Hi, my name is Zach and today, we’re going to be cooking fried eggplant except it’s going to be low cholesterol fried eggplant. It comes from our traditional recipe from my family that has been adjusted for my father who can’t have high fats or high cholesterol in his diet.
What we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be substituting the full egg for egg whites which is going to take out that cholesterol and allowed to be consumed by people that need to be on this diet.
So let’s get started. The first thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to peel our eggplant. What we’re going to do is holding it with your peeler and we’re going to go from up to down holding it at the stem. It might be a little bit tough to get around but the main thing is just to get that uniform peel off of there completely.
If you see any bruising, it’s alright, all you need to do is cut it out after the fact. Be very careful with the peel, you want to go in an up to down motion so that you don’t skip and hit your thumb or your fingers up top where you’re holding it. This way, the worst thing you can do is smack the top to your counter but it can take the hit. What I’m going to do now is if your eggplant is bruised at all, it’s not a terrible thing, all you’re going to do is you’re going to slice out the parts that don’t look as appetizing to you.
Another important aspect to this to keep in mind is that the longer that you keep the open eggplant in the air expose to the air, it’s going to turn brown. So it’s good to try to work as quickly as you can without peeling yourself with the knife. So now what we’re going to do is we’re going to slice it very thinly after of course I get rid of the stems.
So now what we’re going to do is we’re going to slice it as thinly as we can. Be very careful with the knife, it’s very sharp. Also keep in mind that the thinner that you cut these eggplant slices, the crispier that they’re going to get when you put them in the oil, and that’s more of a personal preference. I like the crispier pieces because you get the more—fried stuff, it’s more crispy and it’s absolutely delicious. What we’re going to do is we’re going to lay out all our eggplant on just two paper towels and it doesn’t have to be completely separated, you can just take some of them off.
What we’re going to do is we’re going to take a hefty pinch of our salt or we’re going to go all across our eggplant, salt the heck out of these guys, it’s really nice and salty. Now the reason that we’re doing this is the salt draws out the moisture from the eggplant and the moistures will contain that bitterness. We’re going to leave it here for 15 minutes if adults are going to eat it and 30 minutes if there’s going to be kids eating because kids are going to taste that bitterness and not like a lot more than adults are. The next thing that we’re going to do while we wait for our eggplant to salt is we’re going to take two extra large eggs and separate the egg whites.
The next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to get our imported Romano cheese Italian style bread crumbs which can be found at any local grocery store right next to the normal bread crumbs. That should be good and now we’re going to blot dry our eggplant to get rid of that bitterness. Take a paper towel, it’s really this good.
Can you see all of that liquid that’s coming off, that’s our bitterness going away. So now what we’re going to do is we’re going to bread each individual piece of eggplant. The process as you take your piece, you dip it so it submerged in the egg white and you get off as much excess as possible and you get both sides in your bread crumbs and again, getting off as much excess as possible putting in on the plate.
You repeat this until you’ve done it to every single piece. We’re going to take a medium size skillet and our natural canola oil and we’re just going to start by coating the bottom of the pan and so we fill it up to a good depth. Not too much, we can always add more later. We’re going to set that to medium heat. And now we’re going to check to see just how hot our oil is and to make sure that it’s the right temperature to start frying.
Now we’re just going to take a little—a little piece of crumbly piece that’s got some egg on it or we’re just going to drop it in. As you can see, it comes up crackling and popping and that’s exactly what we want until it starts doing that, do not start to fry it, all it will do is soak up that oil in nice oil log and we don’t want that. So we’re going to take using a fork and we’re just going to start laying this in here and I want to keep track of which one I put in first because that’s the same order that I’m going to take them out. Don’t take very long to do and you don’t want to over crowd them, just give them enough room on other side.
As you can see, the eggplant is going to shrink in size the longer you fry it which is not normal so don’t freak out. As you can see, it’s not quite dark enough, I like my pan a little bit crispier so I’m just going to leave that in a little bit longer. As you can see, around the edges, it starts to get a very—like a darker golden brown and if I flip this over, that’s beautiful, that’s exactly what we want. Drip it off right under the plate with the paper towel. The paper towel is going to sip that extra oil that we don’t want. Delicious.
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