I am not traditionally an eggplant lover, but I do try to incorporate all sorts of veggies into my cooking (like mushrooms) For my eggplant experiment, I sliced the eggplant thinly, laid it out on a baking sheet, sprinkled it with sea salt, and let sit for 15 minutes – apparently this is called sweating the eggplant and is reported to remove any bitter juices. After it is done sweating, I rinsed the salt off and it was ready to use.
I made a bath of water and apple cider vinegar. I also made two dipping bowls. The first bowl had flour, sea salt and cracked pepper. The second bowl had a mix of bread crumbs, panko, ground almonds, nutritional yeast flakes and corn flake crumbs (I can’t believe they actually sell corn flake crumbs by the box at the grocery store, but I stuck with the cheaper version which involved smooshing up actual cornflakes =) I pressed the eggplant into the flour, dipped it into the apple cider vinegar mixture and then pressed into the bread crumb mixture.
These went into the oven at 350 for about 20 – 25minutes. The breading was crunchy and the eggplant was soft. All in all it was a delicious experiment that changed my feelings about eggplant =)
