Miso Chilli Eggplant
It’s become a possibly arrogant and rather familiar path for my recipes to get to my table. While eating a dish at a restaurant or the markets, I often fantasise about ways I could improve it. The ideas will sit in the back of my mind until I stumble upon an ingredient, or rather an excuse, to try out a new version. The resulting dish is not always what I first imagined, the cooking process can transform it into something new and interesting. The decision for it to be canned or blogged comes from the reaction the dish gets from my tester friends.
This recipe is a good example of that process. I’ve tried Miso Eggplant in Japanese restaurants here and in Japan on many occasions, and although I don’t claim to know what the proper, traditional version should taste or look like, every time I sat and pictured how I would modify the sauce to give it more punch and texture. So, when the opportunity presented itself I made this Miso Chilli Eggplant for Japanese friends while I was in Tokyo. They loved it, and tonight I served it to my usual bunch of testers, it was a hit again and here it is for you to try.
Trivia fact: cultivar name for a common round purple eggplant is ‘Ukrainian Beauty’
This recipe makes enough eggplant to serve as a starter or as a side with an Asian rice dish. You can make more and have it as a main with some steamed rice and vegetables. I used a nice round purple eggplant but you can also use the long slender variety, just slice them differently.
Ingredients
1 medium purple eggplant, sliced into 1cm thick disks
1 medium onion, finely chopped
3/4 long red chilli, seeds out, finally chopped
25gm miso paste (you can use the small packets you get as part of instant miso soup)
100ml beef , chicken or veg stock
1 tsp soy sauce
1 tbs cooking sake (optional)
1 tbs toasted sesame seeds
vegetable and olive oil for frying
1. Place eggplant slices in a bowl with slightly salted boiled water for 5-10 minutes
2. Heat up 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil in a medium frying pan. Sautee onion for 2 minutes, add chillis and cook for 3-4 minutes until both are soft .
3. Add garlic, miso paste, stock, soy sauce and sake and stir through. Cook for a few minutes on medium heat stirring frequently. The idea is to thicken the sauce by reducing the liquid a little.
4. Heat up a generous amount of vegetable or canola oil in a large frying pan. Drain and pat dry the eggplant, place as many disks on the hot pan as you can fit. Fry on each side until golden brown and slightly crispy, adding more oil along the way if needed. Eggplant will soak most of the oil up while frying on its first side down.
5. Serve the cooked eggplant slices on a plate with the sauce spread over the top and sprinkle with sesame seeds.
Very interesting recipe. I can think of a few very minor additions to this to suit our Indian palate. Can you think of an alternative to Miso - this is not very readily available in India.
Well, eggplant goes well with curry and tomatoes. You could make the sauce by sauteing onion, chili and garlic with some diced tomatoes and curry powder as well as a little bit of vegetable stock until thickened. Alternatively, just onion, garlic and chili fried together in olive oil are great sprinkled on eggplant, may be with some crumbled paneer in it as well. Mmmm….paneer!