Summer Vegetable Tian | Everyday Dorie

Not my first rodeo when it comes to tian. Tian refers to both the pottery casserole in which the dish is cooked and the dish itself. We’re exploring the summer vegetable tian recipe from Everyday Dorie. Like most of our friends at Cook-the-Book-Fridays, we’ve made baked Provencal vegetables while cooking through My Paris Kitchen with David Lebovitz.

The fact that I’ve made this dish many times before presents its own issues. As the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempts, or at least, inattention. These are the steps I should have paid more attention to but didn’t:

• Get tomatoes, zucchinis, eggplants and red onions of comparable size so when cut horizontally, they would line up neatly in a tight circle of about equal height. My eggplants and onions are far too big for the task. (See the tips in baked Provencal vegetables for details.)
• Slice the vegetables about 1/4 inch thick. The mandoline and a sharp knife are indispensable. I use both. However, they need to be sharpened badly. I can’t think of another dish that requires more exacting knife skill. I didn’t show up for the task.
• Dorie says: “if your vegetables melt and border on jam, you’re made a good tian… Bake the tian for 70 to 90 minutes (400°F), until the vegetables are meltingly tender and the juices are bubbling.” To make a long story short, mine was nearly burnt. So I baked the tian the second time by adding 50% humidity in the convection/steam oven setting and cover the pan halfway through. Still, it was marginally better. The veggies were certainly not jammy, but too charred in some places for my taste. Where’s the sauce? Maybe I didn’t put in the requisite 5 to 9 tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil for the dish.

One thing I like though is how tasty the tian is with slices of toasted homemade whole-wheat sourdough bread.