Preparing Your Eggplant

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  • marcin Flag

    very nice pleace more
    best italian video ricipes what i saw restaurant very nice too but maybe you can show more ricipes from yours menu that would be nice I`M from Poland and i Love Italian food good luck with what you do

Davide Megna
Chef & Co-Owner
http://www.amicimieiristorante.com/  
(301) 545-0966

Preparing Your Eggplant

This video will show how to prepare eggplant for eggplant parmesan.

This expert: 337,868 views

This series: 94,885 views

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Preparing Your Eggplant

Ingredients

Fresh Eggplant
Mozzarella Cheese
Grated Parmigiano-Reggiano Cheese

Tomato Sauce
Frying Oil

Instructions

1. Clean the eggplant, taking the skin off with a little knife or a potato peeler. Slice the eggplant about half an inch thick long ways.


2. Place the slices of eggplant into a colander and layer them, with a little bit of salt between each layer. Place a plate on top and press down, to squeeze the water from the eggplant. Let them sit for an hour and a half to two hours.


3. Bread the eggplant with flour and put a few slices at a time into the oil, frying them to a nice golden color on both sides. Remove the eggplant from the oil with a tong and place it into a paper towel to absorb all the excess oil. 


4. Take 4 to 5 slices of eggplant, 4 or 5 large spoons of tomato sauce, a couple ounces of fresh Mozzarella and some Parmesan cheese. Wet the bottom of the Pyrex with tomato sauce and begin layering the eggplant, tomato sauce and cheese.


5. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and cook the eggplant parmesan for 20-25 minutes.

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Transcripts

Davide Megna: Hello, I am Davide Megna with Amici Miei Ristorante in Rockville Maryland and I am going to show you how to make a Eggplant Parmesan today. Now, we are going to get ready and clean two eggplant that better be very fresh and if they are not too bit it's even better because so that they don't have many seeds inside. So I am going to start cleaning the eggplant like this, taking the skin off with a little knife or you can also use a potato peeler.

Now, once you have finished peeling the eggplant we are going to slice them about half a inch thick. Now a little secret here. I slice the eggplant about half an inch thick because if you cut them very thin the eggplant when you fry them they will absorb too much oil. So that's the reason why I am slicing it a little bit thick. Then I am going to take a colander with a bowl underneath and I am going to place the slices of eggplant into the colander one next to the other one and layer them with a little bit of salt, then we are going to make another layer. We are going to add more salt. So salt on each layer basically. Two more eggplant. This salt would allow for the eggplant to drain the water there. So after I put the salt, I am going to put a little aluminum plate, you can use just the regular plate or anything like that and something very heavy on top of your eggplant, that would really squeeze all the water out from them and it's very, very important otherwise you will have eggplant soggy and full of water after you have cooked them.

So after we slice and layer the eggplant with salt into a colander, we have got to let them sit for about hour and a half to two hours no more than that. That would allowed all the water to come out of the eggplant and now we are getting ready to fry them for our eggplant parmesan.

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