Copying a restaurant’s dish

A couple of days before Christmas, my true love and I decided to take a daytrip to Manhattan to see the store windows, Rockefeller Center, and what New York had to offer for the holidays. We mostly had a great time, including an absolutely delicious lunch at a restaurant named Amali on W. 60th St. near Bloomingdales. They market themselves as sustainable Mediterranean and that’s a pretty good description. A good mixture of what you would probably call Italian and Greek basics with unusual ingredients and techniques keeping it interesting. Service was good and if you’re in the neighborhood, we recommend it.

During the course of our lunch though, we were absolutely captivated by one of their appetizers – crispy Japanese eggplant. The description (whipped Greek yogurt, calabrian chili, sesame, cilantro) was intriguing but it didn’t prepare us for what we received, which was amazing.

The eggplant had been thoroughly cooked and then the cut surface batter fried.  Each half of the three Japanese eggplants stood up, face outwards, on a bed of the yogurt with a thick, brownish liquid drizzled over the top and fresh coriander scattered over everything. Absolutely delicious. The surface was crunchy but the interior of the eggplant was absolutely creamy. That brown sauce dribbled on top was intensely sweet and spicy. There wasn’t much of the yogurt but what was there cooled out the impact of the brown sauce (which the waiter told us was made of calabrian peppers and honey). If I knew the eggplant was going to be this good, I may have ordered two and skipped the main course.

On the train home at the end of the day I began to wonder if I could duplicate it at home, or at least come close. The challenge would be trying to figure out the calabrian-chili sauce and frying the eggplant, since I’ve never batter-fried anything in my life, and haven’t deep fried anything in more than 20 years.

Actually, the first challenge was finding Japanese eggplant. As regular readers already know, I live within a couple of blocks of both a Whole Foods and a conventional supermarket (Acme, for those of you in the Mid-Atlantic), close to Philadelphia’s iconic Italian Market (an open air curb market aka as the 9th St Curb Market), and a 15 minute walk from a Sunday’s only farmer’s market. I have no problems accessing most vegetables but finding any eggplant except your traditional big eggplant was surprisingly difficult. After a couple of weeks of looking, I did find smaller Japanese eggplants at one of the stands in the Italian Market.

The second thing to be tackled was the calabrian chili-honey sauce. After doing a Google search, I discovered it is a fairly common item based on a mixture of calabrian chili paste, honey, and whatever other little twist the recipe’s author has in mind. One of our favorite shops in the Italian Market is Claudio’s, an incredible purveyor of Italian ingredients. They have Philadelphia’s best olives, a mind-blowing collection of dried pasta, meats, cheeses, vinegars, oils, and so on. I picked up a jar of hot pepper paste and brought it to the counter and asked if it was calabrian pepper paste. The gentleman examined the label and snorted derisively, saying “Sicilian.” He filled up a small container of peppers from the ready-made salads and appetizers behind the counter and gave them to me triumphantly saying “these are from Calabria.” Who knew there was a politics of Italian chili peppers!

The frying part was going to be more trouble. I don’t have a deep fryer and I’ve never batter-fried anything. This time I went to one of my new favorite cookbooks, Joshua McFadden’s Six Seasons. I’ll talk about it and a couple of other new finds in a post coming up shortly. I knew McFadden had a recipe for vegetable batter so I used that. I don’t have a deep fryer, but since only the cut side of the eggplant was to be fried, I figured I could use a skillet. Let’s get started.

I don’t have a picture to share of my first attempt. It’s not that the first attempt was a disaster (although I could hardly call it a triumph) but the picture I took didn’t come out well. You’ll have to use your imagination.

First, the chili-honey. I took about a dozen chilis, chopped off the green tops and squeezed out most, if not all, of the seeds. Then I chopped them into a rough paste and added some honey. Put the whole thing in a small sauce pan over medium heat. After a new minutes, I used an immersion blender to blend everything together and keep the heat going until the liquid reduced by about half. What was left was a deep red, sticky glaze studded with chili seeds. It was a very different color than what we saw in Amali’s but the taste was pretty similar.

