Easy Eggplant Recipe (One-Pan Dinner) - Alyona’s Cooking (2024)

FAQs

Easy Eggplant Recipe (One-Pan Dinner) - Alyona’s Cooking? ›

Eggplants are known to absorb a lot of fat while cooking. A useful tip to prevent sogginess and greasiness is to salt sliced or diced eggplant and let it sit for an hour. This helps to draw out moisture. Next, rinse and drain any liquid from the sliced eggplant, then pat dry before cooking.

Eggplants are known to absorb a lot of fat while cooking. A useful tip to prevent sogginess and greasiness is to salt sliced or diced eggplant and let it sit for an hour. This helps to draw out moisture. Next, rinse and drain any liquid from the sliced eggplant, then pat dry before cooking.

Fried or baked eggplant is delicious, but they are not the only ways to cook eggplant. Try it sautéed, stir-fried, grilled, or broiled.

Conventional wisdom has you salt the slices to draw bitter liquid out of the eggplant. Once the slices have sat for about a hour, you're suppose to rinse them under cool water to remove any excess salt and then proceed with your recipe.

The skin is entirely edible, though with larger eggplants it can be a little tough. If your eggplant is young, tender, and on the small side, the nutrient-rich skin can probably be left on for skillet frying or braising. Otherwise, peel the skin and then slice or cube the flesh.

Older recipes call for salting eggplant to draw out the bitter juices, but today's eggplants are less bitter (unless very large), so salting is largely unnecessary. It will, however, help the spongy flesh absorb less oil and crisp up like a dream.

Soak it in milk.

Soak eggplant slices or cubes in milk for about 30 minutes before cooking. The milk not only tempers the bitterness, but it actually makes for eggplant that is extra creamy, since the vegetable acts like a sponge and soaks up a good amount of milk in its flesh.

You can't eat eggplant raw, but you can cook eggplant in many ways: boil, steam, sauté, stir-fry, braise, bake, deep-fry, grill, broil, and microwave.

The secret for keeping the purple in eggplants is soaking it in vinegar for 5 minutes. This step is optional as it doesn't affect the taste, but if you are serving guests, soak the eggplant in 6 cups of water and 3 tbsp of vinegar for 5 minutes, and the eggplant will stay nice and purple even after steaming.

Why is eggplant tough when cooked? ›

You mentioned that once they turned out tough and chewy: then they were not cooked fully through. Vegetables are not like meat, which turn rubbery when overcooked. They turn soft rather. Watch out for the opposite as well: Eggplants when cooked for a long time may turn mushy.

Eggplants have a spongy texture that absorbs fats and flavors perfectly, but only when slightly dehydrated with the help of a couple of sprinkles of salt, explains Norton. "Add a pinch of salt to both sides of eggplant slices and let them sit on the counter for up to an hour.

“The absorptiveness of eggplant can be reduced by collapsing its spongy structure before frying,” he writes. Which you can do by microwaving it before frying (!) or salting slices that'll draw out the water and close up those air pockets, giving you a firmer flesh to work with.