Caponata - The Easier Way To Make The Best Italian Appetizer

Welcome back, friends. Today, we're making eggplant caponata. In my opinion, this is the single best summer recipe you can make. Here are all the ingredients. Let's get into it right now. I always like to go over the ingredients. It helps me, but more importantly, it's about helping you. By getting all the ingredients out, it's just going to make making the dish so much easier, so I recommend you do this every single time. Let's talk about the main ingredient in this Sicilian eggplant caponata. It's eggplant. I have two fairly large eggplants. They weigh about two pounds. Sometimes you can find much larger ones in the store, or maybe you can do like three or four small ones. I have parsley here. This is not the best-looking parsley, and my stuff in the garden isn't doing so well either, but we'll get some good pieces here, and we'll use a little bit at the end for garnish. I actually do have some good basil, so maybe I'll grab some basil. Basil or parsley, either one is fine for this. This dish is all about the textures. There's a lot of texture in caponata, so to increase that texture, we have celery that I kind of cut into. I didn't even split the celery, which is perfect, and we just cut into pieces like this. That's three ribs. I have one red bell pepper. Next time I would cut these a little larger, but this will do. It's fine. Pine nuts, a quarter cup. That's going to add a lot of great texture. We're going to toast those. We have two tablespoons of capers that are rinsed, just to remove some of the salt. This is a salty dish. Castelvetrano olives, which are Sicilian green olives. We have one medium onion. We're going to slice that root to stem. We have another Sicilian ingredient, tomato paste, six ounces of it. That's one US can, and then a little bit of hot red pepper flakes. You can do that to taste. I'm saving this last part here. This is the sugar and the vinegar part, which is the most important part of this dish. It's a sweet and sour dish, or sweet and vinegar. These are some of the most important things about cooking in general, and getting it balanced out is what makes a dish either great or not good at all. We have two tablespoons of granulated sugar, and we have a quarter cup of red wine vinegar. You could also use dry white wine or even a red wine for this, because they're essentially the same thing. When wine spoils, it starts to become vinegar. I also have a quarter cup of raisins. That's going to further add to the sweetness. If you don't like them, if you're really against it, just remove it from this recipe. Maybe add a little bit more sugar to balance that out. That's pretty much it here. I want to talk about the olive oil. Since we're going to roast this eggplant in a second, we can use regular olive oil for that. Traditionally, this eggplant is fried for this dish. You need a lot of oil to do it. If you are going to go that route, make sure you save your oil, because it's expensive. By roasting it, you get pretty much the exact same result, and it's easier. For that roasting, I'm just using regular olive oil here. Then when we do the other stuff, I have the really good olive oil, which is Frantoio Barbera, and that's another Sicilian thing. This olive oil, I love. This is the finishing extra virgin olive oil that I've been using for the five years that I've been making videos. I'll have this linked in the description if you want to buy it. It's actually cheaper on Amazon than at the store, and probably, depending on where you live, if you don't live in New York, New Jersey, you're probably not even going to be able to buy it in the store. I actually like to buy it in the three-liter cans, and then I just refill this one-liter bottle with it. All right, enough about that. Let's get into roasting the eggplant right now. I always buy extra eggplant, just because when I'm making a recipe for you, if the ingredient isn't good, then I'm about to run back out to the store. I recommend you do this for yourself, too. You just never know. Even when eggplant is nice and firm, and you're saying, okay, I'm going to pick a male or female, which doesn't matter anyway, sometimes you just don't get lucky. I'm just going to cut the end off here like this. Just remove this little green stuff. It's firm. It's pretty firm. It should be good. We'll find out. Just cut it right down the middle. Okay, this is a good-looking eggplant. All right, I want to cut this into fairly large cubes. I'm going to do it with the second one as well. See, like this, just about here, like this. This is pretty large, these pieces. You could probably go a little bit smaller if you like, but it doesn't really matter, because this dish, after roasting these, they're going to be very on the soft side, and they can actually fall apart. We don't want to go overboard. If you're