Baked Eggplant with Yogurt, Herb and Garlic Sauce
In the season of summer vegetables, I recommend baked eggplants with a spiced yogurt sauce. It is a cold appetizer that is made almost everywhere in the East, where the eggplant is considered the father of all vegetables and cooking with it has been raised to an art. The results are delicious. They can be served on their own or as part of meze, an elaborate spread of small dishes served with aperitifs.
Baking young eggplants is easy. It is important that they have not yet formed seeds, otherwise you will have to scoop them out. The flesh of a baked eggplant is excellent for cold salads and for spreads similar to caviar. At home, eggplants are most often baked in the oven. If you can bake them in hot embers, the flavor and aroma are much better. In Bulgaria, vegetables are often baked in a small electric oven called a chushkopek, which gives excellent results.
For appetizers, baked eggplants are often mashed into a puree. The best-known light appetizer or sauce in the East is baba ghanoush, which is somewhat similar to eggplant caviar, which is made with olive oil and tahini. Appetizers made with coarsely chopped or diced eggplants are far from rare. Combined with garlic, onion, herbs and various sauces, such dishes are known everywhere.
In the Balkans, eggplants baked over coals and served with a fermented-milk sauce are very popular. Yogurt is a unique product made from milk and the base of many dishes. Bulgarian “kiselo mlyako”, Turkish Yoğurt and so on differ greatly from the products we are used to, and are closer to good homemade soured milk. They are used to make cold yogurt soups such as tarator, jajik, and also various sauces, for example tzatziki.
Tip: take only young fruits with a dark, glossy skin, brush them with a little oil and bake in the oven until the eggplant is pierced by the tip of a knife without effort. After cooling, carefully peel off the wrinkled skin.
When I was little, eggplants were quite bitter. So they were sprinkled with salt for a while and then squeezed. Nowadays, I think, varieties have been bred that have no bitterness at all, and this salt procedure is completely unnecessary. They say an eggplant can even be eaten raw. Overripe eggplants, besides having hard seeds, contain a lot of solanine. So cook only young fruits. Small young vegetables are also great for individual portions: stuffing, pickling, and the unique Eastern dish imam bayildi.
Ingredients
2 servings
- Young eggplants 3-4
- Vegetable oil for brushing 1 tsp
- Yogurt or soured milk 1 cup
(200 g) - Cucumbers 2
- Dill 0.5 bunch
- Mint 1 sprig
- Garlic 2-3 cloves
- Olive oil 1-2 tbsp
- Lemon juice 1 tsp, plus a little for the eggplants
- Salt to taste
Step-by-step recipe
How to bake the eggplants
Buy small young eggplants of cylindrical shape, evenly colored a dark purple, almost black. The fruits should have no signs of disease and no dents.
Young eggplants are easy to find in season. It is better to buy elongated eggplants rather than pear-shaped ones, because they bake more evenly.
Wash the eggplants and dry them well. Cut off the long green stem, as it will most likely burn during cooking.
Brush the surface of the eggplants lightly with vegetable oil and pierce them through in 2-3 places so the steam can escape.
There are many ways to bake eggplants for an appetizer. If you live at a dacha or in a private house, or are out in the countryside, I recommend baking the vegetables in hot embers. At home in the kitchen you can use the oven. Do not fry eggplants in oil: they soak it up like a sponge and the dish becomes very high in calories.
Place the eggplants on a baking sheet and bake in the oven at 200 °C for about 30 mins, until the eggplant is pierced by the tip of a knife without effort and the skin is wrinkled.
In my kitchen I bake peppers, eggplants, corn and so on in an electric appliance, a chushkopek, which I brought from Bulgaria. Pierced eggplants need only 3-5 mins in it.
Leave the eggplants out in the air until cool.
How to make the yogurt sauce
It is convenient to make the sauce while the eggplants cool.
Prepare the ingredients for the sauce: yogurt or soured milk, olive oil, fresh dill and mint, young cucumbers and garlic.
In shops you can buy fairly thick yogurt or soured milk of acceptable quality and low fat content. If you sour whole milk yourself, you get a good soured milk that is perfect for the sauce. If you have no olive oil, it is better not to add any oil to the sauce at all. Fresh dill and mint, young green cucumbers and garlic cloves are easy to find even in winter.
Finely chop the cucumbers. You can peel them or leave the skin on, especially if it is green and thin.
I would not grate them, although that is very often what is recommended. I like the cucumbers in the sauce to be distinct pieces that do not thin it with their juice.
Sprinkle the cucumbers with a pinch of fine salt, stir and leave for 5 mins.
Peel the garlic cloves and grate them. You can also crush them further in a mortar.
Usually when cooking I chop garlic with a knife so it does not release its juice. For this sauce the task is the opposite: you want more garlic juice.
Transfer the grated garlic to a large bowl, add the yogurt or soured milk and 1-2 tbsp of extra virgin olive oil, then mix thoroughly.
Squeeze the cucumbers lightly; a little cucumber juice will collect. Add the cucumbers to the yogurt.
Add 1 tsp of lemon juice and stir the sauce. If needed, you can add a little more salt, but do not overdo it.
Pick the leaves off the dill sprigs and discard the coarse stems. Finely chop the dill and 2-3 fresh mint leaves with a knife.
Add the herbs to the sauce and stir everything together. The yogurt sauce for the baked eggplants is ready. Put it in the refrigerator.
How to serve the baked eggplants
Carefully peel the cooled eggplants, removing the wrinkled or charred skin. Cut off the end with the stem.
Cut each eggplant lengthwise into four pieces. If there are any spoiled spots or seeds, carefully remove them by cutting or scraping.
Brush the flesh with a little lemon juice to slow down darkening.
Spread half of the sauce evenly over large plates. Put the remaining sauce into a small sauce boat and place it on the same plate.
Lay the quarters of baked eggplant on top of the yogurt sauce and garnish with fresh mint.
The appetizer is ready to serve and does not need further chilling. If you like, season the baked eggplants with pepper or add 1-2 chili peppers fried in oil. You can also add finely chopped arugula to the sauce, and cilantro if you like. Serve it as a salad or with an aperitif.
Calories and macros
325 kcal
Serving ≈ 740 g
- Protein10 g14% of kcal
- Fat17 g53% of kcal
- Carbs25 g34% of kcal
100 g44 kcalProtein 1.3 gFat 2.3 gCarbs 3.3 g
Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.
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