Sep 5, 2009

Baingan Bharta


While vegetarian food is becoming increasingly prevalent these days, it's still a long way from India. Not surprising when you take one of the largest cultures on Earth and remove meat from the equation. Without Indian food, becoming a vegetarian would have been a hard start. Most of the Indian food I was introduced to were buttery, rich dishes. They tasted great, but you left feeling a little overwhelmed. Recently we found a great alternative, a restaurant called Spice Route near our house. Serving southern Indian food, they have a great collection of spicy dishes that aren't all swimming in butter. One of those dishes featured eggplant that was smokey and rich without being overwhelming. It's one of the dishes that made us re-evaluate eggplant. It was called baingan bharta. As I do with so many things, I wanted to know how to make it at home.

I stumbled upon the site http://www.vehrahveh.com which showcases a great collection of Indian recipes and little cooking demonstrations hosted on YouTube. This dish came from that site.

For this one you'll want to get a good sized eggplant and coat it with oil. One tip that the recipe leaves out is that you'll want to poke a few holes in the eggplant before you put it into the oven. If you don't, you might have exploding eggplant. Throw it into a 475 degree oven and let it cook for at least 30 minutes. You can see in the picture below that the eggplant on the right is venting steam.


The video for the dish can be found here.


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