going to fry them, I really do recommend you pour the oil like three inches high in a large pot, and then about seven, 10 minutes they're going to take to fry. They're going to be great. Just with that oil, just let it cool, then strain it so you save it, because it's going to take you like, you're going to use a lot of olive oil to do it, and I would fry it in olive oil. I wouldn't fry it in vegetable oil. I just wouldn't. For here right now, about half a cup, but it doesn't have to be exact. I'm just coating initially here with a little bit, maybe a couple tablespoons, so a little bit of salt right now, black pepper. It's going to drink up the oil, so that's why I just like to do a little bit at a time, so I can try to get even coating. By the way, 425 degree oven, set two racks towards the middle of the oven. It's going to take two baking sheets to do two pounds of eggplant. A little bit more salt, pepper. Let's evenly distribute them on our parchment paper lined baking sheets. I need you to take a visual look here and see if you have enough oil on it, and Tara, I don't think we have enough oil on here, right? Probably use a little bit more. Yep. Sometimes as I roast it, I'll just go back and hit it up with a little bit more oil, and then same thing, you know, you could put a little bit more salt on them too right now. You could also just salt them when they come sizzling out of the oven. Same thing, a little bit more pepper. Time is just till they're done. They need to be fully cooked. How do you know they're fully cooked? You take a fork, and if the fork is like hitting resistance, they're not done yet. So they'll be nice and golden, and they'll be like super soft, almost to the point of like mushiness, but not quite. So this is going to take about 25 minutes, give or take 5 or 10 minutes, okay? So you have like a good time here now. While that's roasting, you can prepare all your other ingredients. I just want to show you, I'm going to cut this onion just into slices. So I'm just going to cut one whole end off of here, and the other end too. Just cut it down the middle. Okay, so I want to cut these onion root to stem. You see how this is still here, a good amount? So it probably won't, it probably won't work. So I'll just remove that part too. Okay, so now here like this, and you don't have to go really, you don't have to go really thin for this. I want some texture here, but this is what we want, is just pieces like this. Okay, so same thing, just like this, just turn it over so you don't cut your hand. Okay, just like that. And that's a good amount of onion for what we need here. But look, if you like more onion, definitely use it. I definitely think you could add garlic here too. One other ingredient I didn't mention, carrot. Carrot is really nice too, if you like. So I have this nice pan here, non-stick, which is going to help us a little bit, because when we put that eggplant in at the end, we have a lot of sticky ingredients here, we don't want anything to stick. So medium heat, I'm going to use the good extra virgin here for this. Okay, normally I don't cook with this, normally I finish, but this is, in this respect here, it's nice to use. And I'm just going to coat the bottom of the pan, so about a quarter cup. Here's our onion and our celery and bell pepper. Just a touch of salt to get water to start releasing here, but just be careful with salt in general on this recipe, it's a very salty dish. Okay, so this has only been going for a minute. What I'm going to do is, because I don't really like this parsley here, we'll go to the garden, we'll see what we can find, just where the herbs are, and we'll get something else for this. Which is totally fine to do, you can put anything you want in. So let's go see, let's go see what we got. You can see the basil isn't looking that good, but there's some pieces that are okay, like right here, some new growth over here. See how beautiful that looks? So we'll just clip that. What else? We got some other stuff, that's all right. And then we also have this one here, which is emerald basil. So this is regular sweet basil, and then this is emerald basil, which looks a lot better. So I'll just take a nice piece of that one, and then let's go see the mint, maybe the mint looks all right. Right here, that looks good. Okay, so we'll just grab a little bit of that. Okay, perfect, this is perfect. Okay, so this has been like maybe five or six minutes, this is what the texture currently looks like. Okay, it can definitely go a couple more minutes, it's fine. I'm going to show you the eggplant after 15 minutes. Okay, see this? So this is not even close, not even close to done. But what I'm going to do now is just flip it, and hopefully it will cook enough. Sometimes it will take longer than the time that was specified in the recipe. It's just a matter of your oven, size of the