Hi, everybody. Today's recipe, I'm going to be making a gluten
free, oven-baked fried eggplant for you. We're going to coat this up with a nice breadcrumb-seasoned
coating, dipped in egg too, of course, and we're going to bake it in the oven to make
it a little bit healthier for you. So I'm Rockin' Robin, and I'm going to show
you how to do it right after this. Here are our ingredients that we're going
to need for our recipe. First off, I've got some Panko gluten-free
breadcrumbs here that you can get online. That's where I got mine. I'll leave a link for you in the description
of this video and you can find that. I also have some gluten-free flour here. This is an all-purpose flour that I picked
up at Trader Joe's. We'll need a couple of eggs, an eggplant,
of course. We'll need some olive oil. I'm using an extra light, which works well
in this recipe. And over here, I have some Italian seasonings
that I put together myself. I like to do that so I can control the ingredients,
and again, that will be in the description of this video. We'll need some salt and some butter. We're going to start off here by slicing up
our eggplant. Now, we want to cut this somewhere between
one-quarter of an inch to a half an inch thick. We don't want them too thick and we don't
want them too thin, because if they're too thin, they're going to burn and if they're
too thick, they don't cook so well. And then we're going to place each piece onto...I
have a wire rack here and I'm going to spread them out and I'm going to sprinkle some salt
on them. Now, what that's going to do is it's going
to help draw out some of the moisture from the slices of eggplant so that it will crisp
up a little bit easier. Now, we're going to let the eggplant rest
now. It's going to sweat for about 20 to 30 minutes,
and hopefully we'll pull out a lot of that moisture so they will crisp up. It's been 30 minutes for our eggplant to sweat
a little bit. So I'm going to place it into a colander and
I'm going to rinse the excess salt off. I'm going to let that drain, and then we're
going to pat them dry. Now that the eggplant is ready to go, we're
almost ready to start dipping it. But first, we've got to preheat our oven to
400 degrees Fahrenheit, and we need to prep our baking pan. So we're going to coat it with just a little
bit of olive oil, just a nice thin layer. All right, we're ready for dipping. Okay, so what we want to do here, I have my
flour and my Panko crumbs here and we want to combine the two together and we're going
to add in the Italian seasoning. So we'll take our eggplant and just place
it right into the egg mixture. You can use your hands as long as they're
clean, and then we're just going to coat each piece. Now place it right on our dish. Now, we don't want to crowd these together. We're going to keep them plenty of space between
them so it probably...because they're so large, I'm going to have to go probably two in a
row. Now, the last thing I want to do is take a
little bit of butter, nice, thin slices and place them on top, just a little bit. These are like paper thin. All right, these are going in the oven for
about 20 minutes. Now, I also turned the eggplants over after
about halfway through their cooking time, so check that out and make sure you do that
as well because it browns up more on the bottom. All right, guys, here you go, our little oven-fried
eggplants are done. They stayed in there for about, oh, I would
say 35 minutes. I like mine really crispy and brown, sometimes
even on the verge of burning them a little bit, but that's what I like. So anyway, these look fantastic. They just pop right off the tray there and
they're nice and crispy. And guys, this would be great as an appetizer
or just a snack or, you know, whatever you want, a side dish even. I want to give it a taste. Hear that crunch? Love it, absolutely love this. The Italian seasonings, you've definitely
got to put that together. Check it down below in the description, guys,
all those ingredients are down there for you. This is really good. Very delicious. All right, guys, thanks so much for watching. I do appreciate it when you guys stop by and
take your time to watch my videos. I really do appreciate it. So guys, if you enjoyed the video, please
share it, give me a thumbs up, and of course always leave me a comment. I love to hear from you. And if you do make this and you take a picture
of it, go ahead and hashtag me at #RockinRobinCooks. I'd love to see what you guys come up with. And like I said, there's lots of variations
on this. You can add to this. At this point, you could add even some pasta
sauce with a little shredded mozzarella, and it would be really just delicious. So thanks again for watching everybody. We'll see you next time.
