Korean Eggplant Salad

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This is a Korean eggplant salad which I made from the abundance of eggplants in my kitchen currently. Using a similar recipe for Korean cucumber salad, I whipped up this spicy eggplant side dish in 15 minutes. I used the microwave to cook the eggplants for 3 minutes first, then added the cooked eggplants to a large salad bowl to mix with seasonings. Sounds so simple right?

See Also:

• Tutorial: How to pre-cook eggplants
• Korean Cucumber Salad Recipe
• More Korean Banchan (Side Dishes) Recipes

This is certainly a very easy side dish (“banchan” in Korean) to put on the dining table. And it goes well with a Chinese meal too, not just Korean, and they can be added as a grain bowl or salad topping.

For this recipe, I used Taiwanese eggplants (pic taken last year at a Taipei wet market) which is currently in season. The variety of eggplants does not affect the taste, just that with the thin & longish Taiwanese eggplants, I have the choice of cutting them to cylindrical logs like I did when I shot this recipe. For the thicker local eggplants, you probably have to halve the eggplants lengthwise first before cutting them to smaller sections.

This is where I start from. First cook the eggplants (I used the microwave oven): check out this tutorial for three ways to cook eggplants to ‘lock-in’ their rich purple colour. Add cooked eggplants to a large salad bowl. Then add soy sauce, sesame oil, sesame seeds, onions & spring onions, garlic, black pepper, Korean chilli powder (guchuhura) and paprika/cayenne pepper. Toss the salad so that they are well mixed. You can then tweak this recipe by adding more chilli, sesame oil, or salt, and even substitute the chilli powder with gochujang. On lazy days, I substitute the minced garlic and chopped onions with garlic & onion powder respectively.