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Preparing Your Eggplant

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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.