Savory Crispy Eggplants

Shallow fried crispy eggplants with a savory sauce made with light soy sauce, vinegar and chili peppers. The eggplant season is coming. As a big fan of eggplant, I always want to cook eggplants in different ways. I have already posted the fabulous Yu Xiang eggplants and the most popular Chinese eggplants with minced pork. This is a totally new recipe.

“Weird” the flavor

There are lots of savory flavors in Sichuan cuisine including the famous mapo flavor, kung pao flavor, mala flavor, yu xiang flavor, hot and sour flavor and etc. Among all of this, the most interesting flavor is named as “weird flavor “. Weird flavor is a combined flavor of all of the commonly used Sichuan seasonings. And it might different from one to another.

How to make eggplant crispy

In order to make the eggplant crisp, we need to give it a relatively thicker coating. I directly coat eggplant wedges with cornstarch. But remember to coat it thickly. Try to cut the eggplants into smaller pieces, so they can well cooked very quickly.

Step to Step Guide

Prepare the eggplants

1.Cut the eggplants into 2 cm widgets. Here is the tip of cutting widgets, cut a triangle area off the eggplant, rotate the eggplants and continue to cut the next wedges. If you are not familiar with this cutting method, simply cut strips.

2.Soak the eggplant in salty water. Absorbing some water can shorten the time of cooking and we can guarantee the eggplants are well cooked in short deep frying process. This also helps to attach the starch in the next step.

3. Add starch (cornstarch or potato starch) by batches and make sure each piece of the eggplants is well coated by starch. I highly recommend using potato starch for this dish because it gives a lovely white and crispy shell.

Prepare the sauce and aromatic

When the eggplant is ready, shred ginger, garlic and dried chili peppers. Then cut coriander stem into sections too if using. Whisk all the ingredients for the bowl sauce together in a small bowl.

Start cooking

Add around 4 tablespoon of oil in wok and shallow fry the eggplant widgets until slightly golden brown. Fry the eggplant widgets for two batches and try to leave some space among each widgets because they may stick together at the very beginning. But if this happens, don’t worry. They can be separated after well fried.

Heat oil in wok and fry garlic, ginger, scallion section, dry chili pepper and Sichuan peppercorn over slow fire for 1 minute until aroma. Add the shallow fried eggplants in. Pour in the bowl sauce. Quickly mix well. At last, add coriander stem. Quickly mix again and serve hot!