Grant Crilly is the Executive Director and cofounder of ChefSteps. Grant is a classically trained chef and, prior to ChefSteps, he worked on the award-winning cookbook series Modernist Cuisine and cooked at various restaurants, including L’Astrance in Paris, Busaba in Mumbai, and Mistral Kitchen in Seattle.

Grant Crilly

Mandoline

Breville Super Q™

Parchment paper

Round casserole pan

Ring mold, 3 1/2-inch (89 mm) diameter

Breville Joule® Oven Air Fryer Pro

Roma tomato(es)

Ice water

Zucchini

Yellow zucchini

Japanese eggplant

Sweet onion(s)

Garlic

Red bell pepper(s)

Olive oil

Salt

Black pepper

Rosemary

Thyme

Parsley

Chives

We’re always pushing forward with new stuff: new recipes, new techniques, new videos. But sometimes looking back to see how far we’ve come offers up avenues for inspiration and education—some of our recipes and videos are over a decade old at this point. (My, how time flies!)With ChefSteps Revisited, we’re looking back at some of our most popular videos to see what we did right, what opportunities we may have missed, and what Grant and our team looked like as young bucks.In this video, Grant looks back at our Pixar-style Ratatouille, which, with over 12 million views, is our most-viewed video of all time!

ChefSteps Revisited: Pixar-Style Ratatouille

Preheat oven to [f 300]

Bring a pot of water to a vigorous boil. Prepare a large pot of ice water and set it on the counter nearby.Score the bottom of each tomato with an X—you’re aiming to pierce just the skin, so don’t cut too deeply.
 
Drop each tomato into the boiling water for about 45 seconds, then transfer immediately to the ice water to halt cooking.NOTE: Blanching time may vary a little depending on tomato size. Look for the skin to split along the length of the tomato, then remove—this will make peeling easier.

Blanch tomatoes

Remove tomatoes from ice bath, and peel and discard the skins. Use a knife to slice tomatoes into evenly shaped pieces about [mm 2] thick.
 
Using a mandoline, slice remaining veggies into [mm 2] thick pieces.Set aside and reserve the scraps for the sauce.

Slice vegetables

With a knife, finely chop onions and garlic. Seed and chop bell pepper.
 
Add olive oil to a medium-sized pot and warm over medium heat. Lightly fry garlic until translucent. Add onions; bell peppers; and reserved tomato, zucchini, and eggplant scraps (from Step 3), and cook slowly while stirring. Reduce heat to medium-low, and place lid atop pot to lightly steam the contents until soft. Remove lid, and continue cooking until onions appear jammy. (For a brighter flavor, make sure you don’t let the bottoms brown.) Remove from heat.Transfer mixture to blender. Add salt, pepper, olive oil, and rosemary or other fresh herbs. Blend on high until puréed. Set aside.NOTE: Consider the cartouche. You’re gonna have to cover your ratatouille as you cook. You can use the lid of your pan, but we suggest making a parchment cartouche instead. Vented in the middle, this cover will allow steam to escape and help you achieve the delightfully jammy veggies we’re after. It’s easy—and pretty fun to make too. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S6oFiM8gpw">Here’s how</a>.

Make sauce

Pour sauce evenly into a round casserole pan, and spread it around. Don’t go crazy—if you use too much sauce, it will seep through and ruin your perfectly shingled top layer. Imagine you are saucing a pizza, then stop when your pizza looks properly sauced.Now begin arranging your perfect vegetable slices in a pattern on top of the sauce. For example, start with yellow zucchini, then add green zucchini, then eggplant, then tomato. Repeat. The top edges of your slices should all be at about the same height. Once you have a stack of slices, arrange them in a tight row along the outside of the casserole pan, and continue working inward, ring by ring, until the pan is full. Be sure not to press veggies too deeply into your sauce; that gets messy.

Make ratatouille!

Sprinkle ratatouille generously with salt, and season with more olive oil and fresh herbs if desired.Place lid or parchment cutout on top. Transfer to the oven and cook for about 90 minutes. Check every now and then to make sure the liquid is reducing. If your ratatouille starts to look too much like a stew, remove the lid or cartouche and continue cooking uncovered.

Season and bake ratatouille

Want to plate your ratatouille up all pretty like in the movie? Use a ring mold to create that perfectly shaped portion. Drizzle with oil, top with fresh herbs (we used parsley and rosemary), and garnish with a single chive stem. Serve, taste, and get ready for this rustic yet refined dish to melt your icy heart.

Prepare your inner Anton Ego

Okay, so. Now that you’ve made a ’touille with classic flavors, it’s time to mix it up and try something new. We offer three of our variations here—there are ingredient amounts for reference, but don’t get too hung up on them. This dish is all about versatility and fun—if you’re down one rutabaga, don’t go running to the store. Your dish will turn out fine. We hope these riffs inspire you to create your own custom ’touilles at home! And don’t forget to share pics and recipes on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/chefsteps/">Instagram</a>—tag ’em with #chefsteps, and we may just share them with the whole crew.

Ratatouille riffs!

