Many housewives in eggplant cooking recipes advise removing bitterness from the fruit. What methods exist for this, we learn in a step-by-step recipe with a photo. Video recipe.
Eggplant is a delicious, beautiful and satisfying vegetable. It pleases with color, taste, and pleasant roundness of forms. Many different dishes are prepared from it. In the summertime, we constantly treat ourselves to snacks, salads, casseroles and other eggplant dishes. At the same time, in each recipe, we read that before you start cooking eggplants, you need to remove the bitterness from them. And if nothing is done, then the dish will turn out to be tasteless.
Of course, there is no bitterness in fresh young eggplants. But if the vegetable is already ripe, then the bitterness of eggplant must be fought. Some people perceive this bitterness as a spicy feature of eggplants, however, such a minority. Therefore, many are interested in the question of how best to remove bitterness from eggplants. The bulk of chefs and cooks successfully use several methods for this. At the same time, salt remains an unchanged product that fights bitterness. This method has several options - dry and wet. Let's get acquainted with the most popular method - dry.
- Caloric content per 100 g - 25 kcal.
- Servings - Any Amount
- Cooking time - 40 minutes
Ingredients:
Eggplant - any quantity
Step-by-step preparation of removing bitterness from eggplant by the dry method, recipe with photo:
1. Wash the eggplants, cut off the stem and cut the fruit, as required by the recipe. In this case, the blue ones are cut into circles. If the recipe requires you to peel off the peel, do so.
2. Fold the chopped vegetable into a bowl, sprinkle with coarse salt where you cut it. With the dry method of removing bitterness from eggplant, it is preferable to use coarse rather than fine salt, because the structure of the eggplant pulp is very porous.
3. Stir and leave for half an hour.
4. During this time, the salt crystals will dissolve, and droplets of moisture will appear on the surface of the vegetable pieces, together with which all the bitterness came out.
5. Place the eggplant pieces in a sieve and rinse under running water.
6. Dry the vegetable well with a paper towel and use the eggplant for various dishes.
Alternative ways to remove bitterness:
- Wet way. Sliced eggplants are dipped in a container with cold salted water. Proportions: for 1 liter of water 1 tbsp. salt. Since eggplants do not sink in water, use pressure to press down on them. After half an hour, all the bitterness from the vegetable will go away. Rinse it, squeeze out excess water and start cooking. You can soak whole eggplants in salt water, but then their exposure time will be 1.5 hours. The amount of salt and water remains the same as with the sliced eggplant.
- Freezer Cut the eggplant into slices, place them on a plate and place them in the freezer for 4 hours. Remove the eggplants from the freezer and squeeze out the liquid to remove the bitterness. Keep in mind that such eggplants lose their shape during cooking and acquire the consistency of puree.
- Removing seeds. If there is no time to remove the bitterness from the eggplant, then simply peel the seeds out of the fruit. They are very similar to pepper seeds. They are certainly not spicy, but interestingly, seed-free eggplant no longer needs to be manipulated with salt and freezer. Slice the eggplant lengthwise and scrape the seeds out.
- Soaking in milk. Dip the sliced eggplants in the milk for half an hour and press down on top with a press. After half an hour, remove them and wring them out with a paper towel.
See also a video recipe on how to remove bitterness from eggplant.
