An eggplant is a thing of rare beauty. Its form ranges from as blocky and solid as a Botero sculpture to as sinuous and flowing as a Modigliani. Its color can be the violet of a particularly magnificent sunrise or as black as a starless night. It can be alabaster white or even red-orange and ruffled. And its beauty is more than skin-deep. The flesh is at once luxurious in texture and accommodating in flavor. So why does the eggplant scare people?
Most of it has to do, in one way or another, with the vegetable’s supposed bitterness. Of course, there’s the classic recommendation that eggplant needs to be salted before cooking to remove the bitterness. But that’s just the start. Eggplants with large calyxes (the leafy-looking green part that connects the vegetable to the stem) are bitter. Eggplants with more seeds are bitter. Eggplants that are heavier are bitter. At least that’s what some people say. Others claim just the opposite: it’s the lighter eggplants that are bitter. Some of the assertions take an almost psychological turn: Eggplants that are old are bitter. Eggplants with darker skins are bitter. Eggplants that are male are bitter. (For the record, botanically speaking eggplants are fruits and therefore neither male nor female.)
Let’s get one thing straight: most eggplants are not bitter (even though they have every right to be after everything that has been said about them). At least they are no more bitter than a green bell pepper or the tannic skin of a fresh walnut. They have a whisper of bitterness that adds to the taste rather than ruining it. In fact, it’s that subtle edge that makes eggplant such a great companion to so many flavors. Without that edge, it would be bland, nothing more than field-grown tofu. But that earthy undertone serves to focus our attention on other flavors, the way a bass line complements a melody.
Combine that natural accommodation with a spongelike absorbency, and eggplant is one of nature’s great sidemen. It soaks up the flavor of whatever it is cooked with, and somehow amplifies and smoothes out that flavor in the process. Good olive oil has no greater friend than eggplant and vice versa. Fry eggplant in olive oil, and what once was a hard, dry, almost pithy vegetable becomes downright voluptuous. The surface crisps slightly, and the inside turns creamy and smooth. (Also make sure to brush eggplant with oil before grilling. It will keep the surface from drying out.)
The secret to great fried eggplant is actually one of the supposed cures for bitterness. Salting the vegetable does nothing to remove bitterness (which isn’t really there in the first place), but it does pull the water out of the eggplant, collapsing the cells, which then absorb oil more easily during cooking. Try it and you’ll see. Cook salted and unsalted eggplant side by side with oil in a skillet and dry on the grill. Salting will make absolutely no difference in the grilled eggplant, but it will in the fried. Unsalted fried eggplant is meaty; salted is creamy. It all depends on what you like. Don’t shortcut this step. It takes about an hour of purging (an hour and a half is better) to make a difference. Some cooks recommend pressing the eggplant under a weight during this process. Although this makes sense in theory, I found that pressing resulted in eggplant disks that cooked up like wafers rather than pillows.
Some cooks also claim that salting reduces the amount of oil the eggplant absorbs during frying. This, unfortunately, is not true. Salted and unsalted both soak up prodigious amounts of oil—as much as 2 tablespoons per ½-inch-thick slice. Supposedly, if you cook eggplant longer, it will release the oil it has absorbed as the cell structure collapses. This takes very slow, patient cooking, however, over a long period of time.
One thing that might rightly intimidate people about eggplants is the sheer variety that’s available. What is a cook to make of a vegetable that can take so many different forms? There are so many eggplants in the world that it’s impossible to keep up with them. In fact, scientists aren’t even sure of the exact number. (In his Cornucopia II, an authoritative guide to edible plant life, Stephen Facciola lists fifty-six major eggplant varieties.) Beyond its ancestral home in Burma, eggplant is a staple food in India, China, Southeast Asia, much of Africa and the Mediterranean. And as is so often the case after centuries of small-scale subsistence cultivation—where farmers save seeds from year to year, gradually changing the plant’s genetics—the varieties are poorly defined, with one type shading into another.
Some of these varieties look so unusual that you wouldn’t even know they were eggplants. The elaborately tufted, lavender-skinned Rosa Bianca is as big as a toddler’s head, and the beautifully marbleized green Thai eggplant is smaller than a golf ball. Creamy oval eggplants about 3 inches tall look just like eggs. There are long, thin eggplants that range in hues from green to black-purple to violet to white. Tiny Thai “pea” eggplants look for all the world like very small green peas that grow in clusters like grapes. (Discussion continues among botanists about whether this is a true eggplant or a close cousin.)
It would be nice to say that the visual variety of eggplants is matched by an equally wide range of flavors, but that would be a lie. For the most part, eggplant tastes like eggplant. This is not to say that all eggplants are interchangeable. Eggplants vary in how thick their skin is and how seedy they are, and they vary in the exact texture of their flesh. But they don’t vary much in flavor.
So the little green Thai eggplant, although it is very seedy and crunchy, tastes pretty much like the small, thin Chinese “finger” eggplant, which has very few seeds, creamy flesh and an amazingly thin skin. And that in turn tastes like the familiar blocky black eggplant, with its thick skin, coarse flesh and moderate amount of seeds. Furthermore, except for the blackest of eggplants, the skin color fades during cooking, resulting in a muted palette of shades of greenish beige.
WHERE THEY’RE GROWN: Eggplants are a pretty minor crop in the United States. Production is fairly evenly split among Florida, California, Georgia, New York and North Carolina. In fact, Mexico grows more of our eggplants than all of the United States combined.
HOW TO CHOOSE: For a vegetable that can look like such a brute, eggplant is surprisingly fragile. It bruises easily, and those bruises quickly turn bad. (Cut open a dented eggplant, and you’ll see that the flesh is brown and corky in the affected area.) It also loses moisture quickly, leading to dry and pithy flesh. When choosing an eggplant, pick one that is heavy for its size; that will be the freshest. Also feel the skin. If it is a round eggplant, the skin should be taut and almost bulging. The long, thin eggplants found in Asian markets are often slightly softer, but they should not be so soft that the skin is wrinkling.
HOW TO STORE: The eggplant is a tropical plant and hates the cold. Bronze patches on an eggplant’s skin are signs of chill damage, which can occur after the fruit is picked as well as before. In an ideal world, you’d buy only enough eggplant to use for one day, and you’d store it in a cool spot on the counter. (Eggplants hate to get colder than 45 degrees, and most home refrigerators are between 35 and 40 degrees.) Eggplants’ thin skin is also susceptible to water damage, so keep your eggplants as dry as possible. The best solution is to store them in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator, in a plastic bag with a crumpled-up sheet of paper towel to absorb excess moisture. Kept this way, they’ll be of acceptable quality for up to a week.
HOW TO PREPARE: Eggplants can be peeled or not, depending on your preference. The peel is slightly tough, and if you’re cooking an eggplant whole, the peel can split during the process. You can also peel the eggplant in alternating lengthwise strips, which gives it a pretty harlequin effect. Salt eggplant only if you are going to fry it in oil.
ONE SIMPLE DISH: To grill eggplant, cut it lengthwise into ½-inch-thick slices. Brush both sides of each slice with garlic-flavored olive oil. Continue brushing lightly during cooking. Grill just until the eggplant is tender—try not to char it, although that’s unavoidable to a certain extent. When a slice of eggplant is done, transfer it to a serving platter, then sprinkle it with salt and minced fresh herbs. When the next slice is done, place it on top of the first, repeating the seasoning. Continue layering the slices until all are cooked.