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Melanzana e Pomodoro Parmigiana

Posted on 2002/10/16 22:30:41 (October 2002) by john.

One of those great Italian dishes that are almost insultingly simple to make, and yet taste absolutely wonderful.

When I put this together, I was basically hunting around in my fridge for something I could make from the odds and ends I had left over. It just so happened that I had all the ingredients for a fairly classic Italian dish. As with every famous recipe, there are usually lots of variations. Perhaps the most common recipe for this dish is the simplest, the ingredients being just aubergine, tomatoes and parmesan, as the name suggests. I decided to make it a bit more complicated, but you could make something much simpler with a very basic tomato sauce, or even just fresh tomatoes, rather than the slightly more elaborate tomato sauce I used.

Ingredients (serves 2)


  • 1 large aubergine.

  • 1 tin of chopped tomatoes.

  • A few really good small fresh tomatoes as well, cut into quarters (or eighths if using larger tomatoes).

  • A good dollop (a tablespoon or two) of tomato puree.

  • Two or three sun dried tomatoes.

  • 1 small pepper or half a large one, preferably orange.

  • 1 small or medium courgette.

  • A small red onion.

  • A handful of basil.

  • Olive oil.

  • A good heap (50-100g ish) of freshly grated parmesan. Don't skimp on this!



Method

There's three parts to the method I used - making a tomato sauce, preparing the aubergine and putting the two together. The first two parts can be done at the same time.

Preparing the aubergine is a little bit time consuming, but not particularly difficult. It's probably best to give the aubergine a bit of a rinse first, then dry it off wish kitchen paper. Cut the aubergine into thin slices, about half a centimetre thick. You want to draw some of the moisture out to improve the texture and stop them disintegrating whilst cooking. The standard way to do this is to sprinkle salt on the slices and leave them to dry in a colander. This should probably take about half an hour. I probably left mine more like 45 minutes. Next, heat some oil in a frying pan, nice and hot, and carefully fry all the aubergine slices until they are golden brown on both sides. Depending on the size of your frying pan and the amount of, this may well have to be done in several batches - don't just pile all the slices up on top of eachother! After frying, place the slices on kitchen paper to absorb some of the oil.

The tomato sauce I used was based on what bits and pieces I had in my fridge at the time. As noted though, you could just use tomatoes by themselves, or whatever tomato sauce you happen to like. I thought this particular mixture worked quite well. Aubergine has kind of an affinity with courgettes and peppers, and as a result this combination is found all over the place - in the French Ratatouille as well as the classic Mediterranean vegetable pasta sauce, and in a number of Greek and Middle Eastern dishes. Anyway, here's how I did it. Chop and gently fry the onion for a little while. Chop the pepper and courgette and throw this in with the onion and fry a little longer. Add in all the tomato ingredients (tinned tomatoes, fresh tomatoes, tomato puree and sun dried tomatoes) and the majority of the basil. Stir lots and allow to thicken. You're looking for a thicker consistency than perhaps you'd normally use for pasta sauces and the like, as this is going to go in the oven with the aubergines. If the whole thing is too runny the aubergines will just be lost in the liquid, and the effect will be all wrong.

Finally, you need to put it all together. Get yourself a shallow ovenproof dish. You're going to build the dish up in layers. A covering of your nice thick tomato sauce, then a layer of parmesan, followed by a layer of aubergine slices, followed by another layer of parmesan. I went through that twice, but I guess you could go to a third run through. The topmost aubergine slices usually come out nicest, so you might want to be a bit biased towards the last layer. That's more or less it! Bake the whole thing in the oven for about 20 minutes and you're done.

Serving

I used a few basil leaves as garnish. Parsley, or better still rocket, would also work nicely. With this sort of thing, I generally like to put the whole dish on the table on a big old wooden board and let people help themselves. This dish is basically a meal in itself, but could also be used as a very nice side dish at a large feast. It's very rich but at the same time quite fresh tasting - the peppers and courgettes give it a nice lift. It's also, slightly surprisingly, quite sweet. The aubergines and the parmesan both impart a lot of sweetness, and the sun dried tomatoes add to this further still.



On this particular occasion, I was pretty hungry, so I served some on a bed of spaghetti. I probably wouldn't have normally used spaghetti for this sort of dish, but as with most of the other ingredients, it was just what I had in at the time. As it happens, it worked pretty well.


Comment 1

Sono Italiano! And it looks very nice.

Posted by Luigi at 2002/10/18 16:18:49.

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