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Eggplants or “blue ones” have long been loved in Our Country, despite the fact that in most of our country this vegetable can only be grown in greenhouse conditions, it is very thermophilic. Preparations from them are so popular that in August – September, most housewives buy a myriad of eggplants, taking advantage of the low seasonal prices for them, even if they failed to grow a decent crop of these valuable vegetables in their garden. Well, if the year was fruitful, then all efforts are rushed to find as many interesting and tempting recipes for dishes and eggplant preparations as possible. After all, they can be pickled, and fermented, and salted, and stuffed.
Traditionally, eggplant caviar is the most popular. It should be noted that this dish, especially in the form of canned food, is primordially , or rather, even Soviet, since it was invented by food technologists in the last century.
But every good housewife considers it her duty to somehow, but diversify its composition and preparation, and add its own zest to the taste of eggplant caviar familiar to everyone since childhood. Eggplant caviar, prepared by passing all or most of the ingredients through a meat grinder, is the most traditional type of this preparation. Of course, in recent years, many kitchen tools have been invented to make life easier for the hostess. But it is the use of a conventional meat grinder that allows you to get that very ideal homogeneous structure of eggplant caviar, in which even tiny pieces of natural vegetables can be present.
What is eggplant caviar valued for?
Eggplant has many benefits. Perhaps, only people who have a pronounced allergy to this vegetable do not like them – in our time, which just does not happen. Most of all, eggplant dishes are appreciated by women who monitor their appearance, figure, and weight. After all, blue ones are distinguished by low calorie content and at the same time exquisite taste. In addition, the days when eggplants had to be soaked for a long time before cooking were gone in order to free them from the bitterness accumulating in the peel.
Eggplant caviar contains a significant amount of fiber, which has a beneficial effect on the digestion process itself. Eggplants are also rich in potassium, so they are useful for use in case of heart problems, gout, reduce cholesterol and blood sugar levels. Caviar contains a lot of B vitamins, vitamin PP, ascorbic acid, as well as iron, zinc, manganese and copper. Eggplants are able to normalize water-salt metabolism in the body.
100 grams of eggplant caviar, produced by industry, contains on average:
- Water – 73,6 g
- Carbohydrates – 5,1 g
- Dietary fiber – 3,8 g
- Fat – 13,3 g
- Proteins – 1,7 g
- Calorie content – 148 Kcal.
It is only necessary to take into account that eggplants tend to absorb vegetable fats in large quantities. Therefore, if the calorie content of a dish is of paramount importance for you, then you need to pay attention to the amount of sunflower oil used in recipes. It is better to do without it at all, or use it to a minimum.
The easiest and fastest recipes
The most classic and at the same time easy-to-prepare recipe for eggplant caviar can be considered the following:
Composition:
- Eggplant – 5 kg;
- Ripe tomatoes – 2 kg;
- Bulgarian sweet pepper – 2 kg;
- Salt, garlic – to taste;
- Sunflower oil – to taste.
Eggplant after washing in cool water, peel if desired, cut into pieces of any size and shape and boil in salted water until they become soft.
Cut the tomatoes into small pieces. Pepper, previously peeled from seed chambers and stalks, also cut in any form.
Scroll through a meat grinder first separately eggplant, then a mixture of tomatoes and peppers. Then fry the peppers with tomatoes in sunflower oil with the addition of salt and spices to your taste for 3-5 minutes. At the last stage, combine them with grated and boiled eggplants, add finely chopped garlic (through a meat grinder or garlic squeezer) and mix everything thoroughly.
Put the mixture on medium heat, bring to a boil and cook for 40 minutes with regular stirring. Immediately pour the boiling mixture into prepared jars and sterilize: liter jars – about 30 minutes, half-liter – about 20 minutes. After that, the caviar can be rolled up and stored.
What is good about this recipe, in addition to ease of preparation, is that it can be called dietary, since eggplants are cooked in a boiled way.
