Eggplant Two Ways

A few weeks ago, I got 2 beautiful eggplant in my share.  My initial plan was to make Eggplant Parmesan, but a person who shall go unnamed accidentally took my large glass baking dish and all I had around the apartment to replace it was a glass pie dish.  The dish was too small to fit both eggplants so I just used one and made an Eggplant Pizza with the second one.

Baked Eggplant Parmesan

So I don't have any one recipe that I used for this dish, just a few that I scanned to see how to best prepare the eggplant. It was a pretty simple dish to put together and kind of intuitive, EXCEPT for one important part.

The first step is to slice the eggplant.  I cut my slices about a half inch in thickness.  I didn't want them too thin that you couldn't really taste it, but I wanted it thin enough that it would bake through evenly. 

Here's the crazy part-you're supposed to salt the sliced eggplant, put the slices in a colander and let them sweat for an hour.  Who knew you were supposed to do THAT!?  I had no idea what the point of salting and sweating the eggplant was so I took to Google to find out why it's important.  Little did I know what a divisive issue it was!  There is a "sweat" camp and a "no sweat" camp in the culinary world and evidently this fight can get heated.  I went ahead and did it because, why not?  The theory is that by salting the eggplant it draws out some of the moisture in the eggplant, which makes the breading less soggy AND takes out the bitterness of the vegetable.  Had I know this was such a big deal, I would have sweated half and not sweated the other and see if it made a difference.  Do any of you have a preference?  After sweating the eggplant slices, you wipe the excess moisture off with a paper towel.  Recipes get pretty standard from here one out.

I had two dishes, one with beaten egg and the other with a mix of 1 cup Italian seasoned breadcrumbs and 1/4 cup parmesan cheese mixed together.  You dredge the slices in the egg and then cover with bread crumbs and place on a baking sheet.  Bake both sides of the breaded slices for 5 minutes at 350 degrees.

I took the easy route and used marinara sauce from a jar (Paul Newman brand) and spread a layer of the sauce in the bottom of the glass pie dish.  Then, I layered the baked eggplant slices on top of the sauce.  I covered them with a little more sauce and a whoooooole lot of shredded mozzarella cheese (too much to be truthful).  I popped the whole shebang into the oven and baked for about
25 minutes.

As I mentioned, I put too much cheese on mine, but the meal was really delicious and I quite enjoyed it.

     

Eggplant Pizza

My decision to make eggplant pizza as my second dish was largely inspired by the fact that I had leftover tomato sauce!  Again, I didn't use any one particular recipe, but since I had no idea how to prepare the eggplant so I used this as a guideline!

The recipe calls for brushing both sides of the eggplant with olive oil and adding a little salt and placing the slices on a baking sheet covered in tinfoil.  It then calls for broiling the eggplant for 2-3 minutes on each side.  I have never in my life broiled anything.  It was evident by how poorly I broiled the eggplant. I kind of burned them.  Oops.

I have never made a pizza before, but I did buy a pizza stone so it was fun to take it for a whirl!  I bought pre-made pizza dough from the grocery store (cheater, I know), coated it in a tiny bit of flour and tried my best to turn it into a pizza shaped circle.  This did not go well.  It looked good on first glance, but when it cooked it puffed up like crazy!  Anyway, once I thought I had the dough all taken care of, I spread the remaining marinara sauce on the center of the dough and topped it with shredded mozzarella.

I placed the eggplant on top of the mozzarella and popped it in the oven (on top of the pizza stone of course) and cooked it for about 15 minutes at 500 degrees (seriously...500 degrees).

I cooked the pizza for too long.  Big surprise, right?

So it sounds from my description like this entire experience was a terrible disaster, but it actually wasn't!  Sure the eggplant was a little overcooked, the crust was on the thick side and the cheese was a little overly toasted, but it still actually TASTED pretty darn good.  That, I guess, is all that really matters at the end of the day.  I'm looking forward to trying another pizza soon so I can try to perfect my technique!!!