My cooking creed goes something like this
Measure as little as possible
Experiment a lot
Observe no cultural boundaries
I don’t care if the spirits of a 1000 great, great, great grandmothers are standing around me wagging their translucent fingers, shaking their heads and making universally understood sounds of disapproval; if I think it will taste good, I’ll mix anything, with anything. The deep cultural melting pot of global cuisine, means that fusion cooking has arrived.
One day my good friend Scott McGrath was telling me about making babaganoush, a Middle Eastern dip based on eggplant and tahini, which I had never heard of. The part that caught my attention was scorching the eggplant with a torch until it is charred on the outside and cooked through. I threw some eggplants on the gas flame of the cooktop and realized that there was a whole new aspect of this vegetable to explore.
One day I had the audacity to mince up some of that pulp to mix in a batch of my tomato salsa, and a star was born. The cool thing about putting charred eggplant in your tomato salsa, is that it plays so well with the other ingredients in there, that it can augment without being overt. Yet you can also add more to bring a very unique and unexpected taste toward the front of the flavor line.
But wait, there’s more! Ever have your burrito get soggy from fresh salsa?, or have large quantities of juice run down into your sleeve?, or end up with a puddle of salsa juice on your plate when you make fresh salsa? It turns out that the eggplant pulp goes a long way toward absorbing extra juice in the salsa. That is a pretty great quality.
INGREDIENTS
Like I said, I don’t care to measure things much. It’s about how things taste, so taste, add, taste, add, taste, add… These ingredients are vaguely in order of quantity.
Tomatoes: (see thingy on tomato types below) dice 1/4 inch-ish
Eggplants: Preferably use 2 inch diameter and down if you can get them. Long skinny asian types are perfect. Char blackened on flame or charcoal until collapsed and totally squishy inside. Mince the pulp to almost paste consistency. A few bits of charred skin are fine, but don’t scrape everything right down to the skin, as it is pretty strong. Use some of the browned/burnt stuff, but not all of it.
Sweet peppers: bell, cheese or frying. flame roasted, diced or minced small
Anaheim Peppers: red ripe, flame roasted, take off most of the peel, or whatever comes off easily, mince finely
Cilantro: minced.
Onion: I like it minced very fine.
Small hot chilies: any kind, I prefer ripe over green.
Lemon or lime juice, or vinegar: Quantity depends on how acid the tomatoes are. I know it’s heresy, but I prefer lemon over lime.
Salt: use a lot, it’s a condiment
Chili powder: I use dried Anaheim, aka California chilies
Coriander and Cumin: fresh ground seed. Put in a lot, then taste it and add some more and then add even more.
SOME INGREDIENT AND PREP NOTES:
Tomatoes. If I have them, I use drier processing types to avoid having a lot of extra juice. Not the usual smaller roma, pear shaped paste tomatoes. Those are actually pretty wet. I mean larger, longer paste types like polish linguisa, blue beech and others (I have seeds available!). They have low amounts of watery pulp, and fewer seeds. I also like Zapotec, but it’s not as dry as these others.
Chili powder: I use California chilies, aka dried Anaheim peppers. This is s great pepper to grow and very versatile. California chilies can be had pretty much anywhere that Mexican people do their shopping. Toast lightly to crisp them up and add a little flavor, but don’t overdo it! Cool, then grind in an electric coffee grinder or blender. What is usually sold in the U.S. as chili powder is actually a spice blend, which I don’t recommend. Occasionally you can find pure chili powder, but it doesn’t keep very well. Paprika is not a bad substitute if it is fresh enough.
Coriander and Cumin are always available on my counter in pepper grinders. That is a great kitchen hack, try it! Both of the, as well as chili powder, lose their flavor quickly when ground. It is not just a matter of becoming weaker either, so you can’t really just add more. They should be fresh. If you don’t use them a lot, put the seeds in a tightly sealed jar and freeze. They will last for years that way.
Eggplants: don’t like them, or your family doesn’t like them? If there is a recipe with eggplant for people who don’t like eggplant, this is it. If I were to grow anything specifically for this, it would be the larger long asian types, like Ping Tung Long.
