some eggplant recipes

[Grub]

The foodie section of our excellent newspaper featured eggplants today. Three simple and great recipes provided. They sound very nice to me

http://www.smh.com.au/news/recipes/e...679517555.html

[landarc]

Hey Grub,

That chinese eggplant recipe is pretty good stuff. In Chinatown (SF Bay) they tend to use the long, thin asian style eggplant for this recipe, and cut it into chunks (diagonal cutting technique, i believe) as opposed to strips.

As an American of Japanese ancestry, grew up with this stuff and hated it for 40 years. Now, I seem to be developing a taste for it.

Bob

[Worth1]

Has anyone had the little white pickled eggplants?
I used to get them in a Korean market along with dried squid soaked in hot sesame oil.
Makes for a pretty good snack, though it did make some of my work mates turn green, and not from envy either.

[Grub]

Hi Bob,
I look forward to trying that Asian recipe. I was thinking of grilling or frying the eggplant halves or disks if using a large black type, on a non-stickpan, then cutting into strips so I don't use the oil. Then assmebling the stir fry. Also a neat Middle Eastern salad overleaf on that webpage.

Hi Worth,
I don't know the little white ones but the little bitter green ones really make a green Thai curry by imparting some acid bite to go with the sugar, salty, lime, hot, sweet flavour combos.

The thing I liked about the baba ghanoush recipe was the lack of oil, though tahini is all sesame seeds. Still, I love that smokey flavour.

On the Yum Cha trolleys in Chinatown here they do a great grilled fish slab on eggplant dish with ginger and hot peppers.

As for Korean, briingon the Bulgolbi.Mmmm. And the Japanese miso combo is one of my faves.

[landarc]

Grub,
If you like miso, the japanese marinate eggplant (and many other things) in Miso and serve it as a side dish. You can marinate the slices of a large eggplant in miso overnight, fire up the grill or broiler and sear it. An adaptation of a recipe normally done with salmon or mackeral. You want the outside crunchy, inside creamy effect.

There is a funny story from back when I was cooking in a restaurant...

Bob

[Grub]

That's the one, the grilled miso eggplant dish. Mmmm. And on the side some spinach with dashi, some soyabeans in the pods, some pickled dakon or octopus. Oh yeh. And hot sake.

Go on, share the story

[landarc]

Worth,
hokey smokes, dried squid in chili oil, now that is some ethnic eating.

Grub,
The humor is most understandable if you have ever worked in a restaurant kitchen, or with a bucket of miso with chunks of stuff in it. I was handling the miso bucket duties on a very busy Friday night, and an order for salmon came in. So, I quickly reach into the miso bucket and grab three pieces of salmon, or what I expected to be salmon, and threw them under the broiler. I mean, I have done that same thing hundreds of times over a couple years. Come back a few minutes later to turn the salmon...nothing! My buddy, the head cook, says the look on my face made the evening. This tale was retold, over beers, at the all night restaurant we ate at after work, to the other cooks there.

[Grub]

So what was it you chucked under the broiler? A blob of miso I assume?

Would you marinate the salmon in miso prior to cooking? Sounds interesting.

One of the world's best restaurants is in my city of Sydney: Tetsuya's, a contemporary Japanese fusion (i hate that word) eatery.

Tets is a great bloke and I've fished with him. He does a wicked green tea/tomato consume in a cup as an appperitif. And a tomato sorbet to die for.

I have his recipe book.

[landarc]

Yup Grub,

At the restaurant, we used white (shiro) miso and put the chunks of salmon in the miso overnight. The miso acts as a brine and flavors the meat while relaxing the proteins. At home, we would add some red (aka) miso to deepen the flavor. The recipe also works with other dark meat fish (I have heard of mackeral and tuna collars being done this way).

Yes, a chunk of miso grills down to a black, malodorous and very hard to clean film on the broiler pan. And it is good to have a local japanese restaurant available. Fusion cuisine is what I have eaten all my life, a combination of my Japanese heritage and American upbringing.