No other food can elicit as many snarky food metaphors from me as poorly cooked eggplant. In recent weeks, I went to one restaurant and compared an eggplant panini to foam insulation, and then to another where I likened the stuffed eggplant entree to chewing on a mattress.
Maybe I was harsh. Still, badly cooked eggplant can be a depressing thing to encounter in a restaurant. Any chef who puts eggplant on the menu must realize that he serves as an ambassador to the nation of haters. One grayish-green, bitter bite of tough flesh only confirms their worst suspicions. This vegetable can seem vaguely poisonous.
There used to be a time when only Greek and Italian restaurants dared to serve the deadly nightshade. Their chefs knew that the one way to present it as palatable to a general public was to dress it up with an excess of cheese and tomato sauce or ground meat and bechamel sauce.
But they also knew to salt the eggplant to leach out any trace of bitter juice and to fry it in enough oil until it gave up any temptation to bite back. You ordered eggplant Parmesan or moussaka, and you knew the eggplant itself would show up as a mere stripe of pale green custard within the slab on your plate, mild on the tongue but also meaty, sweet and persistently fragrant in a nice, soft way. That was the key. The eggplant held onto its character. It was no pushover like zucchini or calamari. You were hooked.
My mother used to joke that she knew she had a strange kid on her hands when I asked for eggplant Parmesan for my fifth birthday dinner. Let’s just say I was an early adopter. But I also think there might be a genetic component. We Ashkenazi Jews tend to favor eggplant, even though it grew nowhere near our Eastern European great-grandparents’ beet and cabbage fields. I don’t know why this is, but I’ve noticed this affinity often enough to consider it a safe observation. We also love Chinese food.
While I’m thrilled that eggplant is showing up on more and more menus, I despair that fewer and fewer cooks are willing to take the extra steps to de-spongify it. I hate coming off as a food absolutist, but unless eggplant achieves a custardy texture through its cooking, it isn’t worth eating.
The classic method for prepping eggplant involves a generous application of salt, more than a sprinkle, less than a shower. After a few minutes, you can wipe or wash off the salt and expelled juices and go to town. This works exceptionally well with cubed eggplant that you then toss with a glug of olive oil and roast in a 375-degree oven on a sheet pan, turning now and again until each piece is creamy soft.
Katie Button, the chef at Curate, a terrific tapas bar in Asheville, N.C., has turned me onto a new method that works even better. Instead of salting the eggplant, you peel it, slice it and soak the pieces overnight in milk. After soaking the eggplant, I merely pressed the pieces in cornmeal and fried them up in my big cast-iron pot the next morning. They came out mild, sweet and soft under their crunchy coating, a pure taste of that tenacious eggplant goodness. It made for a strange family breakfast, but no one was complaining.
The other tried-and-true method is also the easiest. You roast the eggplant by placing it over an open flame until the skins burn and the insides go boneless-chicken soft. (A friend once showed me that this works just as well on an electric element.) You need to enclose the eggplant in a bag afterward to keep the steam close and working its magic. Once it’s cool enough to touch, you can rid it of all the burnt skin and juice, and then chop or puree the flesh for a salad. I always want to try something beyond the basic Middle Eastern recipe (diced red onion, parsley, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, salt) but I can’t. It’s that good.
Some eggplants, though, don’t get soft as quickly as you’d hope. Truth be told, I blame the local food movement. The small, extremely firm globe eggplants we grow in our backyard gardens or buy from farmers markets take a long, long time to give up the fight. I’ve more than once had to transfer them from the grill to the oven to render them pierceable.
Asian eggplants — those long, slender, luridly purple ones — are another story. They turn soft in a flash, whether over the grill or in a saute pan. They're also easy to grow. But they don't have the character of globe eggplants. They don't achieve that gorgeous celadon green color, or taste as sweet or have that ineffable, appetizing smell. All these good things are the rewards you get for cooking eggplant properly, qualities you look for in restaurants, but too rarely find.
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