Quick Spicy Thai Style Eggplant

This recipe for Quick Spicy Thai Style Eggplant combines fresh, firm Japanese eggplant with a spicy Thai-style sauce to create a delicious hot side or cold salad.

The making of Quick Spicy Thai Style Eggplant

Houston, we have eggplant.

Every year, for the past seven, we have planted our summer garden with mixed results.

One year we get a lot of tomatoes, the next year, not so much. One year we got NO zucchini. How does one get no zucchini? Peppers generally do well, at least the smaller ones, I've yet to get large plump bells. And eggplant. It's hit and miss.

This year seems more of a hit. I have beautiful plants, filled with fruit, and buds at the ready to give me more.

This year I planted both Japanese and globe eggplant. The globes are still globing, but the Japanese eggplant is giving me new fruit almost every day. I like to pick them when they are still on the smaller side as the texture tends to be firmer - so when looking for them at the market, look for smaller,  firm, dark purple fruits without bruises or flaws.

Thai basil is also at the ready. So what's a person to do? Make a Thai-inspired eggplant stir-fry. That's what.

Jump to:

• The making of Quick Spicy Thai Style Eggplant
• Ingredients needed to make Quick Spicy Thai-style eggplant
• The Ying/Yang of Thai Food
• How to Cook Eggplant Perfectly
• The Leftover's Dish
• Quick Spicy Thai Style Eggplant

Ingredients needed to make Quick Spicy Thai-style eggplant

• Eggplant - Japanese or small globe preferred
• Fresh Red Chili - or Thai red chilies. If neither are available you could use red jalapeno.
• Onion - red onion is preferred, but yellow will work as well. I wouldn't use a sweet onion such as Vidalia or wala wala
• Garlic
• Thai Basil leaves - if you can't find these, use regular basil
• Sauce Ingredients include: soy sauce, Hoisin sauce, black bean sauce, fish sauce, lime juice and garlic chili sauce

If making the Leftovers Dish you will also need

• Diced tomato
• Diced cucumber
• Balsamic vinegar
• Sesame seed oil

The Ying/Yang of Thai Food

I love cooking Thai food. The elements of sweet, salty, sour, spicy, and bitter make for an exciting explosion of flavor in every bite.

In this recipe for Spicy Thai Style Eggplant, the sweetness comes from the Hoisin sauce - this is also one of the ingredients that makes this dish Thai style rather than just Thai.

Hoisin sauce is not a normal Thai ingredient. It's a normal Chinese cooking ingredient. But when developing this sauce, I liked the way the Hoisin added thickness as well as sweetness, so I used it in place of sugar.

If you want to keep it more Thai authentic, use sugar, preferably palm sugar in place of the Hoisin. About a teaspoon should do. You may also need to add a bit of cornstarch to the mix to keep the sauce thick.

Salty comes from the soy sauce - and even though I only use low-sodium soy - it has plenty of salt. Also adding to the saltiness is the black bean sauce, again, more Chinese than Thai, but I liked the addition.

Fusion, fusion is good.

The fish sauce also adds a salty element - along with a depth of flavor that just can't be duplicated with any other ingredient.

I love using fish sauce, but don't recommend smelling it.

Lime juice adds the sour, and chili peppers add the heat. For the chili peppers, you could use Thai chilis, or as I did, a Hungarian long red pepper, which is very very hot.

As a matter of course, always check your pepper for heat factor before putting it into your dish. You can always adjust the heat before, but it's hard to do after the fact. Remember, the membranes and seeds have the most heat, so if the flesh of the pepper is hot, you may want to reconsider adding seeds.

Unless you like it really hot.

And of course, there's the chili garlic sauce. I love the flavor of it, but it's another area you can feel free to use more or less of, depending on your individual taste.

Thai basil and the eggplant itself add a bitter element. Thai basil has a sharper flavor than sweet basil, with a slight anise, or licorice flavor. Its leaves are long and narrow and hold up well to cooking. For this dish, just pull the leaves from the stem, no chopping is necessary.

If you can't find Thai basil, you can use regular basil, just tear or chiffonade the leaves.

How to Cook Eggplant Perfectly

As a child, I didn't much care for eggplant. Unless it was breaded, fried, and covered with cheese and marinara. Eggplant Parm, I could get behind that. Now I make a Low-Fat Oven-Baked Eggplant Parm. that is equally delicious and lower in, yes, both fat and calories.

But back in the day, my mother cooked ratatouille, the old-fashioned way, cooked to death. More of a mush of stewed vegetables than a vegetable. Until I made my own fresh version of Not Really Ratatouille, I thought eggplant HAD to be cooked to death. Almost every recipe I read had you cooking it for 30 minutes or more. But through experimentation, I found that I like eggplant cooked hardly more than 5 minutes or so. While the vegetable was soft, it still had its structure and integrity.

Eggplant also tends to be a sponge, soaking up oil like crazy. So it's important to use a minimal amount of oil. That along with a hot pan, and keeping the vegetable moving, helps keep it from absorbing too much oil. Of course, its sponge-like quality is a plus for soaking in the delicious sauce.

Quick Spicy Thai Style Eggplant

The Leftover's Dish

As I was cooking just for BB and me, and made servings for 4, I had leftovers. I thought it would make a great healthy vegetarian lunch served over some rice. And I'm sure it would have. But then, as I was preparing the next night's dinner, some chicken kabobs marinated in my Tandoori Chicken marinade, I thought, how good this would be as a side salad? Very good is the answer.

I never like serving a leftover exactly the same as the original. Shake it up a bit, and a leftover is a whole new experience. Adding some fresh chopped tomato, diced cucumber for crunch, a couple of splashes of balsamic vinegar, along with a dash or two of sesame seed oil changed the whole flavor. And of course, it was served cold.

Now wait a minute, you might say. Splashes and dashes? What kind of measurement is that? Well to clarify, splashes are bigger than dashes. Dashes are smaller than splashes. Is that clear now? So just a few splashes of balsamic were added to the acidity and flavor without disturbing the original sauce, and a couple of dashes of sesame oil gave it a fresh sweet, nutty quality. Be careful when using sesame seed oil as it has a tendency to take over a dish. So dashes, not splashes of sesame seed oil.

Bottom line? This recipe was delicious both ways. Hot, warm, cold. As the original side, or the new salad. However you serve it, it has great flavor. And if you think you don't like eggplant, try it again. This recipe might change your mind.