Make this restaurant-style spicy Chinese eggplant recipe at home | Marion’s Kitchen

This is the famous eggplant you'd find in really good Szechuan restaurants, but this is my at-home version of how to make hot and numbing eggplant. You guys know this is going to be a dish that I love, right? Spicy Szechuan peppercorns, that hot and numbing situation going on, so good. I always used to love to order this dish when I was out at a really good Szechuan restaurant, but I thought that it might be a little difficult to make at home, but I figured out it's not. If you have a little bit of technique going for cooking eggplant, which we'll get to in a bit. No, actually, we'll get to it now. We'll start with the eggplant. You were waiting for the eggplant, weren't you, Dax? I was. You were, you were. Okay, I know. I have these long eggplants now. They're often called Japanese eggplants or Lebanese eggplants. You can use the larger ones as well, but the main point is the preparation of them. I like to take some of the skin off. I don't want to take all of it off because leaving some helps to keep the tender eggplant together a little bit when it's really soft. Just a bit of the eggplant skin off and then take the end off. I like to make sure that these slices are fairly thin, like nice little elegant slices of eggplant, if you like. That means they're going to cook quite quickly when we steam them a little bit later on. I think that gives you the right surface area of eggplant to be soaking up all the yum, spicy stuff that's going to happen later on. The process for the eggplant is that you want to steam the eggplant. That's actually the best way to cook it, so that you're breaking it down and making it soft and tender, but you're not searing it or you're not boiling it. I think boiling the eggplant would be weird. It would get weird and slimy. Steaming is the way to go. Open up your steamer and then grab your pieces of eggplant and just pile them in. No, you don't have to salt eggplant these days because basically that bitterness that you used to get with eggplant has kind of been bred out of the eggplant. Now, you don't need to do that salting step. You can if you like, but you don't have to. 25 minutes, I'm going to let that steam away. In the meantime, let's make our spicy sauce because this stuff is really good. I'm going to start off with my Sichuan peppercorns. I'm using green ones because green ones... There's green and red, right? But the green ones seem to have a much heftier kind of numbing and citrusy flavour than the red ones. If you can get a hold of these green ones, that would be really great. Just crush those. Now, I also need some ginger and some garlic. Now, we're going to get into the wok and I need a little bit of regular oil here first. Then we're going to go in with some chilli oil. This is my homemade chilli oil. You can watch the video on how to make it, but you can use store-bought as well. The reason I like the homemade version is you get all these lovely spices in here. Cardamom pods, star anise. There are extra Sichuan peppercorns in here as well. It's good stuff. That in there. Put in that garlic and ginger. That is such a good smell. Slightly clears you out. Now, I'm going to go in with dou ban jiang. Dou ban jiang is an ingredient you would have seen me cook with on my channel a fair bit. Particularly, if you're doing Sichuan-style dishes, you might see it as well. It's basically like a fermented chilli and broad bean paste. It kind of gives you a kick of umami and saltiness as well as the spicy. You can search it out online. It's widely available to order online. Just see if you can find it or check your local Chinese grocer. To that, I'm going to add some soy sauce, some rice wine vinegar and some sugar. Lastly, we go in with our peppercorns. Our sauce is pretty much done. That sugar is dissolved. Everything is really lovely and spicy and garlicky in there, which is really what I wanted. That extra hit of the peppercorns at the end is really punchy. It's good. Just wait and see until the end. I'm going to have a look at my eggplant now. At this point, my eggplant should be really lovely and soft. Let's take a look. Very nice. They're not quite dressed for the party yet. It's not the most Instagram-worthy stage of the recipe. You want to carefully just transfer them into a bowl. Carefully, because they are really soft now. I don't want to break them up too much. Then you just want to spoon that spicy stuff all over the top. Almost as if you're tossing this like a salad. I just want you to really gently encourage that eggplant and the sauce to make friends in there. You can scoop that out onto a plate. Make sure you catch all of that yummy sauce and pour that over the top. A little sprinkling of spring onion here. There you go. A really beautiful restaurant classic that I've only just started making at home. I think it's really delightful. I'm not even in there yet. I think it's delightful. I love that red oil, that kind of red sauce in there. Just looks amazing. Now the eggplant should be really nice and soft. It's almost like it just melts away in your mouth and you're left with all those yummy spices. So perfect. It's almost like the eggplant, because you've steamed it, it's gone all creamy. Then you've got big hits of spice and Sichuan peppercorn, and then that numbing, tingling sensation you get at the end. So good. Serve this with steamed rice, some other Chinese dishes if you like. But even just rice and this eggplant would be a perfect dinner for me. Yum. Hey guys! If you want to know whenever I'm releasing something new and delicious, then you should hit that subscribe button and the little bell so that I can let you know every time something new is coming out. Thanks! See you!