or sunflower, aromatic, will do. Add the zucchini and fry for 4-5 minutes, stirring, until half cooked.
Meanwhile, cut the eggplants into the same cubes. When the zucchini becomes slightly soft and slightly golden, transfer from the frying pan to a plate lined with a paper napkin.
And pour the blue ones into the frying pan and also fry, stirring, until slightly browned.
Then pour it onto another plate with a napkin to absorb excess oil.
And pour chopped onion and ham into the frying pan, cut into the same cubes as vegetables. Stirring, fry for 3-4 minutes, and while it is frying, cut the pepper into strips and then into small square pieces.
Add the pepper to the onion and ham, fry together a little. Our task is not to fry the food, but to achieve softness and light browning.
While the pepper is sauteing, pour boiling water over the tomatoes, slightly cut from the bottom, for 1-2 minutes, then pour cold water over them and remove the skin. Cut the tomatoes into cubes. If you are a little too lazy to do all this, or it’s winter, you can use canned tomatoes in tomato juice.
Add tomatoes to the pan, season with salt, pepper, basil (can be dried) and parsley (fresh or frozen); add chopped garlic.
Mix the whole delicious company and cook for 15 minutes over medium heat until the liquid evaporates, stirring from time to time.
When the tomato paste with ham and pepper has cooled, combine it with the rest of the filling ingredients: fried zucchini and blue zucchini.
Add salt to taste and mix. The filling for the vegetable pie is ready!
Now take the dough out of the refrigerator and divide it into two equal parts.
Let's prepare a mold - small, with low sides. I took a tart pan. Line the bottom of the pan with baking paper. Grease the paper and sides of the mold with butter.
After flouring the table, roll out one part of the dough into a thin circle, 2 mm thick, and with a diameter several cm larger than the bottom of the mold, so that there is enough dough to cover the sides.
Roll out the second part of the dough into a cake 1-2 cm smaller than the first.
After rolling the cake onto a rolling pin, transfer it to the mold and unwind it.
Carefully lining the sides with dough, trim the edges by rolling them over the pan with a rocker.
Pour the filling into the mold with the dough.
Spread the filling evenly with a spoon.
Carefully trim the edges of the second cake so that it becomes round.
We transfer the top cake in the same way, laying it evenly on top of the pie.
Carefully pinch the edges of the top and bottom cakes. To make it more convenient, I used the handle of a teaspoon to pry up the edges of the bottom cake.
Poke the top crust with a fork in several places so that steam from the juicy filling has somewhere to escape and the pie does not crack during baking.
Shape the rest of the dough into a ball, roll it out a couple of millimeters thick and make decorations.
Form the pie and brush with yolk beaten with a spoonful of milk. My daughter and I tinkered with the decoration, but it's worth it! It's very interesting to make such beauty :)
Place the pie in the oven for 30 minutes at 190-200C. At the end, to brown, you can increase it to 210C. We determine readiness by the dough and the color of the crust: if the dough is not raw, soft, but crispy, and the pie has become golden brown, it is ready.
What a beautiful pie!
After taking the cake out of the oven, let it cool for 15 minutes in the pan so that it doesn’t break when transferring it.
Then carefully move the pie onto a plate. Or you can cut it straight into the mold. Moreover, this vegetable pie is recommended to be served warm. Not quite hot, since hot dough, even though there is little of it, is harmful to eat, but warm :)
With sweet tea or with a first course - in any combination, a pie with eggplant, zucchini and tomatoes is delicious!
Try this while vegetables are in season as an alternative to sweet pies.
Cooking instructions
1 hour Print
1. Dough: mix 225 grams of white wheat flour, 4 tablespoons of olive oil, 1 egg, salt, pepper in a food processor or mixer to form crumbs. You can add 1-2 tablespoons of water so that the crumbs turn into a homogeneous dough, which you can immediately put in the refrigerator. Mixer tool It is convenient to beat egg whites, as well as knead other substances like minced meat or dough, not by hand (as this requires effort and time), but using a mixer like a KitchenAid. For example, the Artisan model has ten speed modes and three different attachments for working with any consistency, and it is also a universal food processor.
2. Filling: thinly slice eggplants and peppers (especially tasty when they are young and thin-skinned, they smell very tasty in the pie), place in one layer on a baking sheet, sprinkle with olive oil and place in a very hot oven. Bake until vegetables are tender and browned (about 30 minutes).
Crib How to process sweet peppers
4. Prepare the filling: beat eggs, sour cream, milk and cheese, add garlic (passed through a garlic press) and a handful of finely chopped herbs (I put parsley).