But if you want to cook eggplant caviar, the absorption of which, in general, will not affect your figure and will bring nothing but good, then follow the following recipe:
Take 1-2 kg of eggplant, wash well and bake with the skin in the oven on a grill or tray. After the vegetables have cooled, remove the skin from them, cut into oblong pieces and turn through a meat grinder. To the mass of grated eggplant, add a few tablespoons of freshly squeezed lemon or orange juice, finely chopped greens, according to your tastes and salt. Mix everything well. If desired, you can add a few onions chopped with a meat grinder with garlic cloves. This eggplant caviar is stored only in the refrigerator, but it is very tasty and healthy.
Multi-component eggplant caviar recipes
If you are a refined gourmet and saturation of taste and smell is more important to you, it is necessary to give preference to recipes when making eggplant caviar for the winter through a meat grinder, where all vegetable components are fried separately in vegetable oil before mixing. It will be impossible to resist the taste and aroma of such a dish. Try, for example, this eggplant caviar recipe.
Necessary ingredients:
- Eggplant – 4,5 kg;
- sweet pepper – 2 kg;
- onions – 800 grams;
- carrots – 1 kg;
- Tomatoes – 2 kg;
- parsley – 50 grams;
- salt, chili pepper and vegetable oil – to taste.
First you need to do the preparatory work: wash and peel the eggplant, remove the tails and all seeds from the pepper, peel the onion and carrot, wash the tomatoes and cut into several pieces, wash the parsley.
Pepper and eggplant should be cut into long pieces along, salt and leave for several hours.
Then oil is poured into the pan, calcined until a barely noticeable haze appears, and chopped and slightly squeezed eggplants are placed there. After they are roasted, they are passed through a meat grinder and put into a large cauldron with a thick bottom. Peppers are fried separately in the same pan, then they are also passed through a meat grinder and added to the eggplant. Onions are first passed through a meat grinder and only then fried and also added to vegetables.
Tomatoes are fried last, a little water is added to the pan and they are stewed for 10-15 minutes until thickened.
After all the ingredients are mixed in a cauldron, put it on medium heat to boil. Stir constantly so that it doesn’t burn. Try it and 10 minutes before the readiness, add parsley, passed through a meat grinder. Caviar should be stewed for about an hour. The boiling vegetable mass must be quickly decomposed into pre-sterilized jars, closed with sterilized lids, turned over and wrapped. In this case, additional sterilization of canned food is not needed.
For a variety of taste when making eggplant caviar through a meat grinder, various ingredients can be added to this recipe: pumpkin, parsnip roots, celery greens, apples and even walnuts. The number of additional elements introduced by weight should be from 1/10 to 1/5 of the number of eggplants used.
If you want to get the exquisite taste of eggplant caviar combined with usefulness, try not to fry all the vegetables in the above recipe, but bake them in the oven before grinding through a meat grinder.
Vinegar Recipe
Many housewives traditionally make winter preparations using vinegar – after all, it allows, without using sterilization, to increase the shelf life of eggplant caviar. In addition, the taste of finished eggplant caviar becomes spicy and unusual. Using the recipe below, prepare a new dish that will delight you on a frosty winter day.
In order to bring your plan to life, you will need:
- 2 kg eggplant;
- 1 kg of ripe tomatoes;
- 1 kg of sweet pepper;
- 0,8 kg carrots;
- 0,5 kg of onion;
- 1 garlic head;
- 80 grams of refined oil;
- 1 tbsp. a spoonful of salt;
- 2 Art. spoons of sugar;
- ground pepper – to taste;
- 100 ml table (apple) vinegar 9%.
Peel the pepper from the seed chamber and tails, peel the eggplants and tomatoes and cut all the vegetables into large pieces. Then grind with a meat grinder.
Carrots and onions with garlic can also be ground through a meat grinder. Combine all ingredients for the recipe in a heavy bottomed saucepan and simmer over low heat. After boiling, add salt, ground pepper, sugar and any additional herbs and spices to your taste into the caviar. Simmer for about 50 minutes. Then add vinegar to the pan and heat for another ten minutes. Still boiling caviar must be laid out in pre-sterilized jars and twisted. Banks turn over, wrap and leave to cool for 24 hours.
The average cooking time for eggplant caviar according to any of the recipes is about three hours. Thus, you will spend relatively little time, but in return, in winter you will get the opportunity to periodically enjoy a delicious and healthy snack that reminds you of a hot summer.