This root-vegetable riff is perfect for a snow day snack or a clean-out-the-fridge Meatless Monday meal.Heat oven to [f 300].Slice veggies and fruit thinly with a mandoline, reserving scraps.Set aside slices and place scraps in the bottom of a large casserole pan. Add cream to cover.Begin stacking veggies and fruit slices, alternating in a pattern as with the classic ratatouille above. Starting at the edge of the pan, nestle stacks in a ring around the edge of the pan, then begin a second row inside the first. Continue until you’ve traveled the circumference of the pan twice.Drizzle your Rootatouille generously with olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and cover with a lid or parchment paper (see note to Step 4 above). Bake for 90 minutes, garnish with fresh herbs (we used parsley), and serve!

Turnips

Rutabagas

Green apple

Parsnips

Cream

Rootatouille

Sweet and delicious—especially when topped with a fat scoop of vanilla ice cream or homemade whip—this is a simple, relatively light dessert that’s gluten-free to boot.Heat oven to [f 300].With a mandoline, thinly slice yo’ apples. Set aside. In a bowl, combine butter, sugar, and cream, then mix together. Transfer mixture to a pan and bring to a boil on the stovetop. Grate cinnamon over the mixture with a microplane or just sprinkle some in from a jar—we’re not judging, and anyway, we can’t even see you.Add the cream mixture to the bottom of a large, round casserole pan, and add in any scraps left over from your apple slicing. Shingle those apples, alternating colors to make a pretty pattern. Once you’ve got a stack, lay it in a row against the outside of your pan. Continue with more stacks. When the first ring is complete, begin arranging an inside row until you have a snug interior circle.You can eat Appletouille raw or bake for about 30 minutes to soften and warm the apples. Enjoy!

Yellow apples

Red apples

Butter

Sugar

Cinnamon

Appletouille

You can prep this one the day before, then just heat and serve with eggs for breakfast. Heat oven to [f 300].With a mandoline, slice up that leek and drizzle generously with oil, then season with salt and pepper. Transfer to a large, round, oven-safe casserole pan. Saute over medium heat for about five minutes, or until the leeks’ volume is reduced by half. Set aside.With a knife, thinly slice up your sausages. Using your mandoline or a knife, slice potatoes. It’s time to top those leeks with your potatoes and sausage! Begin shingling them in a pattern—so, like, purple-skinned potato followed by red-skinned potato followed by yellow followed by sausage. Then start over. Once you have a stack in hand, nestle it in around the outside of the pan, and fill out the ring with more stacks. Repeat the process to create a small circle inside of that one, and continue with smaller and smaller circles until you’ve reached the center of the pan.Bake for about 35 minutes—cook times will vary depending on your oven, the potatoes you use, and how much browning you’re after. Top with a couple of <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/tips-tricks-edible-emoji-egg">Emoji Eggs</a> and minced chives, and serve that bad boy up for breakfast.

Leek

Pork sausage(s)

Small potatoes

Breakfastouille

It’s 2007, and you’re sitting in a darkened theater on a July afternoon, about to watch a two-hour-long cartoon about a rat. Maybe you’ve brought a kid for cover; maybe you didn’t even bother—this is a Pixar film, after all, and Pixar has already made Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., and The Incredibles. With their ultracharming, ultrabelievable characters, relatable themes, and truly funny jokes, those movies feel in many ways more adult than the live-action blockbusters with which they share marquee space. For hardcore film fans, and certainly for critics, this cartoon rat movie isn’t just acceptable adult fare—it’s required viewing.Ratatouille doesn’t disappoint. It’s such a beautiful, fun, easy-to-love movie! And from its murine protagonist’s silvery coat (1.15 million hairs, each individually rendered) to the gleaming copper pots in the kitchen where he cooks, it is unbelievably, insanely detailed. Food is no exception. Famously, Pixar hired Chef Thomas Keller—the very personification of fussy fare—to serve as culinary consultant, and the French Laundry luminary worked with the Pixar crew to realize the film’s eponymous dish. This ratatouille wasn’t <a href="http://www.pbs.org/food/recipes/classic-ratatouille/">the rustic stew</a> favored by niçoise grand-mères. It was, instead, a mosaic of vibrantly colored vegetables, sliced paper thin, fastidiously plated with a ring mold, and sauced with a peppery dressing called a piperade. While it may not resemble old-school ratatouille, this version makes the most of that stew’s iconic flavors—tomato, zucchini, peppers, onion, eggplant, and garlic. The peppers and onions get mixed into that aforementioned piperade, which is thinly spread across the bottom of a casserole pan. On top: those carefully shingled, perfectly sliced vegetables. Hounded by a feverish food press hungry for the details, Keller explained that he liked to call the variation confit byaldi, a reference to a Turkish eggplant dish known as İmam bayıldı. But to everyone who fell in love with the movie, this was ratatouille: a dish fit for a food critic yet so simple a rat could cook it. (Okay, maybe only a magic animated rat with a culinary gift, but still.) If you’re like us, its bright beauty has never escaped your mind, so we’re pleased to report we’ve got a foolproof recipe that you can use to experience the quiet bliss of making one yourself. We enjoyed making this layered dish so much that we created some fun variations on it too. Think Breakfastouille, a ’touille with root vegetables, and even a sweet ’touille you can whip up whenever a tough dessert critic stops by unannounced. We hope these recipes will inspire you the way this lovely movie has always inspired us. With ratatouille—confit byaldi, whatever—there are many ways to get creative. They’re all going to be delicious.

Pixar-Style Ratatouille