How to cook vegetable caviar at home? Nutritious dish and low calorie content. Technology and subtleties of cooking. Step by step recipe with photo and video recipe.
Let's prepare the most delicious vegetable caviar today. This recipe is very, very relevant at this time of the year, because supermarkets and markets are inundated with cheap seasonal vegetables. Vegetable caviar is a versatile dish that can be served as a salad, side dish or spread on bread. It goes well with many dishes, and meat, and chicken, and spaghetti, and potatoes … The dish turns out to be very aromatic and rich. Summer vegetable caviar made from ground vegetables will turn out to be especially tasty. Of course, this is a dish for an everyday table, but for a small family holiday it can be safely served as an appetizer.
Caviar is prepared very simply and rather quickly, and it is delicious both hot and cold. Although I like it more, it is still chilled. It is prepared from a varied set of vegetables. I chose the simplest and most budgetary products - zucchini, carrots and onions. You can add any other vegetables or replace them to this snack food. Eggplants, sweet bell peppers, tomatoes, squash, etc. are suitable here. When the harvest pampers with its abundance, it is possible and even necessary to use everything that is at hand. It's a good idea to supplement vegetables with mushrooms (mushrooms or oyster mushrooms). It will turn out to be a very spicy dish. In any case, no matter what vegetables you cook, you get a healthy vegetable treat that you can not only cook very quickly, but even preserve for the winter for future use and store in jars.
- Caloric content per 100 g - 92 kcal.
- Servings - 1
- Cooking time - 1 hour
Ingredients:
- Zucchini - 2 pcs.
- Garlic - 2 cloves
- Ground black pepper - pinch or to taste
- Onions - 1 pc.
- Vegetable oil - for frying
- Carrots - 1 pc.
- Sugar - 1 tsp
- Salt - 1 tsp or to taste
- Tomato paste - 2 tablespoons
- Tomatoes - 1 pc.
Step by step cooking of vegetable caviar:
1. Peel the carrots, rinse with cold running water, dry with a paper towel and cut into medium-sized cubes. Take a suitable cast iron skillet or non-stick skillet and pour in odorless vegetable oil (3-4 tablespoons). Add a little butter to make vegetables with a pleasant, delicate taste. If, on the contrary, you want the dish to be more dietary, then replace some of the oil with a little water.
Preheat the pan well, set the stove to medium and put the carrots in hot oil.
2. Peel the onions, rinse under running water, dry them from excess moisture, cut into cubes and send to the pan with the carrots. Mix everything and continue to fry the vegetables.
3. Wash the zucchini under running cold water and dry with a paper towel to remove all excess liquid. Cut off the ends on both sides and cut the fruit into cubes, like all previous vegetables. Send chopped zucchini to the pan with vegetables.
In general, cutting vegetables is not important because I then grind them into a puree consistency. Therefore, you can cut them as much as you like. Although there are options for vegetable caviar, where the vegetables are not chopped, but remain in pieces. If you want to cook this way, then cut all the food to the same size so that it looks nice in the dish.
For the recipe, choose young zucchini, with a thin skin, with unformed seeds and a small size, about 20 cm in length and weighing 300-350 g. Large ripe fruits are also suitable, but then remove the dense peel from them and remove the seeds along with the fibrous inner part. Cut the remaining pulp into appropriate pieces.
4. Fry vegetables over medium heat, stirring occasionally until they are soft, golden and golden brown.
5. While the vegetables are roasting, wash the tomatoes with cold water, dry with a cotton towel and cut into cubes. Send them to the skillet and add the tomato paste immediately. If you have more tomatoes in stock, for example 3-4 pieces, you can use them instead of tomato paste.
Take the tomatoes softer for the recipe so that they turn into a puree and become part of the sauce. If the goal is to cook vegetable caviar in pieces (i.e. without subsequent puréing), then on the contrary, take tomatoes with dense pulp so that they do not turn into a homogeneous mass in the finished dish.
6. Peel the garlic, chop finely and send to the pan. Season with salt, pepper and sugar. Add herbs and spices to taste. I added sweet and spicy ground paprika. Instead of ground pepper, you can put chopped fresh hot peppers. Ground nutmeg, dried ginger root, or a vegetable spice work well. You can, if desired, add chopped herbs (basil, cilantro, parsley) to taste.
7. Stir everything and heat the stove to medium heat. Continue cooking for another 5 minutes to soften the tomatoes.
8. In principle, the vegetable caviar at this stage is already ready and can be served in the form that many housewives do. But I prefer to grind it with a blender to a puree consistency. For this you need a blender. If you have it handmade, like mine, you can lower it in a frying pan and turn the vegetables into a homogeneous mass in it, so as not to stain excess dishes. If you have a stationary blender, then transfer the vegetable mass to the bowl of the appliance, chop it and put it back in the pan.
9. Return the skillet and vegetable puree to the stove and bring to a boil over medium heat. Make the temperature as low as possible and simmer the mixture under the lid for 2-3 minutes. If the caviar turns out to be thin, then boil it to the desired density. If you store caviar for some time, then a preservative is needed for it - table vinegar. Pour it in 1 tsp. and stir. Then the caviar can be stored in the refrigerator in a glass container for 3-4 days.
Leave the finished dish to cool to room temperature, and then send it to the refrigerator to cool well. Put the prepared vegetable caviar on a slice of fresh bread or use it with fresh young potatoes.
If you want to preserve this caviar for the winter, then by all means bring it to a boil again, and boil it over low heat, stirring occasionally, for 15 minutes. 10 minutes before the end of cooking, pour in table vinegar (1 tablespoon). Stir and pour hot into sterilized jars and roll them up with sterile lids.
