How To Cook Eggplant

Hi there, I'm Matt from the Underground Cookery School, and today I'm going to do a video cookery lesson for you. Today I'm going to show you how to griddle eggplant. The first tip is use a griddle, but make sure it's really hot.

This has been on for about ten minutes - it's got a ferocious heat. Never add fat to a griddle pan, because it's just going to simply end up in the extractor. The other thing is, when you're doing an eggplant, or an aubergine, always use a knife with a serrated edge; you get a much better cut to it.

I'm not going to cut the whole aubergine, or eggplant, because I don't need it. I'm just going to take four disks for this demonstration, and I'm going to put them on the griddle pan. Now, because this pan is so hot, they actually don't need that much cooking.

And what's going to happen is I'm going to cook them maybe in 30 second intervals. So if the griddles are pointing that way, what I'm going to do now is just turn it by 90 degrees, like that. And you'll see the difference it makes, because what you want is a nice lattice pattern, which I think gives it a far more professional edge.

And if you do that, it's also roughly 30 seconds per 90 degrees; works quite nicely. If I turn that around, you can see exactly what I mean. It goes straight back on there, and you have beautifully griddled aubergines, or eggplant.

The thing with this vegetable is they are so full of bitter water, and you want to get that water out, so by cooking them this way, the bitterness ends up going into the top of the extractor. Now, I'm going to turn them by 90 degrees one more time, just to give you the final lattice. You probably saw there my hands were getting quite burnt because there's a fantastic heat coming off of there.

If I take that off, you've got the same again. And here's a nice tip, I would always leave the cooked vegetable on a rack, because if you leave them on a plate, what will happen is the steam that comes off them will simply make them go all soggy. So let them cool down on a rack.

And that is how to griddle eggplant. .