Moldavian Eggplant Parmesan recipe (fusion of Vegetarian Cuisine from Moldova / Romania / Italy)

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[Applause] Most eggplant parmesan recipes are more about the tomato sauce than the eggplant itself they’re heavily branded to where you can hardly taste the eggplant and tend to be cheesy goopy oily blobs mdova is home to what is arguably the finest eggplant in the world and they want to

Taste the eggplant this recipe is unique for two reasons first the manner in which the eggplant are coated without any egg or bread this is completely different from anything you’ve seen second the sauce is made from braced vegetables that have a true Synergy with the parmesan cheese putting in about

Eight cloves of garlic it’s a rather a lot of garlic and I’m going to start it off just by grining it in the food processor a little [Applause] bit Okay now I’m going to add um the flour that’s 180 g and you don’t have to add this but it it helps a little bit it’s it’s a subtle difference but I’m adding a little margarum about teaspoon of dried margarum to this uh it’s optional and then you need about two

Generous 2 teaspoons of salt seems like a lot of salt but but it won’t be because this most of this isn’t going to actually stick to the eggplant now we got to grind it some more you’ll find it’s it’s sticking at the bottom because of the the dry flour

And the uh relatively wet garlic so you have to scrape down the sides a little bit you want to try to get this as as homogeneous as you can okay now you can leave this to sit for an hour before you begin using it uh or

You can use it right away if you have just to show you the difference the kind of eggplant we usually see here uh it’s not shiny and black and pretty uh but it has much better flavor it’s actually ironic because it doesn’t look very good like like most natural fruit and

Vegetables but uh The Taste is actually far better but I realize your chances of getting one that that’s not uh genetically bread to look pretty sinin but uh if you can those are the best egg plants yeah here’s one of the eggplants I just ran a heart peeler down it I wish

You could smell this is so different from the eggplant that you get in the the United States it’s actually it’s like filling the whole room with a scent of eggplant right now it’s uh completely different as you can see I’m I’m cutting these maybe uh4 of an inch thick something like that

And just going to repeat it down here to the rest of the eggplant now I have the the flour that had the garlic and the the salt mixed into it I’m going to toss this these slices after I do them all in here we’re going to let it stand for a

While this is why also you don’t want to have big chunks of garlic in it cuz otherwise when you cook it you’ll have big chunks of garlic that’ll that’ll burn um so this there’s a little bit of an art as to how long you leave the

Eggplant uh in the flower but you you have to leave it there for a while cuz the salt that’s in the flour is going to work on the eggplant and it’s going to draw out some of the moisture and it’s going to hydrate the flour it’s part of

The process so uh we’ll give it a little while and come back and check them now about every 5 to 10 minutes you want to toss these pieces around in the flow you I don’t know if you can see on the video or not but but this is changing they’re

Starting to become sticky they’re tacky to the touch that’s the stage that you’re looking for you don’t want to let them go way past this point because then what will happen is you get this super heavy uh coating of flour on them and uh not only will it taste gummy when you’re

Done but it’ll give you terrible indigestion because you’ll have raw flour in in the inside there so this is about the right amount of of time but it’ll vary with from eggplant to eggplant and probably some other things like how humid the environment you’re sitting in right now when you do this is

So they’re they’re just slightly tacky this is the point we’re going to start heating up the oil and cooking them I’m also um I’m going to leave them in the flour but I’m not going to be tossing them around and trying to get any more

Flour on them now I’m just going to kind of push them off to the side here a bit and uh get them out of the flour so they don’t they don’t start getting gummy okay I’m using a good very heavy uh non-stick pan for this um this is an

Extremely good pan uh it’s important because you don’t want this these to stick at all I’m also adding olive oil to this pan already hot and I’m going to start cooking these just um a few at a time now one of the other um things to consider here this is this

Is one of those peasant dishes uh which is as often the case is very labor intensive it’s going to take a while to slowly cook this eggplant you can’t don’t set fire to it with a super high flame super high heat uh it’s being cooked over medium to medium high heat

On a scale of 1 to 10 it’s a seven if you try doing it too fast they plant won’t be creamy and soft in the middle it’ll just be burnt on the outside so it’s going to take time it’s going to take uh maybe for each batch of eggplant

Maybe 8 or 9 Minutes in order to get it cooked completely um and and nice and golden and when you multiply that by the number of pieces of eggplant we have to do you can see this is going to take a while to go through all this eggplant

