Baba Ghanoush - How to Make Roasted Eggplant Dip & Spread

[Music] hello this is chef john from food wishes.com with baba ganoush that's right not only i'm going to show you how to make this fun to say and delicious to eat roasted eggplant dip and spread but i'm also going to show you how to sax an eggplants and don't worry that only sounds inappropriate but in the kitchen being able to tell whether an eggplant is male or female is kind of a big deal since the male egg plant have fewer seeds and are better to cook with and how you can tell is actually very very easy we're simply going to look at the navels where the stem attached to the eggplant and if that indentation is kind of elongated sort of a slot shaped or slit shaped that is a female as opposed to the male eggplant which have more of a dot shaped or round indentation so we're going to stay away from that shape because that's female that's going to have more seeds and we will look for the ones with the rounder indentations and the way to remember this is with the saying dots not slots hashtag dots not slots so anyway just a quick little eggplant buying tip and just for fun i ended up getting three male and one female eggplant just for a little experiment and what we need to do before we roast these besides of course wash them is prick that skin a few times with the point of a knife they say if you don't do this your eggplants will explode and who needs that although they don't really explode they just kind of split open but regardless we'll give them a few pokes with our knife at which point these are ready to roast any way you want all right i'm going to head out to the grill and do mine over charcoal but this will totally work in a hot oven or even under the broiler but if it is grilling season this is the ultimate day after your barbecue recipe and the reason is after you finish grilling those burgers or chicken or hot dogs or whatever generally your coals still have a lot of life left in them so what i like to do after all the meats grilled is throw some eggplant down and roast them while they're grill's still hot and that way those are ready to make a beautiful spread out of the next day it's pretty much the perfect system so if you know you're going to be grilling buy some mali eggplant and throw them down at the end of the festivities and you will have something very delicious to eat the next day but anyway we're going to roast these eggplant on the grill and it's a very simple operation and that we're just going to keep turning these grilling them on all sides until they basically collapse and get really really soft so once they shrivel up and kind of look like this i'll start poking around and if i feel a spot that doesn't quite seem soft yet i will try to maneuver that spot towards the hottest parts of the grill and by the way if it means leaning one eggplant against the other to keep it in position that's totally fine and once these do finally get soft you can pull them off but i do admit i like mine well done so i tend to leave mine on the grill for a few extra minutes which is going to result in a little smokier albeit darker baba ganoush so this is how far i took mine so i'm going to go ahead and pull those off transferring them into a mixing bowl because what we're going to do when we head back inside is wrap this in foil and just let it kind of sit and steam there for about 15 minutes and this is optional but i feel like it helps transfer that kind of smoky grill flavor throughout the mixture and then after 15 minutes what we'll do is we'll unwrap it and we'll let that cool down until we can handle it at which point we'll peel off all that skin of course i was totally impatient and it was still too hot to handle so i used a spoon to start scraping this into a colander and by the way check out all those seeds yes that is the one female eggplant i bought and it did have significantly more seeds than the male eggplants i bought but anyway one way or another you're gonna transfer everything that's not skin or stem into that colander and like i said if you're a little more patient and let these cool you can just peel the skin off the whole thing right there you can see one of our beautiful almost seedless male examples and then once we've separated all that beautiful warm eggplant flesh from the skin and stem i'm just going to set that colander right on top and just let that drain for about 5 or 10 minutes and once that's drained we will transfer those perfectly roasted eggplant innards into a mixing bowl where we can mash this and introduce the rest of the ingredients and if you want those seed pods kind of stay together so if you want to pull those out go ahead a little bit's not going to hurt you but a lot of seeds can make the mixture more bitter so i did pull some of those out but that will be up to you and probably a moot point if you buy all male eggplant so first up i'm going to add a little bit of crushed garlic as well as a generous amount of salt and then before we add the rest of our ingredients we'll take a potato masher and we'll use that to mix mash and smash this down to something that's pretty creamy yet still has some texture to it and some people like to use food processors or blenders and get this completely smooth but i prefer mine a little bit on the rustic side as do i think most baba ganoush aficionados so i mixed and mashed mine to look like this at which point we're going to stop and add the rest of the ingredients so let's go ahead and squeeze in some fresh lemon juice and just like every other ingredient in this recipe totally to taste i'm probably going to use about a lemon and a half and then we want to add a little bit of tahini sauce but not too much i'm going to start with about two or three tablespoons and then if i want more i'll add more later and you want to be a little careful because if you use too much instead of making a baba ganoush you're going to make a slippery hummus which is not what we want we're also going to do a little shake of cayenne raise your hand if you're surprised as well as some extra virgin olive oil something on the fruity side would be perfect and then what we'll do is we'll switch to whisk and give this a very good mixing which is not only going to incorporate everything very nicely but what's going to happen is some of the most fibrous parts of the eggplant that were located around that stem section those are actually going to get wrapped around the tip of the whisk and when we pull it out that's going to come with it all right can you see that so that was some classic multitasking right there and that's pretty much going to be it except for one secret ingredient i'm going to stir in a little bit just a couple tablespoons of plain yogurt it's an old trick a lebanese friend taught me so i'm going to stir that in and technically at this point our baba ganoush is done but it is not even close to being ready to serve very critical we have to wrap this up and chill it completely before the final seasoning because right now it's basically room temperature and it's impossible to taste all the flavors which have not even fully developed yet so what we want to do is wrap this up and pop it in the fridge for three or four hours or until completely chilled at which point we can pull it out and then do the final seasoning okay so at this point my baba ganoush is ice cold and we'll unwrap it and give it a stir and taste for seasoning so i went ahead and i adjusted mine with more cayenne and salt like most vegetable dishes this needs a good amount of salt and an under-salted baba ganoush is a horrible baba ganoush and then besides the cayenne and the salt i also like to finish with a little bit of fresh herb which includes a tiny amount of fresh mint that was literally one leaf as well as a nice big pinch of italian parsley and we'll stir that in and that could be it but just to be sure we're going to taste again and adjust if necessary you are the linden larouche of your baba ganoush and speaking of brainwashing if there's one thing i want to make sure i meld into your minds it's never serve anything that you haven't tasted first all right and then once we are happy with the seasoning we can go ahead and transfer that into some kind of serving vessel and because the texture is what some people would describe as aesthetically challenged we will distract the eye with some spoon-based indentations also known as spoon dentations and then as is customary we will finish with a drizzle of olive oil and a little more tele parsley and that's it our baba ganoush is ready to baba ganache and i'm just going to serve mine with some toasted pita triangles and are those homemade or store bought ooh i'll never tell all right fine they're from the store but who cares about the pita when you have this amazing roasted eggplant spread just so tasty so savory so delicious and yet actually very very light and like i said if you can manage to roast these over a charcoal fire it's going to be that much more delicious because you're going to get that little bit of smokiness in the background that really brings us all together but anyway that's it baba ganoush a very simple and very delicious eggplant spread plus you also learned how to tell if an eggplant is a male or a female i mean even if you don't cook vegetable based trivia like that is casual cocktail party conversation gold alright so you got that going for you but anyway eggplant gender aside i really do hope you give this delicious spread a try soon so head over to foodwishes.com for all the ingredient amounts and more info as usual and as always enjoy

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 2,909,734

Keywords: Baba Ghanoush (Food), Eggplant (Food), Dip (Type Of Dish), Spread (Food), Roasting (Culinary Technique), Recipe, appetizer, meze, chef, john, foodwishes, Cooking, vegetarian, middle eastern, cuisine

Id: EUiV_0Acspc

Length: 8min 12sec (492 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2015