Delicious Stir Fried Eggplant with Garlic Sauce | Easy Chinese Recipe

Hey, welcome to the Park's Kitchen. I'm Pete. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving. Today, I'll make the best Chinese eggplant stir-fry dish. Eggplant is also super healthy. It's a great holiday calorie offsetting meal. I know that eggplant is not everyone's favorite because many people just don't know what to do with it. It may also seem like a mysterious ingredient, but with this recipe, eggplant will become your favorite. I promise. And it's almost better than meat. So, why don't we get started? First, slice up Chinese eggplant. Western eggplant is a lot bigger and has a lot thicker skin, so if you're using that, make sure you adjust your cooking time. I'm cutting them up in half an inch thickness. And the next thing we're going to do is we're going to marinate these in salt water for half an hour. One tablespoon of salt. Pour enough water to submerge all your eggplant. Give it a little bit of a hand stir to make sure all the salt gets evenly distributed. So, it's been 30 minutes now. I'm going to drain the water out. And basically, we're going to add cornstarch to the marinated eggplant. Adding one and a half tablespoon of cornstarch. Mix around your eggplant to make sure the cornstarch is evenly coated. Now heat up your wok to medium heat because we're going to do an initial cooking of the eggplant. Cooking eggplant takes a while. Our goal here is to char the skin until we get the caramelized texture while the inside is cooked about 90%. To do that, cook for about a minute and then put a lid on and cook for additional 4 minutes. During this cooking process, uncover the lid and stir around the eggplant a couple of times because they like to stick to the bottom. The heat from the bottom of the wok helps caramelize the texture but the cooking with the lid on basically steams the eggplant so that we'll end up with really juicy eggplant. Once they're done, transfer it to a dish and set it aside for now. Now we need garlic, ginger, and red chili pepper to get the aromatics going for the stir fry. First chop 5 cloves of garlic. And always, when you're stir frying, make sure all the ingredients are ready and chopped in advance because the stir frying process goes really fast and you don't want to burn anything. I'm also chopping some fresh ginger. Make sure you slice the skin off before you chop it. Also slicing a red chili pepper. I'm using a red jalapeno because that's what's available to me locally but you can use any red color chili peppers. It's really the color, the red color that's important here because it really pops the dish. And the green onion will be the final garnish but might as well get it all ready now. Now let's make the stir fry sauce. This eggplant dish is also called eggplant with garlic sauce. Ironically, there is no garlic in the sauce. The garlic goes in as an aromatic to the stir fry. And also to be honest, I'm not even sure why this is called garlic sauce because garlic is not even a significant part of the dish. And I listed all the ingredients in the description section so make sure you refer to that list. And since this is a Chinese stir fry dish, there are common recurring ingredients in the sauce such as black vinegar, Shaoxing wine, and doubanjiang. These should all be available in your local Asian market. Give it a good stir. Make sure you break down all that bean paste. Now heat up your wok once again to medium heat. And we're going to start with garlic and ginger. Give it a nice stir for about 30 seconds. And add your sliced red chili pepper. Now throw in all the cooked eggplant from earlier and pour in that stir fry sauce or whatever you want to call it, the garlic sauce without garlic. Now give it a good stir. We're basically going to cook this until the sauce reduces to a kind of a thicker consistency. And notice there's a lot of liquid in the sauce at the moment. We even put in a quarter cup of water. So it might take about three to four minutes to cook all this off uncovered to reduce the sauce to more of a thicker consistency. Every 30 seconds or so, come back and stir around your eggplant. You see right there, that's about the consistency of the sauce that we're looking for. We can now turn off the heat and add the final garnish, green onion, which I put on everything these days. Well there you have it folks, the best Chinese stir fry eggplant. You'll absolutely love this dish. If you enjoyed today's recipe, please hit that like button below and if you're new, please subscribe for more delicious recipes. Thanks for watching.