eggplant pieces, the type of eggplant. Some eggplants just do better than others. So now tomato paste, the whole entire can. This is a six ounce can. If you don't want to use paste, you can use probably about, oh I'd say about maybe 15 to 18 ounces of passata. You can use a whole can, a 28 ounce can of crushed plum tomatoes, or whole plum tomatoes that you just crushed. They have a lot of water in them, so you're just going to cook it out. And we don't want our caponata to be like really watery and liquidy, like you know, it's kind of a mass where you can like put it on a crostini, dip it into something like pita chips or anything. What about using cherry tomatoes? Cherry tomatoes would be great, I mean, and especially like if you want to keep it to your whole garden. The garden we just showed you, all the cherry tomatoes are there, but they're all green still. So the zucchini just exploded this year, and if you've been following the Instagram, and if you're not, please do. Make sure you follow us on Instagram, because you'll see completely different stuff. You'll see all the barb, all the grilling I do, which is pretty much every day now during the summer. You will see me in the garden all the time, and I mean, the amount of zucchini I picked already, what do you think, a hundred I've already gotten? Oh at least, we've been giving them away. They grow so fast. But yeah, if you're interested in more in the gardening stuff, and like kind of like that lifestyle stuff, definitely follow us there, because like I can only do so much in these videos here. I try to make these videos very instructional for you, which if you follow me on Instagram, I do the reels. They're like 20 seconds showing how to not make a recipe at all. You know, just basically it's like a promo for this. So I'm going to let this keep cooking, and if it looks like it's burning at all, which this isn't even close, you can add a little bit of water in here, just a couple ounces to lower your heat of the pan. A couple more minutes on this. I'm just going to take this off to my regular stove over here, and I'm going to put another pan over here. About medium heat, maybe a touch less. When you toast pine nuts, by the way, buy these at Costco. You have to be like focusing the whole entire time on them. Don't be tempted to raise the heat really high. They'll just, that'll be it. See it? They're good, but they're almost not good. So just get them out. You can even, the residual heat of this pan might even start, so put them in somewhere else. I'm just going to stick them on my paper plate. So I'm just going to switch pans and go right back here. If you want hot red pepper and you definitely don't have to put it in here, I would do it now. You know, if you like something really spicy, just put a hot pepper in there. Okay, just let it cook in the oil for about 30 seconds, and now we can just dump everything else in here. Our raisins, they can go in there. They're going reconstitute from the moisture in that's in our pan right now. This is a quarter cup of red wine vinegar, just regular red wine vinegar. I always say buy your red wine vinegar in a large, like I buy it in a gallon container. Why do I want to buy a small one? I use it all the time. Two tablespoons of sugar, two tablespoons of rinsed capers, and one cup of the Sicilian green olives that are sliced. And make sure you carefully go over even pitted olives because sometimes there's a pit in there. And this is why you really don't want salt, a lot of salt in here. This is so much salt from these olives right now. The heat's going to dissolve the sugar, it's going to mix in with the vinegar, and we're going to have the most delicious tasting agrodolce sauce. That would be good just to spread on a sandwich. Absolutely. My eggplant's taking longer. I said recipe, I had 25, 30 minutes. Again, dictated I think on the size. So these are going to take more about like 40 minutes. So I spent 30, I put them in for another 10. If you're waiting a long time, you can just really lower the heat on this, which is fine. Let's, we can give this a taste test now to see how our sweet and sour ratios are. This is kind of the texture I want as far as like liquid, like I don't want a lot of liquid in here. I don't really want it to be wet, but if it's not wet enough, I can just add a little bit of water. What's nice is the 425 on the oven, you can just leave it there because you can toast your little pieces of bread up at that same temperature. So I got, this is a baguette from a Whole Foods. It's a little soft right now, which, which doesn't matter though, because we can just rejuvenate everything. Okay. And I just have like just a touch of olive oil, like a less than a tablespoon, and then just coat a little bit on, on the bread. When that comes out, or even now you can just throw it in just a few minutes, just till they get