Dominique Rizzo | Bespoke Food Tours
How delicious are these Parmesan Fried Eggplant? Eat them as they are hot or cold with salad, use them instead of pasta in a lasagne, bake covered with a sauce.
For those of you who usually don’t like eggplant, these delicious cheesy fritters are going to change your mind. I used the smaller Lebanese eggplants but you could always use the standard larger eggplants for this as well. When preparing eggplants, the salt takes out any bitterness and if the eggplant is a little young it will soften it a little and also stopped it from absorbing too much oil.
• 4 small Lebanese eggplants
• Salt
• 1 cup flour
• ½ cup grated parmesan cheese
• 2 cloves garlic
• Zest of 1 lemon
• ½ cup flat leaf parsley leaves
• 3 eggs
• Salt and pepper
• 1/3 cup olive oil
Slice the eggplant into rounds of 1 cm width and sit them in a colander with a sprinkling of salt. After about 20- minutes, dry the eggplant off and sit them on some paper towel on a tray.
Whisk the eggs with a little salt and pepper.
For the cheesy crust, place the flour, parmesan, garlic, lemon zest and parsley into a food processor and blend it until fine almost back to a flour.
Heat the olive oil in a large heavy based frypan and then taking a slice of eggplant, dip it in the egg and then press it into the flour mixture. Fry on both sides for about 2 minutes until golden. Serve hot or cold