Melanzane, eggplant, alright how many people like working with eggplant? Don’t hesitate. Do you adhere to the promise that you need to salt it and bleed it a little bit, sweat it. You just cut it and use it. That works for you.
There are two theories on that. And my personal preference is to sweat it a bit. I think it takes a little bit of those juices out and it also gives you a much creamier texture to finish. You can or can’t do it. It doesn’t make any difference to me because nine chances out of ten, I’ll never be invited to your house for dinner.
So we’re going to cut those, I’ve got some started. Now, you always want to cut it a little thicker, this maybe isn’t going to work real well. A little thicker than you anticipate it to be when we’re finished. Now, we’re going to salt this and let it sweat and in this interest of time, I’ve already done some but again, we’re going to cut it like this and you’ll see I’ve got some already started. When we finish it, it’s going to be a lot thinner and it’s going to be able to facilitate the dish because what we’re going to do, grill it, lay it out as a first layer, roll it to make it even, almost stick it together. Then, we’re going to slather that with goat cheese, lay some grilled asparagus on there then the roasted peppers. Roll the whole thing up.
So now, this is freshly cut. Now, if you cook it as is it’s going to suck up every bit of olive oil or lard or whatever you think you're going to cook it with. This will give you a little bit more flexibility and it won’t give you that absorption of the oil. Although, this one will once it gets to a temperature exude the oil again but by that time, you probably overcooked. Those are my theories behind it. You can or can’t, you don’t have to do any of those.
And also in the interest of convenience, we don’t have an outside char broiler so I brought one of those famous boxers, little grills and I’ll grill that but I want to get all of these ingredients out here. So, we’ve already roasted peppers. Is everybody familiar with doing roasted peppers? I mean, if you aren't, I’m prepared to show you that.
What we want to do is you want to take an opened flame. If you do them in the oven you're going to cook the peppers, you’re not going to roast the skins. The object of this is to roast the skins very quickly, black them, char them, blister them and then put them into a plastic bag, wrap them in a towel or a box, something to keep the air from moving in about 10 to 15 minutes. The skins will peel right off. I’m just going to throw this on there.
This isn’t quite as high a flame as I normally would but we’re just going to let you see how that works. These have been grilled in the luxury of my larger kitchen. These have been grilled and on the recipe I’ve required you to color them and mark them so that you have some caramelization going on in there. This is what's going to exude this, the flavor. This is where you're going to get your flavor from as a color.
Now, I want to get some plastic wrap. See what we’ve got going on here. We just put a little bit of olive oil on these slices. And you see the amount of moisture coming off of there. They have a tendency to be bitter. Those juices have a tendency to be bitter and we want to eliminate anything that’s going to affect the flavor. To show you what we’ve got, how it works, now we’re going to take eggplant and overlap them, attach, you want to center this and then we’re going to overlap this one again. Just attach here and another one here. Actually this was something I didn’t write this in the original recipe as a tip but after I started working with it I said this is going to be perfect. You take your little rolling pin and just roll this like you’re doing pie dough because actually its going to work in the same way.
Alright, peel that off. Now, the next layer will be a mixture of goat cheese, a little bit of olive oil and chopped fresh rosemary. Everybody is familiar with rosemary. It looks like little Christmas trees. We chopped that fine, just mix it together, add a little bit of salt and pepper and that was about it. You see, what's happening with the pepper. That’s exactly what you want. You're not hurting anything by letting it get that way. It’s facilitating it.
On the goat cheese, you want a nice smooth homogenous blend so it’s smooth. It’s easy to spread, just like you're icing a cake. How many have iced cakes? Perfect. All of you, right? You’ve all iced cakes. You want to cover it all because I find that the biggest problem that people have is the fear of doing something they’ve never worked with before. And it’s a shame because you miss out on so much. Now, we’re getting there. That’s what I did in my head because it really takes a while.
The asparagus, you want to leave some space in between to help when you're rolling it. Nice grill marks on there. That should be enough and then I’ll just take a piece of paper towel and we’re just going to wrap this up and I’ll just keep it here for a few seconds. And next, we’ll cover the eggplant, the asparagus with the roasted peppers. If you don’t want to do this, there’s excellent products available in the stores and some of the deli sections of the stores have a spot where you can get olives and artichoke hearts and roasted peppers and all kinds of things so that works really well.
And we’re just going to lay that on there. You don’t have to variegate the colors. You could use all the same color. It just has a little nicer effect once you cut this as you’ll see once we do that. And it doesn’t have to be real fancy because the folds and the creases will all be hidden once we roll it. I just want to make sure we get it full. This is going to be a fairly large pinwheel. And again this could be done a day or two days ahead if you’ve cooked everything well and it holds up very nicely. I don’t recommend freezing it although I would recommend chilling it quicker in the freezer. That would work.
But you start it slowly and what you do is you kind of press it together as you go. And then what I do is when I get to that point, having done this several other times before, take it and go back this way because you got a lot more room and you just come back and pull it. Now, what's nice about it, the plastic wrap which we couldn’t do before, when we we’re working years ago, we used to have to use cheese cloth or terrycloth or towels. Plastic wrap works better ways because you can do this. And it just keeps tightening your bundle. That’s keeping it fresh. It’ll keep it tight and it’ll keep it until you're ready and we’re just going to stick it right back here in the refrigerator.
And like I say, we’re probably still looking for this to brown. I think we’re browning a little bit. But I just wanted to show you, if you do it on an open fire, we’re just now getting some heat on there. Unfortunately, you're taking a little longer but we’ve got some essences going on in here. The red pepper aioli, aioli is a garlicky mayonnaise type of thing.
As I’ve explained in other classes, I always break things down into critical and enhancement. Eggs and oil will make mayonnaise. But enhancing that would be the addition of baby arugula to make it a nice green or basil. In this case, roasted peppers, pureeing that and adding that will enhance the flavor of the mayonnaise. It’s going to be a mayonnaise or an aioli if you add the garlic, or the eggs and the oil. That will make it what you want. But it’s not going to be a good flavor. You enhance it to be what you want. That’s the enhancement portion. So always look at things in that manner, enhancement and critical.
So if you want to do the roasted peppers, we probably can peel this already. As much as you'd want to, take this and don’t run it under the water because you're going to wash away all of the flavor that you try to achieve, maybe not all of it but a lot of it. So, what you can do is just take another paper towel and rub it off with that. But you see, the pepper still has a nice texture but the skins come off. And the longer I would let that set it, wrapped in the towel, the easier it would be. Actually, the burner works better than you're char broiler outside because it’s going to get a hotter, quicker more direct heat.
There’s one I made earlier and just delicately unroll it. You’ll find that the goat cheese mixture will firm up a little bit. Be careful when you put just a few tablespoons of olive oil in there just enough to smoothen it up. And then I want to do this the way it should be, wipe your knife off each time and we don’t have all of that excess cheese. And use a sawing action rather than a guillotine motion on it. Now, this is fresh goat cheese. This is fresh. It’s not an aged dried goat cheese because Pecorino Romano is goat cheese. I mean, it’s made from goat’s milk, the pecora.
And we have a nice dressing here. And again, we just want a little bit of flavor on that. We’re not looking to drench it. And then we’re just going to add a little bit of the aioli. Just to guild the aioli a little bit I’ve got a reduction of balsamic vinegar. You see, you know all this stuff. Then you'd have to do the next course. Alright, there we go.
Rolatini Di Melanzane Alla Griglia, perfect for the summer.
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