Can it really be called cooking when one doesn't use power tools in the kitchen? Well, not actually "power"tools, but a handful of heavy-duty clamps at least...
Tried making an eggplant lasagne once before, ended up with an otherwise tasty but killer-level salty food. Teach me not to try to follow actual recipes...
Anyway, a pile of massive purple nasu in the shop triggered an urge for revenge. Combine that with a recently obtained pack of rock salt (jämesool pmst; also, that is unbelievably hard to find in Japan - bizarre) and it was game on.
Workflow part 1:
- Wash, peel (keep the peels!), slice (into 1-1.5 cm thick slabs) the eggplants.
- Layer the slices onto a large stiff cuttingboard and sprinkle lightly with rock salt.
- Add a second cutting board on top and clamp the two together... hard.
- Set contraption to stand on the side and tighten every now and then as the eggplant flattens.
Salt is necessary to draw out the huge amount of water from the eggplant, and keep the final lasagne in a somewhat solid state instead of a puddle. Rock salt, as opposed to regular (that was, khmkhm recommended in that recipe mentioned earlier) is supposed to draw out the liquid but not saturate the vegetables too much and can be mostly brushed off before cooking.
To be honest, before getting around to the clamps, we did mess around with more cutting boards and piles of plates (and a cake, don't ask...) to act as weight, but after an hour of very slow progress with that method, as D put it: "Gravity can go f*** itself!"
Clamped down, it takes around 2 hours for the nasu to go from about 1cm to 0.3cm thickness.
Lasagne tends to also require some cheese and tomatoey-meaty sauce.
The regular bag of grated, meltable (that's how cheese is classified here, forget labels like "parmesan", "cheddar", "gouda"...) cheese filled the first requirement.
Some minced meat (a splash of oil + fresh pepper + basil powder) got fried up next. And remember those eggplant peels? A little bit of oil, black pepper and 5 minutes on a frying pan, then mixed in with the mince did the trick. Being all the lazy in the world, for sauce I just used a shop-bought tomato-based pasta sauce (Italian basil or sth it was called). In hindsight, really should have made my own, the amount of oil coming out from that was plain nasty. Mix all three and get assembling.
Workflow part 2:
- Unclamp everything, brush off all the salt crystals you can find.
- Layer into a deep oven-resistant pan: eggplant-cheese-sauce-repeat. Until out of ingredients or space.
- End with a cheese layer, of course.
- Into an oven to about 190C for 20 minutes, then to max temperature for up to 10min, until the cheese turns nice.
Tasty!
Cheers,
Hedi