Crib How to cut greens
5. Remove the dough from the refrigerator. Roll it out in a mold (I usually choose a shape in which it won’t be embarrassing to put it on the table right away: transparent, rectangular, but white ceramic, like for cakes, is also suitable). It is convenient to roll out the dough with a small rolling pin, which can easily maneuver around the corners of the mold.
6. Spread the dough with a small layer of mustard using a brush or a soft flexible spatula. Place tomatoes cut into rings over the mustard, cooked eggplants and peppers on them, and a few chopped pitted olives on top.
7. Pour the filling evenly over the vegetables.
8. Bake in the oven until golden brown (about 20-25 minutes).
Try this simple but delicious eggplant cheese pie! It is, as you may have guessed, unsweetened, but very tasty. Juicy vegetable filling and melted cheese harmonize perfectly with the crumbly dough. The kefir dough here is especially tasty: it looks like shortbread, reminds me of another wonderful snack pie - with onions and processed cheese.
Pie with eggplants and tomatoes under a cheese crust - very filling, I ate a piece with tea - and it was like I had lunch! You can also take a slice of pie instead of bread for the first or second course.
Eggplant pie with kefir is a very successful recipe, and I would like to repeat it with some other filling. For example, it should work well with mushrooms. By the way, if you don’t immediately tell your family that the pie is made with eggplants, they may well think that it is with mushrooms - the blue ones in the filling become very similar to mushrooms.
Ingredients:
For the test:
- 400 g flour;
- 1 teaspoon of soda without top;
- 1 teaspoon sugar;
- ¼ teaspoon salt;
- 200 g butter;
- 150 ml of kefir, or yogurt without additives, or low-fat sour cream;
- 0.5 tablespoon of vinegar.
I forgot to add vinegar to the dough, but it still turned out crumbly and tasty, since the soda was extinguished by the fermented milk products.
I took kefir in half with 15% sour cream. If you use only kefir or yogurt, you may need a little more flour, since these fermented milk products are less thick than sour cream.
For filling:
- 2 large eggplants or 3 medium ones;
- 3-5 tomatoes;
- 150 g hard cheese;
- 1 teaspoon sugar;
- ¼ teaspoon salt;
- 1-2 tablespoons of vegetable oil;
- Ground black pepper to taste and other spices: paprika, turmeric, all-purpose seasoning.
The original recipe on Webspoon uses olives for garnish, but I used cherry tomatoes.
How to bake:
Let's take the butter out of the refrigerator in advance, about 30 minutes before you start preparing the dough: you need the butter to soften naturally, at room temperature. If you are in a hurry, you can speed up the process in the microwave, by a couple of tens of seconds at low power - but in this case, eating rice, the butter will melt, or it will simply soften unevenly: it is already melted at the edges, but hard in the middle. And with such forcefully softened butter, the dough turns out less tasty, not so crumbly. Therefore, I recommend waiting until the oil becomes soft on its own :)
Sift the flour mixed with soda into a bowl (this way the soda will be better distributed in the flour and dissipated evenly). Add salt and sugar and grind into crumbs with soft butter.
Add kefir and sour cream, vinegar or lemon juice (optional), knead a soft dough that does not stick to your hands. If it sticks, you need a little more flour; if it crumbles, use a little kefir.
Leave the dough for half an hour at room temperature.
In the meantime, let's prepare the filling. Wash the eggplants, remove the tail, cut into 1x1 cm cubes, add salt and leave for 10 minutes.
Then rinse with cold water and leave in a colander to drain.
Heat the vegetable oil in a frying pan, add the blue ones and fry over medium heat for 4-5 minutes, stirring from time to time.
Add tomatoes, grated on a coarse grater and then rubbed through a colander/sieve, sugar, salt and spices.
Simmer for a few more minutes.
On a table sprinkled with flour or on a sheet of parchment, roll out the dough to about 3 mm thick. I baked in a 29 cm mold, but judging by the thickness of the dough, you can use a larger mold, such as a square or rectangular one.
Transfer the dough to a pan lined with parchment. We collect the edges in waves.
We spread the filling.
Grind the cheese on a coarse grater and sprinkle on top.
Decorate with cherry tomatoes.
Place the pie in the oven, preheated to 180-200C, and bake for about half an hour - until the dough is baked (check with a skewer). When the skewer is dry and the dough turns golden, the eggplant pie is ready.
Taking it out of the oven, cool for 10 minutes in the pan, and then transfer it to a dish and sprinkle with fresh herbs.
You can try the eggplant pie warm. Just drink it with warm tea, not cold water, because the pie contains processed cheese.