Eggplant Parmesan

I've never made eggplant parm before. However, I came up with a dill-tastic variant on a classic dish that came out way, way better than I expected it to. I did not, however, come up with a funny dill-related name for this dish, like "dilly eggplant parm" or something like that. It's not really a loss.

I don't know why, but for some reason, I really didn't expect this to come out well. Which meant that when it came out delicious, it made me really happy. This is fairly a fairly low-carb variant on the classic dish, substituting dill for most of the breadcrumbs that cover normal eggplant parm. It's not really low-fat, but you could easily broil the eggplant instead of frying it and use low-fat cheese, and get a really healthy, really delicious dish.


Dill-Encrusted Eggplant Parmesan
Serves 4

In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense to me to break down the ingredients list based on what those ingredients are doing in the dish. It helps to understand what's going on in the dish itself as well as sorting out groups of things you're going to be using together. Where it makes sense and where I remember to do it, I think this is a habit I will continue. Not sure exactly what to do with dill weed, which appears in two different places - it is unsatisfactory to me for a lot of reasons. For now, the compromise I reached with myself is to list the total amount of the ingredient used in parenthesis afterwords.

Top-down recipe writing. I really like it.

The Main Event:
1 large eggplant, cut into rounds and purged (see below)
1 cup Mozzarella cheese
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
1 normal-sized jar tomato sauce
2 (out of 5 total) tablespoons dill weed

The Glue:
2 large eggs
1/4 cup water

The Spicening:
3 (out of 5 total) tablespoons dill weed
2 tablespoons ground dill seed
3 tablespoons bread crumbs
2 tablespoons Mexican oregano
2 teaspoons garlic powder
2 teaspoons onion powder
Black and red pepper to taste


Step 1: Purge the eggplant[1]

Take your eggplant - peeled or unpeeled, as is your wont. Cut it into medium-thin round slices. Mine were about as thick as... a pencil, maybe? Two bagged-and-boarded comic books? Just remember that it's going to get a lot thinner, so make sure it's thick enough that you'll be able to take a nice bite out of it.

Now, lay your slices out on a drying rack, either in/over your sink or on a baking sheet. (Things are going to get messy - you don't really want to do this over a countertop.) Take your kosher salt and liberally sprinkle it over the eggplant. Sprinkle is the word - you don't want piles, you don't want snowdrifts, you want as many individual crystals, with room to breathe, as you can pack on.

Why is that? Well, try it out. After about five minutes, you'll be able to see the salt working its hygroscopic magic. It honestly looks kind of bizarre - each of those crystals will start vacuuming up the water from the eggplant, and what you'll wind up with after about fifteen minutes is a big puddle of briny water standing on top of the eggplant round. If you wind up just dumping a bunch of salt and letting it pile up - as I did today on a few of the pieces of eggplant - there isn't any room (I guess) for the water to go, and it largely stays in the eggplant. (I have no idea if that is actually what is happening, according to Science. However, it really looked like that was what happened.)

Let about fifteen minutes go by, flip over the eggplant slices, and repeat. At this point, you can let them sit for hours, if you want; most of the water gets sucked out in the first fifteen minutes, but the salt continues to do its work as long as the eggplant sits there.

After at least fifteen minutes a side, rinse the salt off the eggplant, and give it a good squeeze. I'm serious! Post-purging, the water in that piece of eggplant is like the air in an air mattress. You can just go ahead and squeeze it out - and pouring water over it isn't going to put any water back into it.

Squeeze technique is important. I think most people instinctively grab between the tips of their fingers and their palms, and squeeze that way... which means that your fingers are going to punch right through the eggplant. You want to be careful not to put too much pressure on it. If there are a lot of seeds in it, it will fall apart anyway, but still, do your best to keep each piece intact. (It won't taste any different, but it looks nicer.) One thing that I found worked fairly well was folding each piece in quarters, then squeezing it like that - the small piece was both easier to get a good grip on and somewhat reinforced.


Okay, so what was the point of all this effort? Well, have you ever baked an eggplant dish? All that water that we just pulled out of the eggplant would have been in the dish instead - specifically, in the eggplant. Duh. That means we would have had a bowl of eggplant mush.

So, by pulling the water out of the eggplant before we cook it, we ensure that water doesn't wind up in our dish. But wait! There's more! Those pieces of eggplant shrunk down to maybe a quarter of their volume, once the water got hygroscop'd out of them. (HYGROSCOP'D!) Except what stayed in there? All the flavor. This is the same theory under which beef gets dry-aged, or soup stock gets reduced. All we're getting rid of is water; all the yummy is staying in there.


Step 2: Prep Work

Beat the egg and water together in a shallow, flat bowl. Mix all of the spice ingredients together in a shallow, flat bowl. Get out a frying pan and get some oil going. Get out a 9x13 baking dish and coat the bottom with a fairly light coat of tomato sauce. Turn the oven to 350 degrees. Now, make sure your feng shui is appropriate for this dish, which means you should have everything set up in a row, like so:

EGGPLANT -> EGG MIXTURE -> SPICE MIXTURE -> FRYING PAN -> BAKING DISH


Step 3: Frying the eggplant and assembly

Well, you got your feng shui all set up, right? Just follow the harmonious flow of energy. Take a slice of eggplant and dip it in the egg, making sure to coat both sides. Let it drip for a few seconds, then dip it into the spice mixture, again coating both sides thoroughly. Drop it in the oil.

Wait about thirty seconds, then repeat the whole process, ending it by flipping the first piece of eggplant you put in the frying pan. It should look nicely fried - IE golden-brown esque. If it's not, you may want to turn up the heat a bit or insert a slightly longer pause.

Wait [PAUSE_IN_SECONDS] again, then repeat again. This time, put in eggplant piece #3; flip eggplant piece #2; take eggplant piece #1 and put it into the baking dish, laid out in one of the corners.

Continue in that fashion until the entire dish is covered in eggplant. (Should take about eight pieces.) At that point, lay down another fairly thin layer of tomato sauce, a few handfuls of cheese, and start the process all over again.

I got two layers out of my eggplant, but there was still plenty of room in the dish. This dish probably serves 4, but if you want more, it's easier to just add more more eggplant and more spices to the recipe, and pile it on top.


Step 4: Baking

The easiest part. When you're done frying the eggplant, give the top layer some more sauce, then the dill and the rest of the cheese. Toss the whole mess into the oven for about a half an hour, let it cool for fifteen minutes, and eat.


Victoria thought that the dish had fish in it; the eggplant, purged and fried, has a deliciously meaty texture. Not sure what to do with the dill - the flavor came out, in part because I used so damn much of it - but I think that the dish could probably be tinkered with to use less and bring the flavor out more. Maybe put the dill on the top after cooking? I don't know; it's worth a try.

I also used about a teaspoon of salt when I made this for dinner, but Victoria thought that it was pretty salty that way. I figured that the purging process probably left some extra salt in the mix - maybe I got lazy washing off the eggplant, that sounds like me. Additionally, commercial tomato sauces are pretty salty. So, probably no need for extra salt in the spice mixture.

I need to start coming up with a clever sign-off at the beginning of these posts, so I'm not forced to think them up when I'm exhausted from writing.



[1]As with many, many things I've done on this blog, this is more or less cribbed straight from Good Eats. It's gonna get worse, too. I'm thinking that next week is going to be ginger, so I watched the ginger episode... and felt worse and worse as Alton Brown did every single thing that I thought of doing.

I'm still going to do ginger week, it just means that I'm basically going to be replicating a Good Eats episode in blog form.