Georgian eggplant
- Nutrition Facts
- Calories: 48
- Protein: 1.5
- Fats: 1.7
- Carbohydrates: 6.3
Dear admirers of the national cuisine of the peoples of the world and gentlemen culinary experimenters! Our today's master class is for you. Let's turn to the origins of Georgian cuisine, prepare a wonderful dish - Georgian eggplant. You will certainly like the appetizer, because it is prepared in an interesting way and it turns out to be just incomparable at the exit - tender and spicy at the same time.
A bit of history
Vegetable dishes of Georgian cuisine are mostly salad or appetizer. Moreover, vegetables can be eaten raw, but more often boiled, fried or baked on a fire. The peculiarity of eggplant dishes lies in the sharpness of taste, supplemented with garlic, fragrant spices, nuts and herbs. True, many years ago, Georgian chefs used seasonings to a minimum to prepare their spicy snacks, being content with garlic, hot peppers, lots of greens and walnuts. It is walnuts that are revered in Georgia above all others. Our eggplants with Georgian walnuts will be initially cooked in the oven by baking, and then transformed into a snack. Bulgarian pepper (sweet and bitter) is used as an additional ingredient.
Full Ingredients:
- eggplant - 1-1.5 kg;
- bulgarian pepper - 500-700 g;
- garlic - to taste;
- hot pepper - to taste;
- parsley - 1-1.5 bunches;
- red onion - 1-2 heads;
- walnuts - to taste;
- coarse salt - to taste.
How to cook Georgian eggplant
- A simple and affordable composition of products in the autumn, and at the end we will have not only a tasty, but healthy salad of baked vegetables. We take products according to the list: small eggplants, sweet green and red bell peppers, purple onions, young garlic, peeled walnuts, a large bunch of fresh parsley or any other greens - to taste.
To prepare this tasty and healthy salad, we need: bell pepper, blue onion, eggplant, garlic, walnuts, parsley and any other herbs to taste.
- So, let's start the baking process. Eggplants are selected small, but plump. Rinse, wipe dry and cut off the stem. We take multi-colored bell pepper - for a beautiful combination. We wash, get rid of the core. We send vegetables to a baking sheet, and then to the oven for 45 minutes.
All the vegetables that we will bake should be washed and wiped dry. This applies to eggplant and bell pepper, by the way, the latter also needs to be pitted.
- We bake eggplants with bell peppers, first under a sheet of foil, and then open. Remove foil 15 minutes before cooking. Oven temperature - at least 220 °. During the baking process, excess moisture will be released on the baking sheet - this is normal. That is why we did not grease the mold with sunflower oil. Ideally, of course, it would be to bake vegetables on coals, but what is there.
Bake vegetables at a temperature of 220 degrees. The first 15 minutes, the baking sheet should be covered with foil, and then remove it and continue cooking the same amount open.
- Baked eggplants and chill the peppers. Then we remove the skin, and send the pulp to a large kneading salad bowl.
Now that the vegetables are baked, they must be cooled and peeled, and then offered in a bowl or salad bowl.
- Grind pure parsley and peeled garlic on a cutting board.
We clean and finely chop the greens chosen for the salad, we do the same with garlic.
- Attach flavors to baked vegetables.
Mix greens and garlic with baked vegetables.
- We chop the peeled red onion into half rings, straws or cubes - according to your desire.
Cut the blue onion in half and chop it in your favorite way, we chose half rings.
- We send the chopped onion to a bowl with fragrant vegetables. Salt well bitter red hot peppers (slightly). Everything is quickly mixed with your hands, but not with a spoon. Salad should not be "porridge". Each ingredient should be felt separately.
We also combine chopped onions with baked vegetables, salt, add hot pepper and mix the salad with our hands. It is important that the ingredients do not turn into porridge.
- We supplement with walnuts. If desired, the nuts can be ground into small crumbs.
Add chopped walnuts to the salad nuts. Nuts can either be ground into crumbs or chopped into medium-sized pieces.
- Serve eggplants with nuts in Georgian style in serving bowls for the holiday and always warm. If desired, the dish can be decorated with parsley tops and supplemented with mayonnaise. Have a nice dinner!
For serving it is better to use bowls. Before serving, you should definitely sprinkle the salad with fresh and fragrant chopped herbs, and if you like it, also mayonnaise.
- To the table!
To the table!
Variations of the dish
- If our salad is mixed in a blender, seasoned with sunflower oil and vinegar, and then brought to a boil, then the resulting Georgian-style eggplants for the winter are quietly rolled into jars for storage.
- Eggplants and peppers can be roasted on charcoal, as mentioned earlier. Then the appetizer will have an unforgettable "smoky" flavor.
About the benefits
Roasted vegetables are a great source of fiber and vitamins. In the process of baking, we completely abandoned the use of fats and salt. What made our dish especially useful. Moreover, eggplants and peppers were cooked directly in the peel and thus retained all the vitamins and juices inside the pulp. Only moisture completely unnecessary for the salad stood out.
Red onion is an ideal antibacterial and antiviral agent, as well as an undeniable source of folic acid, potassium, and the most important vitamin C for the body. Walnuts are the tree of life. You must have heard this saying more than once. A huge complex of vitamins and minerals, as well as fiber, essential oils and organic acids, and a healthy body cannot do without it. Only 20-30 grams of peeled nuts per day and your body will work like clockwork.
In conclusion, I would like to note that Georgian eggplant, the recipe with a photo presented in our HozOboz review, is made with all love for Georgian cuisine. But if suddenly it seems to you that the dish lacks spices and spiciness, add them to your liking. Eggplants "pull out your eyes" - more for an amateur! You and I need to save our stomachs for new and interesting culinary feats, and on our site there are many recipes from Georgian cuisine that deserve attention no less than this.
