Eggplant 101: Ways Not to Ruin Your Aubergine

Have you ever gone over for a meal at the home of an ambitious yet clueless cook? Were you served slices of rubbery, greenish foam with the consistency of dehydrated apples and the flavor of old teabags? If so, you have witnessed the ruination of a perfectly good eggplant.

Eggplant is not difficult to get right – with a few tips, something as simple as roasted eggplant slices will be utterly delicious. The cooking of all forms of eggplant centers around one crucial tenet:

LOTS OF OIL!

When eggplant is either undercooked or prepared without any oil, the taste and texture suffer. The ideal texture for eggplant is melt-in-your-mouth mushiness, which is only possible when you give it a good dousing with your favorite oil (I use extra virgin olive without exception). I’ve heard of people boiling eggplant in soups, but it often turns rubbery and bland. Keep in mind that eggplant is like a sponge – it will soak up a ton of oil at first, but as you cook it down, it exudes the oil back into the pan. Don’t worry if your eggplant is somewhat greasy. In aubergine-land, greasy equals tasty.

Before you cook your eggplant, taste a tiny bit of it raw. If it’s bitter, you would be wise to salt the thing before you cook it. Cut the eggplant into half-inch round slices. Lay the slices out and sprinkle generously with salt. Wait 10-15 minutes; the slices will perspire. Wipe the salt and the perspiration off with a towel, then commence cooking.

Most of the bitterness in eggplant (if your eggplant is bitter at all – a good eggplant will be sweet without any salting) lies in its seeds and its juice. If you are baking your eggplant whole in the oven, you can remove the seed lobes after it’s baked and gently wring out the flesh, removing the caramel-brown juice. This method is as effective as salting, but takes a little longer; however, it’s super fun if you like squishy things.

About the skin: unless it’s uncommonly tough, or unless I'll be grinding the eggplant into a paste, I never bother to remove it.

Aaaand that’s how you avoid ruining an eggplant!

Extra special addendum: if you're cooking with Japanese or Chinese eggplants, as well as many of the smaller eggplant varieties, you practically never need to salt them; these varieties are naturally sweet and have few seeds.