Eggplant Caponata - Best Summer Eggplant Recipe!

Caponata, the favorite of mine. I think it's going to be a favorite of yours. You probably have seen this in Trader Joe's or maybe your supermarket in little jars. Maybe you walk by it and you say, Oh, I want to buy this, but it doesn't look like a good value. Well, we're going to show you how to make a lot of it today for very cheap and better than anything you're going to buy in the store. To start off, going to take clean, good quality eggplant, and you're going to cube it. Now, does the size have to be exact? No, it doesn't. You know, we're just going to get this to the point where we can adequately coat it with olive oil and salt and pepper and get a good roasting on it. Traditionally, eggplant caponata is made, the eggplant is fried, but because I'm doing so much of it today, it's much easier to do this on trays, cook it at a high temperature, and you still get that nice caramelization color. So I'm going to put a lot of olive oil on them, salt and pepper and get it in my oven. I'm going to cook it at 425 degrees Fahrenheit for 25 minutes to start, but you'll be able to check it as it's cooking. While that's cooking, dice up some celery, about a cup and a cup of red onion. Now you can make the, you can leave the onion into long pieces or you can do a dice like I'm doing here. It really depends what you're in the mood for. And that celery and red onion give a great crunch and texture difference to the soft eggplant. Here I have pitted Sicilian green olives, any good quality olive would be fine. In fact, do the one that you like the most. I'm going to cut these olives, slice them. You can chop them up even more. You could even just cut them in half and that would be fine too. So I've got about a cup of them. We're going to put them off to the side. Capers, love capers, such a great potent ingredient. I always buy it from Costco. That huge jar is $5. You can't beat that, but make sure you always run your capers through a strainer to get rid of some of that salt because they're very salty. Pignoli nuts, Costco has a great deal and these were from Trader Joe's. They're very expensive now. They've been expensive for the last few years. Try to find them in one of those two places. Take your parsley, quarter cup, mince it, chop it, whatever. Get it off to the side. Get your heat very low in a dry pan and put in the quarter cup of pignoli nuts to let them toast. Here's that eggplant. It's looking really good, really soft and really caramelized, just how we want it. And it was really hot. So I had to keep changing gloves, but that's great color on that eggplant. It's really good for roasting it. It might not be quite as good if you fried it, but it's a heck of a lot easier. Take a really large pan, large enough to hold everything and medium low heat, quarter cup of olive oil and get the celery and the red onion right in there. So here's tomato paste. Tomato paste is a Sicilian product. We're making Sicilian caponata. So all these ingredients, they're all Southern Italian based and they just go together in this dish. So I don't want to cook this onion or celery too long, maybe two minutes. I want to keep that crunch and I'm going to add in a full can of tomato paste. Standard can of tomato paste in America is six ounces. So whenever I say can of tomato paste, that's what I mean. Get it in there, cook it for a few minutes. Tomato paste, the flavor is going to boost. It's going to get stronger as you cook it out. I'm going to add in a cup of the chopped green olives. Get in about two tablespoons of capers and these are all subject to change. If you like more of one or the other and a quarter cup of raisins. I love raisins in here. This dish is that sweet, sour and salty. They're just great flavors. They go together. Going to add two tablespoons of sugar. That's right. You need a lot of sugar in this and you know what to hold back if you want in the beginning, but you'll see you'll need sugar. Quarter cup of red wine vinegar. Let these flavors come together by mixing it. Let it cook for about three to five minutes here to develop. You can hear it, smell it. It's so good. Really tell if it's good. We have to taste it. And you know what? I think it needs more sugar. So I added another tablespoon. I'm going to touch more vinegar. I don't want to get those pinoli nuts, the toasted pinoli nuts. Get them in there. Mix that around and we got to taste it one more time. Now we added more of the sugar. We added the nuts. So I make sure it's good and then we're going to get in all of that eggplant. I love doing eggplant like this. I do like this for a la norma too, which again is non-traditional, but it's easy and you just can't beat that color that's on there. Going to turn off the heat now completely. I'm going to fold the eggplant into the caponata. Parsley, gives a nice freshness to it. You could also add mint to this or basil. So the best thing to do with caponata, well not the best. I mean, one of the, one really good thing is to cut bread on a bias and I have regular white Italian bread here, seeded. And I got a hot cast iron pan. I'm just going to toast it. This would be even better if you do it right on the grill outside, serve this whole caponata outside. But you know, I was making the video in here. So I took out the cast iron pan and they, they toast up really quickly. And you spoon this on top. This is great as an appetizer, but it could be a light dinner too. Caponata gets better the longer you leave it in the fridge and we'll see you next time.