Recette du Succès

Answer:

HUNGRY FOR MORE

This is a recipe for ratatouille, with a twist. As hinted by the flavortext ("all mixed up"), some of the words in this recipe are scrambled. Indeed, each step has one "word" which can be (almost) unscrambled to spell a French word that makes sense in context. Each of these misspelled words is also missing a particular letter ("some key ingredients were missing").

Mixed Up Context English Français Missing Ingredient
Step 1. Pueffachéz the oven... Preheat Préchauffez R
Step 2. ... take your beguiner, tomatoes, squash, and zucchini... eggplant aubergine A
Step 3. ... Ausé the onion, garlic, and bell peppers... Sauté Sauté T
Step 4. ... A typical pattern is eggplant, tomato, squash, then courtege... zucchini courgette T
Step 5. ... If you have any excess nonsteaminess... seasoning assaisonnement A
Step 6. Remove the pan from the ridgafier... fridge frigidaire I
Step 7. ... This dish is also duecixié the next day... delicious délicieux L
Step 8. ... celebrate by sharing with pacino and family... friends copains S

Taking the missing ingredient from each of these French words, you'll get RAT TAILS. By checking this against the solution checker, we’ll prompt:

Keep going... Maybe look for the tails of the "rat"s?

As it turns out, this recipe was brought to you by rats. If you revisit the recipe, you'll find that there are a number of "rat"s hidden throughout. (Note that some rats are a little fatter than others, so there may be spaces or other punctuation between the letters.) The "rat tails" are the letters that follow immediately after each "rat":

Recipe Rat Tails
Step 1. Pueffachéz the oven (this can take a rather long time, ~15 min, so do this first!) to a temperature of 190°C. H U
Step 2. While your oven heats up, take your beguiner, tomatoes, squash, and zucchini and slice them into ~2 mm rounds, preferably thinner. (At no point should any slice be thicker than 3 mm). N
Step 3. Now it's time to make the sauce! Heat the olive oil in a 30 cm oven-safe pan over medium-high heat. Ausé the onion, garlic, and bell peppers until soft, about 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper, then add crushed tomatoes. Stir at gentle speed to begin with, until the ingredients are well mixed. Then, remove from heat, add basil, and stir at relatively faster speeds until smooth. G R
Step 4. Arrange the sliced veggies in alternating patterns on top of the sauce from the outer edge to the middle of the pan. Season liberally with salt and pepper. (A typical pattern is eggplant, tomato, squash, then courtege. It might look peculiar at first, but by the time you finish, it will be magnifique!) Y F
Step 5. Time for the herb seasoning! In a small bowl, mix together the basil, garlic, parsley, thyme, salt, pepper, and olive oil. Spoon the herb seasoning over the vegetables, then chill in the refrigerator for a few minutes. Tip: don't overdo the seasoning! If you have any excess nonsteaminess, you can store it in an extra t ray for next time. O R
Step 6. Remove the pan from the ridgafier, cover it with foil, then bake for 40 minutes. Uncover, then bake for another (at most) 20 minutes, until the vegetables are softened. M
Step 7. Serve while hot as a main dish or side. This dish is also duecixié the next day! Not much preparatory work is required -- cover with foil and reheat in a 180°C oven for 15 minutes, or simply microwave to desired temp. O
Step 8. Consider a tradition where you celebrate by sharing with pacino and family over a movie night! Bon appétit! R E

After you sniff out all the rat tails, you'll get HUNGRY FOR MORE, the answer to this puzzle.

Authors' Notes

This was a fun puzzle to write. In our early designs, we came up with some other ideas that included mixed up alphabet soup, but decided that since all our other puzzles were more visual-based, it would be good (for variety) to include a text-based puzzle in our hunt. This makes sense for a recipe, and what better recipe to write for Ratatouille than the title dish itself?

An interesting little story is that in our first playtest of this puzzle, we actually misspelled "ridgafier" as "ridgifier", causing the missing letter to be an "a" instead of an "i". As a result, our playtester got "RATTAALS" as their intermediate answer. They applied the "unscramble-with-an-extra-letter" step one more time to this, and found that (amazingly), TRANSLATA (English: TRANSLATE) is an exact anagram of RATTAALS plus one extra letter. This seemed like a perfect answer, given the mechanics of the puzzle, but it wasn't what we were aiming for. A fun little surprise to be sure!