From the Salmon

While preparing to have some friends over to watch the Academy Awards on Sunday night. I stumbled upon a recipe for Confit Byaldi— the fancied-up titular dish from what was destined to be the year’s Best Animated Feature, Ratatouille.

The recipe was created for the film by Thomas Keller, the renowned chef of Napa’s French Laundry. It looked like it would require a lot of slicing, but it also looked beautiful, so I decided to give it a shot.

The first step was to create a pipérade — a chunky reduction of peppers, tomatoes, onions, garlic and herbs. At this stage, it’s a good idea to cook off as much liquid as possible, since the sliced vegetables will be adding more liquid later:

The next step involved slicing the squash and tomatoes into rounds 1/16 of an inch thick. (I didn’t use eggplant for this recipe because three of the eventual diners, including my wife, didn’t so much care for eggplant.)

This was a bit arduous, but I’m not sure if it would’ve been easier with a rodent pulling on my hair.

Next came the most fun part of the dish: arranging the alternating slices on top of the pipérade. If you try this yourself, it’s ideal to choose tomatoes that have roughly the same circumference as the squash. (Mine were a little larger, but that’s what I get for making the dish in winter, I guess.)

After a couple of hours in the oven, mostly covered, I ended up with something that looked great, smelled amazing, and tasted delicious. Quite a trifecta.

And it was marvelous with cedar-plank-grilled salmon.

I don’t know what I would’ve cooked if that surfing penguin movie had won.