For the yogurt, I added a little salt and some dried mint and then whipped the Greek yogurt until it was smooth and thick, then set it aside.

Now comes the eggplant. I cut each one in half and them placed them in a covered skillet with about 1/2″ of water and steamed them for several minutes until the insides were soft. While that was happening, I made the batter.  After the eggplants were done, I blotted up the excess moisture with a paper towel and set them aside while I filled a skillet about 3/4″ deep with olive oil and began to heat the oil. When it was hot, I took the eggplants, dipped them cut side down into the batter and then into the oil. Let everything bubble for bit and when I took them out, they were browned but just didn’t look like the ones in the restaurant, so I decided to experiment. I did half the eggplant in the batter dipped in hot oil, and half in a technique with which I was more comfortable, pan frying. I dipped the eggplants in flour, shook off the excess, dipped them in a whipped egg, then in breadcrumbs. Then fried them in about a tablespoon of oil in a skillet – like eggplant Milanese, I guess.

I covered the bottom of the serving plate with the whipped yogurt, tried and failed to stand the eggplants up, drizzled the honey mixture and served. It was mostly OK. The yogurt dominated the dish more than it should have and the batter fried eggplants were soggy. The chili-honey mix worked perfectly and the pan fried eggplant were crispy outside, creamy inside and could have used a bit more oomph.

Now time for refinement. Japanese eggplants have totally disappeared from the market so I have to improvise with a regular sized eggplant, cut in half, and then each half in quarters. I do the flour-egg-breadcrump thing on each quarter, but add healthy amounts of salt, dried tarragon, and cayenne to the breadcrumbs.

After steaming the eggplant to get the interior consistency just right, I add a tablespoon of olive oil to a pan over medium heat and then fry the coated eggplants for about three minutes before plating them, drizzling the chili-honey mixture and then adding dollops of the yogurt on top. It worked brilliantly. My picture doesn’t quite do justice to the dish, but if you like the taste of eggplant, you’ll love this.

The real star of this story is the chili-honey. I’ve used it in several contexts and it is nothing short of delicious.

CRISPY EGGPLANT WITH CHILI-HONEY AND YOGURT

Ingredients

1 eggplant, halved with each half cut into quarters

flour

1 egg

breadcrumbs

dried tarragon

salt

1-2 tbl oil (olive oil preferred)

cayenne

1/3 cup calabrian chili peppers (or calabrian pepper paste)

1/3 cup honey

1/2 cup Greek yogurt

1 tbl dried mint

Directions

Chop off the green tops of the chilis and squeeze out seeds. The more seeds you leave in, the hotter the results will be. Chop the peppers into a paste. Add the honey and peppers to a small saucepan on medium heat. When the honey thins out a bit, blend everything together with an immersion blender. Reduce by about half and then set aside.

Add the yogurt, mint, and salt to taste to a bowl and whip until smooth and thick.

Cut the eggplant in half crosswise and then each half in quarters. Steam them in any manner you wish until the interior is soft and creamy and then set aside.

Set up a breading station with a plate of flour, a bowl with a whipped egg, and a plate with breadcrumbs. Any reasonable quantities will do. Blot any excess moisture from the eggplant, then dip in the flour, shake off any excess, dip in the egg, and then press into the breadcrumbs and set aside.

Heat 1 tbl of oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add eggplant pieces crumb side down but don’t crowd the skillet – this may take 2-3 batches. Cook for 2-3 minutes until the breading is golden brown and then remove to a warm space and repeat until all the eggplants are done. You may need to add a little oil to the skillet between batches.

To plate, arrange the eggplant pieces on the bottom, drizzle with the chili-honey, then add a few dollops of the yogurt. Some fresh coriander or mint on top wouldn’t hurt.