Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The secret to great fried eggplant is actually one of the supposed cures for bitterness.
Salting the vegetable does nothing to remove bitterness (which isn't really there in the first
place), but it does pull the water out of the eggplant, collapsing the cells, which then ab-
sorb oil more easily during cooking. Try it and you'll see. Cook salted and unsalted egg-
plant side by side with oil in a skillet and dry on the grill. Salting will make absolutely no
difference in the grilled eggplant, but it will in the fried. Unsalted fried eggplant is meaty;
salted is creamy. It all depends on what you like. Don't shortcut this step. It takes about
an hour of purging (an hour and a half is better) to make a difference. Some cooks recom-
mend pressing the eggplant under a weight during this process. Although this makes sense
in theory, I found that pressing resulted in eggplant disks that cooked up like wafers rather
than pillows.
Some cooks also claim that salting reduces the amount of oil the eggplant absorbs dur-
ing frying. This, unfortunately, is not true. Salted and unsalted both soak up prodigious
amounts of oil - as much as 2 tablespoons per 1/2-inch-thick slice. Supposedly, if you cook
eggplant longer, it will release the oil it has absorbed as the cell structure collapses. This
takes very slow, patient cooking, however, over a long period of time.
One thing that might rightly intimidate people about eggplants is the sheer variety that's
available. What is a cook to make of a vegetable that can take so many different forms?
There are so many eggplants in the world that it's impossible to keep up with them. In
fact, scientists aren't even sure of the exact number. (In his Cornucopia II, an authorit-
ative guide to edible plant life, Stephen Facciola lists fifty-six major eggplant varieties.)
Beyond its ancestral home in Burma, eggplant is a staple food in India, China, Southeast
Asia, much of Africa and the Mediterranean. And as is so often the case after centuries of
small-scale subsistence cultivation - where farmers save seeds from year to year, gradu-
ally changing the plant's genetics - the varieties are poorly defined, with one type shading
into another.
Some of these varieties look so unusual that you wouldn't even know they were egg-
plants. The elaborately tufted, lavenderskinned Rosa Bianca is as big as a toddler's head,
and the beautifully marbleized green Thai eggplant is smaller than a golf ball. Creamy
oval eggplants about 3 inches tall look just like eggs. There are long, thin eggplants that
range in hues from green to blackpurple to violet to white. Tiny Thai "pea" eggplants look
for all the world like very small green peas that grow in clusters like grapes. (Discussion
continues among botanists about whether this is a true eggplant or a close cousin.)
It would be nice to say that the visual variety of eggplants is matched by an equally
wide range of flavors, but that would be a lie. For the most part, eggplant tastes like egg-
