Hi, I’m Amy Riolo. Today, I’m working in the kitchen at Sur La Table in Arlington, Virginia and we’re making whole wheat penne with tomato eggplant sauce and I’m going to sow you how to slice our eggplant and broil it.
When you buy an eggplant, you always want to look for one that’s nice and firm like this. It should be very shiny and it should have no bruises to it. Any bruises will really mean that it’s old and as eggplants age, they get bitter. You want to get one that’s nice and firm like this and it feels a little bit heavy for its size.
In this recipe, we’re going to use about a pound of eggplant. So we’ll start by slicing off the top and setting that aside. So what’s nice about this eggplant that it’s nice and flat, we don’t see any seeds and we have a little bit of green right around the edge. This shows us that it’s a new eggplant; that it’s nice and fresh so we don’t have to worry. A lot of people need to soak their eggplant in salt to remove the bitter juices before they use it but in this recipe, we don’t need to do that.
So now, we’ll begin slicing our eggplant and we want pretty thin slices. You can go about a quarter of an inch on this and just go all the way down. Now this pasta recipe is actually called “Penne ala norma” in Italian and it was after a woman named Norma who is the person who’s accredited with actually inventing the recipe and it’s so beloved throughout Italy that when people do something good or people are commending someone on a good action, they’ll say you did something “ala norma” meaning you did it very well because they are so happy with this recipe and you will be too. This is one that’s very rustic Southern Italian recipe and we’re starting to see it in a lot of restaurants.
Now, I’m going to take our eggplant slices and just place them down on to our baking sheet and this is what we’re going to use to broil the eggplant on. So this recipe is becoming increasingly popular because it’s delicious, it’s filling and it’s very, very healthy. Eggplant is full of phytochemicals like thiamine, calcium, phosphorus and potassium and all of these nutrients are really beneficial to the body. They help us to ward off illnesses like cancer and they’re also very low in carbohydrates so they’re very healthy vegetable to integrate into your diet.
Now the great thing about this broiling application here is it saves you a lot of calories. In the original recipe, these were deep fried and you can deep fry them if you choose to but since we’re focusing on wellness, I’ve begun doing it this way and I’ve been actually serving it this way in my family for years. It’s a very delicious way to enjoy eggplant and trust me, no one is going to miss them not being fried because they’re full of flavor.
So now that we finished putting the oil on this side, we can just turn them over and put the same right on the other side. Each color that the vegetable or fruit has tells us not only how they look but it tells us what kind of nutrients they have in them and the night shade family, actually are better for us if we consume them at night. It sounds funny but that’s exactly what it means. So you want to eat things like eggplant in the evening in order for you body to be able to absorb the most kind of nutrients for them. That’s when they’re most beneficial.
So now that we finished oiling our eggplant on both sides, we’re going to place it in the broiler which has been preheated at 500 degrees and we’re going to let them broil for about 3 to 4 minutes per side or just until they get nice and golden and cook through. Be careful not to let them burn because broiler temperatures do very and also the height in our oven is very. So keep an eye on those. Make sure they’re golden brown and when we come back in the next segment, we’re going to show you how to make our tomato eggplant sauce.
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