nice and toasty. I think my eggplant's good. I think it's good now. I'm going to move this. This is just on very low heat. Just move it off to the side. Let's make sure the eggplant is good before we put it in here. It will look better if you fry it. It will, it will. We want to be able to pierce through these very easily with a fork that is not too sharp. So like this one here, see, I went right through that very easily. Okay. Then like that, it's like no resistance. Sometimes a few pieces, no matter how long you cook it, really won't be able to. Okay. That's beautiful. Super soft, super soft. We're good. Okay. This took 425 at the size. You remember those pieces were really big. Now look how small they are. Okay. So start with them fairly big. 425, this took about 38 minutes. Your oven will be a little different. And what's nice about on the parchment paper here, I just kind of like took it like this and I pushed everything this way and everything this way. And now I can just kind of pick it up and put it right in there. Beautiful texture. You can like turn off your heat now. It's not, doesn't really matter. So I just want to kind of fold this in as best as I can. I mean, some of it's going to crush, of course. I mean, and that's kind of, you have to get the eggplant to the point where it's soft, but do want to maintain a little bit of texture and that beautiful black skin of the eggplant. Now, listen, if you don't like skin, I should have addressed this in the beginning. A lot of you are going to say that, just remove it. That's all you have to do. But I mean, the skin is great. It's delicious. They pretty much bred all the bitterness out of eggplant. You can also put all of our pine nuts in and I'm going to put a little bit of mint in this one. And then I will save the basil. Well, we'll use some basil too, like to top it. We'll use some mint too. I mean, just a touch of mint, a very Sicilian thing, mint. And I got to tell you, I didn't really like mint too much when I was younger and it's really grown on me. But if, you know, if you don't like that, use parsley or basil. Let's, let's see this. Let's get a piece of the eggplant like that. You're going to be okay. It's good. I don't think it needs any more salt, pepper, sugar, acid. Maybe I'll put a little bit of basil in here too, right? Honestly, I think it's perfect like that. Let's toast our bread up and get the taste tester down. James, thank you for being here again. What did you just, what did you just eat before this one? Patty melts. These are like completely different things. Yeah. So that was like not healthy. And I would say this is, well, I mean, this is healthy. It's pretty greasy too. This, but it's, it's all, it's all olive oil. And it's eggplant. And you could just take spoons of it from here if you want instead. Probably easier like that. Kind of hard to bite into this thing. Here, I'll just give you some into right here to eat, okay? Depending on this video's putting out first or second, it probably doesn't really matter. But the last one gave a 9 out of 10. And I'm going to give this the same rating. I know it's the thing that you need to put in it. I'm just not a big fan of the pine nuts. Oh pine nuts? Yeah. Okay. You don't have to put in that. Those don't have to go in there. Okay. I would give this a 10 if it wasn't pine nuts. Oh really? Yeah. What, why don't you like about the pine nuts? The texture? Flavor. Flavor? Yeah. I just think it's like a whole like vegetable thing. It doesn't need pine nuts. I think they add a lot to it texture wise, but I mean, that's good that he said that. You can easily omit those. What's your favorite, like there's a lot of different things in there. What is your favorite that you can taste? These little peppers right here. Little bell peppers? Yeah. And the basil, of course. Do you taste the mint in there or not? No, I didn't get any mint. Really? No. Funny, I do taste the mint more probably than the basil. It's immensely better overnight. So if you make it, I always recommend making a big batch. That's why this is one of those recipes that it's really, really not good to buy this. Like, you know, Chento, I'm trying to think who else, Dalalo, like all these like brands, they make like little jars of it and they charge a lot of money for it. Like if you were to buy the jars of Chento just to equal this much, it would be like $30. And I just made this for way less. I recommend you make even more than this and then put it in the refrigerator for a couple days, or you can even freeze it. You can make, like if you follow proper canning or jarring procedures. That's right. You can jar it and store it, and you can give it away as Christmas presents. Yeah. All right, James. So it gets a nine, huh? Anything else would you like to say before we leave? I got nothing. You got nothing? Okay. Yep. All right, until next time.