A small twist on the classic Szechuan eggplant results in a plate of crispy eggplant with an appetizing and pungent sour-spicy sauce. Szechuan eggplant, also called fish fragrant eggplant (鱼香茄子, yu xiang qie zi), is a great dish that has not yet gotten a lot of attention from food lovers outside China. I talked about this delicious eggplant dish in an older post, which teaches you how to grill the eggplant in a pan on the stove to generate quite crispy results without deep frying. I really like that recipe because it recreates the authentic flavor with an easier approach. However, a few readers did mention to me that the eggplant was not as crispy as ones they had in restaurants. So today, I’m introducing another method for this dish, so you can enjoy truly crispy eggplant with this scrumptious sauce. Creating super crispy eggplant at home is not easy, even if you deep fry. Eggplant is a tricky vegetable. If you’re not careful, it will end up absorbing a lot of oil and become soggy and greasy. My recipe teaches you the right way to fry eggplant at home. By following this recipe, you should be able to create crispy eggplant without it soaking up tons of oil.
The method for cooking authentic Chinese eggplant at home is very different from how it’s done in a restaurant kitchen. Ideally, you would be able to fry all the eggplant within seconds in a huge wok with a powerful gas stove. The crispy eggplant is then cooked with the sauce briefly (less than 10 seconds), again, in a large wok with a powerful stove. In the finished dish, the eggplant should stay crispy with the sauce evenly mixed. Unfortunately, we are not able to cook like this in our home kitchens, especially not with an electric heating element. That is why you need to take the time to prep the eggplant, so it will be cooked faster without absorbing too much oil. You’ll also need to fry the eggplant in small batches, so it will be browned evenly and quickly without causing the oil temperature to drop too much. In the end, you will need to pour the sauce onto the eggplant, instead of cooking the sauce and eggplant together. This way, the eggplant stays crispy when served.
Cooking a nice plate of eggplant requires patience and effort. This is not a dish I’d want to cook if I was in a rush and needed to put dinner on the table as fast as possible. On the other hand, it delivers a great meal with superior texture and flavor. Start steaming some rice right before prepping for this dish, and you will have a lovely one-dish meal for two ready in 45 minutes. By the way, the recipe below emphasizes how to cook perfect crispy eggplant. The sauce tastes very close to that used on authentic Szechuan eggplant, but it uses jalapenos instead of pao jiao (泡椒), a Szechuan pickled pepper (I was too lazy to run to the Asian market). If you have pao jiao at home, use them instead to create an even more authentic flavor. Besides the meat sauce in this recipe, you can also serve the crispy eggplant with any other sauce you prefer (for example, sweet and sour sauce, garlic sauce, or black bean sauce). Hope you enjoy!
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