And cook it that’s just the way that it is it’s not a not a good restaurant dish because it’s too labor intensive it’s been about 3 minutes now and I’m going to add some more olive oil in the middle here and I’m going to flip these pieces around you want to keep

Them moist with olive oil so that they Brown nicely also helps to turn the pan around some too as you can see some of the pieces are more cooked than than others which is inevitable with any stove so just keep them going it’s this is not

Done on this side they’re going to need to be turned again okay it’s been 3 minutes on this side now I’m going to flip them back over and they’re going to get about one 1 and 1/2 minutes on the original side again I’m not adding any

More oil to the pan this time they’re already they’re already moist on there they don’t need any more oil this time about 1 and 1/2 minutes okay it’s been about a minute I’ve also turned the heat down from 7 to 6 because I see that they’re they’re cooking just a little

Bit too fast you want to aim so that they take about 9 minutes total cooking time per batch and uh these are taking maybe 8 minutes they’re a little bit little bit too fast so I turned the temperature on the stove down to six and

This is going to take just like one more minute then we’re going to transfer these to uh to a plate okay it’s been another minute I’m just going to flip this over to show you they’re they’re nice and Golden Crisp on both sides these are going to go to a plate to reserve

Then take a kitchen towel and this has got a bunch of uh partially burnt flour in there and and it’ll be really burd if you don’t wipe this out in between each each batch so it’s got to be wiped clean of course it’s still hot more

Olive oil and then we begin the next batch just exact same process you just repeat it about 3 minutes on the first side 3 minutes on the second side about a minute to a minute and a half on the first side again and a minute to a minute and a

Half uh to finish it up on the other side okay and the process gets repeated I’ve got the the last slices of eggplant going here now it’s been about uh 35 minutes in all you find that you’ve got more flour with the garlic and the herbs

And the salt in it than uh than you needed this works really well for making uh coating for fried chicken you can you can use that or you can do another whole batch of eggplant another eggplant in the in the same batch don’t do more than

One more and then other than that you can throw it of course cuz it’s only flour and garlic and it’s not especially expensive and this is what we want to end up with we have cut 18 slices in all from the one eggplant which is enough to

Make uh six of the final um product as you’ll see in few minutes this can be left for uh you know 30 40 minutes easily the the eggplants really crisp when it first comes off but it it’ll soften up slightly as it sits there but it doesn’t make any difference cuz it’s

Going to go in the oven with sauce anyway it’s going to soften up okay this is the sauce that I actually I actually made the sauce the mavian braced vegetable sauce yesterday so the first step is to put a little bit down in the dish that this is

Going to be cooked in this keeps the eggplant from sticking and obviously it’s going to bottom eggplant is going to absorb a little bit of the sauce okay now we begin stacking them if you wanted to do this for a larger course you could put you could stack them higher than um

Than I am I’m I’m only putting I’m only going to use three layers here in in a restaurant we usually about eight if if we have to make this dish but I usually don’t cuz it’s too labor intensive now this is genuine parmesano regano um cheese don’t use an imitation for this

This is an important aspect of this dish it’s what it’s based on so don’t cheap out and use imitation parmesan it will not work not that crap in the in the uh box that’s dehydrated okay I’m just putting like a teaspoon of the the same graced eggplant sauce on

There and I’m going to repeat this um three times here okay more cheese it’s just about like a teaspoon of cheese between each layer doesn’t have to be exact of course a little aage out and another teaspoon of sauce the oven in the meantime is uh preheating and the final layer B plant

On top Here okay you more P this on we’re going put a lot more sauce on the last layer though it’s just about what we needed for the eggplant now really spoon on the sauce this recipe is it’s about the the eggplant but this it’s also all about the sauce

Don’t forget the sauce is made from all these deliciously braced vegetables we took so much care on so it’s not just like a little decoration um it’s not a background note nearly as much as it would be on a a talian PL on so this is this is looking pretty

Good now we add the the final this is quality wet packed U mozzarella it’s actually imported from Italy um but you may or may not be able to find quality Italian Mozzarella if you live outside of Europe uh it’s usually you get something that’s made in the country

That you’re from uh we live close enough to Italy right now that we we can get the Italian one okay there we go this is enough and uh this is going to go into the oven and begin baking also look for my cocktail book cocktails of the South Pacific and

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