Black Bean Sauce Eggplants

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This is a homely Chinese dish of eggplants cooked in a spicy black bean sauce (黑豆漿茄子). The otherwise bland-tasting eggplants (aka brinjal or aubergine) come to life by soaking up the savoury black bean sauce like a sponge. This dish is so savoury, so good with steamed rice.

See Also:

• Tutorial: How to retain the purple hue of eggplants after cooking
• Recipe: Chilli Bean Paste Eggplants
• Easy Eggplant Recipes

In this recipe, I’m using LKK spicy black bean sauce (pictured above). You can use any favourite brand, do try to get those without added preservatives or coloring. Although I do make black bean sauce from scratch, the bottled ones are delicious and a great time-saver.

Retain the lovely purple hue of eggplants in this stir-fry:

If you were to add eggplants directly to a wok to stir-fry, they will turn an unflattering brown after cooking. While it doesn’t affect the taste of the dish, the presentation is somewhat lackluster. To overcome this common problem, check out this tutorial for pre-cooking the eggplants using either the microwave, boiling or steaming method to ‘lock-in’ the purple hue. For this recipe, I used the steaming method (pictured above) to do the job.

The steamed eggplants are added to the bubbly black bean sauce where they will retain most of its purple hue after cooking.

Enjoy!~