How To Prepare Eggplant

I'm going to show you how to prepare eggplant or aubergine as it's also known. You can prepare aubergine in many different ways but for today, we're just going to cut it into fairly thin slices which are then going to be fried. So, I'm going to cut the aubergine, so you have got your slices of aubergine and I'm going to put it into a colander and we're then going to sprinkle them with a little bit of salt.

Now, this might seem like an obscene amount of salt to put on a vegetable but the good news is that a lot of it is actually falling out through the colander, anyway, and some of it will become sweated out in the water. We're using, in total, for this aubergine, about a teaspoonful of salt, and it's fine salt that we're using and then I'm just going to turn the aubergine around a bit so they all get nicely covered in salt and then, we're just going to leave it and we put in our colander over a bowl which, at the moment, is dry. There's nothing in it apart from a bit of salt that's come out, I'm going to leave that to one side for about 20 minutes to half an hour.

By which time, a lot of the moisture should have come out the aubergine so our aubergine now have about 20 minutes, and if you look closely, you can see they have got kind of little bits of water on them and that is the moisture that has come out and they are actually a lot bendable now, because they have lost a lot of their moisture and you can see in the bottom of the bowl, there's this kind of brownish water that's gathered and what we need to do is pack all of these pieces dry and try to get some of that salty water off because obviously, we have put quite a lot of salt on them now which we don't necessarily want. In this pan, we've got some olive oil, it's heating up and once the olive oil heats up, we are just going to dip the aubergine slices in some corn flour and it just helps them to fry nicely and we will shake them off so that they are not covered in flour and just by coating them with flour, it also stops them from absorbing too much oil and it crisps them up a little bit as they cook, so aubergine slices, and now, we're going to put this straight into the oil and we see them sizzle slightly as they go in. The thicker they are, obviously the longer they take to cook but then, they don't need loads of time, a couple of minutes on each side and then, we will turn them over.

So, these aubergines are nicely golden brown now and they have gone really nice and soft and crisped up around the edges. The flour helps them to get nice and crispy, so we're going to now move them from the pan and just put them on another bit of paper to drain. Whatever you do to aubergine, it does always have a tendency to absorb lots of oil.

For a really good idea on what to do with this kind of aubergine, look for our aubergine parmesan recipe which you can find under the title, Eggplant Parmesan. And that's how to prepare eggplant. .