Eggplant can be really delicious - but make sure you do THIS before preparing ANY eggplant dish!
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Eggplant is a versatile vegetable that plays well in so many dishes. It can be prepared in a variety of ways. Our favorites are eggplant lasagna (where lightly fried eggplant takes the place of lasagna noodles), eggplant parmesan, fried eggplant with cornmeal crust, and the middle eastern dish, baba ganoush (similar to hummus, but prepared with eggplant.
While this vegetable (it is technically a fruit) is commonly called eggplant in the U.S., it is known in other parts of the world by various names, including guinea squash, brinjal, or melongene. It is native to India and Southeast Asia.
No matter what dish you are going to prepare, eggplant has a naturally bitter flavor. That’s because Eggplant is a member of the same plant family as tobacco, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and even Belladonna, AKA, NightShade. In fact, these are all part of the nightshade family (Solanaceae). As such, eggplant has nicotine in its seeds as well as the flesh. Nicotine, in small doses, is not especially toxic, but it sure doesn’t taste good!
Cooking helps reduce the bitter taste, but we take it one step further. In fact, we don’t make ANY eggplant dish without leaching out as much nicotine as we can by salting the raw fruit before preparing it. To do this, simply sprinkle salt generously on the cut fruit, placed in a bowl, as you go. By osmosis, the nicotine will release in the resulting saltwater and collect in the bottom of the bowl. After about 30 minutes to an hour, we drain and rinse the pieces and pat them dry.
Not only will the eggplant taste better, but the eggplant will be softened more, making the texture even better! Even as important, salted and pressed eggplant will soak up significantly less fat when cooking, so it will be less greasy and have a superior consistency.
Try it the next time you cook eggplant! If you’ve given up on eggplant, give it another try using this method and see if you don’t become an eggplant fan!
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Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com.
You should never eat eggplant without doing this first.
Stay tuned.
Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com.
I have learned to love a well-prepared eggplant dish.
Other parts of the world call this the Abergeen.
And as a matter of fact,
some of the popular paint palettes
call out this color as Abergeen,
but that's where it came from.
The name in other areas of the world for the eggplant.
Now, the eggplant, you shouldn't eat it
unless you do what I'm gonna tell you
in just a moment first.
You need to understand that the eggplant
is part of the nightshade family.
What does that mean?
Well, nightshade plants have nicotine in them.
Some of the ones you would know about are tomatoes,
potatoes, peppers, tobacco,
even the famous poisonous plant, nightshade, belladonna.
All of them have nicotine
along with other items in them as well.
So if you're going to do any kind of eggplant dish,
whether it's fried eggplant with a cornmeal,
or you're gonna do an eggplant parmigiana,
or just use it as a meat substitute
when you're doing lasagna,
you can do all those sort of things.
You gotta get the nicotine out of it.
And this is how you do it.
The first thing we'll do is go ahead and slice this up
and get it ready to go.
And then I'm gonna show you the next step.
Okay, now that we have the eggplant this way,
what we're gonna do to get it to let go of the nicotine
is we're gonna salt it.
So, no, don't worry about salt staying with it.
We're gonna rinse away the salt.
We're taking this freshly cut eggplant.
We're just gonna put it in layers.
And when we do, take a little bit of salt.
Rock salt is fine.
And we're just gonna put it all at the top.
Again, you can put a fair amount on this
because you're not going to keep the salt.
Go ahead and layer it up again and repeat.
After everything is coated with the salt,
let's let it set for 15 to 30 minutes and come back.
And you'll see nicotine is starting to weep out of this
and you can rinse that away,
which really removes the bitter taste.
Okay, we've had this sitting for at least a half an hour
and it doesn't have to be super critical.
As a matter of fact,
if you leave it a little bit more than a half an hour,
then it's gonna be fine.
It's just gonna pull more of the nicotine out.
Now, if you look close, let's go ahead and wrap this
so you're not looking through glare.
You'll see, let's just point here.
See all the brown residue
where it's coming off of the seeds in here?
That is nicotine saltwater
and this is working through osmosis.
If you don't think it pulled off much,
look what happens when I tilt the bowl.
Here we go.
Look at there.
So this is juices off of all of that
and this is very salty and very bitter
because it has a high nicotine amount.
So what we're gonna do now is just drain that off,
rinse it, put the rinsed eggplant in this bowl
and now it's ready for the next steps.
All right, you can just leave it in that bowl if you want
or you can just take it out and put it in another bowl.
But the saltwater is gone
and you now have prepared eggplant that now can be breaded.
It can be used as a meat substitute.
All the favorite ways you like to prepare eggplant
but now without that bitter taste
and it's a really delicious way
to bump up your eggplant dishes.
And you know what?
Some of our other favorite dishes
are prepared with avocados.
The problem is we always seem to forget
to go get the avocados until we need them
and when you get them, they're not ripe.
Well, check out this video here
where we'll show you a couple of ways
to ripen them overnight.
And while you're at it,
you can also check out this other video
that YouTube thinks is perfect for you.
What do you think?
How'd they do?
I'll wait.
It's a good stuff.
Hey, this is Dirt Farmer Jay from dirtfarmerjay.com.
