Chilli Bean Paste Eggplant

This is a simple Chinese-style wok dish of spicy chilli soy bean paste eggplants (辣豆漿茄子).  Though eggplants (aka brinjal or aubergine) on their own taste quite bland (at least to me), they soak up the savoury soybean sauce like a sponge and go so well with steamed rice.

See Also:

• Tutorial: How to retain the purple hue of eggplants after cooking
• Easy Eggplant Recipes

More Meatless Recipes:

• Stir-fry Lotus Root Recipe
• Simple Sauteed Kale Recipe
• Curried Cauliflower Recipe

Have you noticed the vibrant purple of this eggplant dish after they are cooked? If you add eggplant directly to the wok, they will lose their pretty purple and turn an unflattering brown shade instead. To retain the purple hue, you need to pre-cook the eggplants before stir-frying.

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

For this recipe, I used the boiling method to pre-cook the eggplants: Bring a pot of water to a rapid boil, add eggplant pieces and weigh them down with either a drop lid or a slotted ladle as pictured above (note that the eggplants are under the ladle). Cook for 3 minutes. Check out this detailed tutorial for pre-cooking the eggplants using other methods (microwave or steam) to ‘lock-in’ the purple hue.

Drain and set aside the eggplants. They will still retain most of the lovely purple hue when you stir-fry them later.

This is the final eggplant dish stir-fried in chilli bean paste sauce. Enjoy!~

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Bean Paste Eggplant Recipe

Check out this tutorial and use one of the three easy methods (boil, microwave or steam) to pre-cook the eggplants so that they retain their lovely purple hue after cooking.

Serves: 2-3

Prep Time: 10 mins

Cook Time: 10 mins

Ingredients:

• 200 grams eggplants cut to 5 cm sections, then cut to smaller “logs”
• 1 tbsp oil
• 3 garlic cloves minced
• 1 red finger length chilli de-seeded & diced
• 1-2 chilli padi (optional; for the heat) partially de-seeded

(A) Sauce

• 1 tbsp chilli soy bean paste (spicy “taucheo”/辣豆瓣醬)
• 3/4 tbsp light soy sauce
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• 1 tbsp rice wine
• 1/4 cup water

Directions:

1. Pre-cook the eggplants using either the microwave, boiling or steaming method. View this tutorial for the instructions. Set aside.
2. Cook the dish. Heat oil in wok. Add garlic and chilli; stir fry briefly until aromatic. Add sauce ingredients (A) and cooked eggplants. Stir-fry briefly to coat the eggplants thoroughly in the sauce, cover with lid and simmer down for 1 minute. Serve with steamed rice.

Ingredients Used: chilli • chilli padi • eggplant • fermented soybean (taucheo) • garlic • rice wine • sesame oil • soy sauce (light) • soybean paste