Eggplant Meatball Recipe

Chef Pasquale

In this segment Chef Pasquale explains his version of Eggplant Meatballs. This is another unique way of using Melenzane or Eggplant. It’s easy and delicious. Take a moment and let Chef Pasquale share is recipe (In Broken English) for

Eggplant Meatballs 

Eggplant, due to its texture and bulk, it is sometimes used as a meat substitute in vegan (Eggplant Meatballs) and vegetarian cuisines. Eggplant flesh is smooth. Its numerous seeds are small, soft and edible, along with the rest of the fruit, and do not have to be removed. Its thin skin is also edible, and so it does not have to be peeled.

Interesting fact about Eggplant 

The Italian melanzana, through folk-etymology, was adapted to mela insana (‘mad apple’): already by the thirteenth century, this name had given rise to a tradition that egg-plants could cause insanity.

Translated into English as ‘mad-apple’, ‘rage-apple’, or ‘raging apple’, this name for eggplants is attested from 1578 and the form ‘mad-apple’ may still be found in Southern American English.

From Greek, the word was borrowed into Italian and medieval Latin, and onwards into French. Early forms include:

• Melanzāna, recorded in Sicilian in the twelfth century.

• Melongena, recorded in Latin in the thirteenth century.

• Melongiana, recorded in Veronese in the fourteenth century.

Raw eggplant can have a bitter taste, with an astringent quality, but it becomes tender when cooked and develops a rich, complex flavor. The fruit is capable of absorbing large amounts of cooking fats and sauces, which may enrich dishes.

Many recipes advise salting, rinsing, and draining the sliced fruit (a process known as “degorging”) to remove the bitterness inherent in earlier cultivars, and also to soften it and reduce the amount of fat absorbed. Modern cultivars, including the large purple ones common in the Western world, do not need this treatment to remove bitterness, although it still reduces the fat absorbed in frying.

Eggplant can be steamed, stir-fried, pan fried, deep fried, barbecued, roasted, stewed, curried, or pickled. Many eggplant dishes are sauces made by mashing the cooked fruit. It can be stuffed. It is frequently, but not always, cooked with fat.