Baked Eggplant Parmesan Recipe _ Clean & Delicious

Eggplant parmesan was a dish that my mom made a lot when we were growing up. And as much as I love the way she makes it, I wanted to find a way to lighten it up just a little bit. So, for this Quick Byte, I'm sharing my clean and delicious version of my mom's eggplant parmesan. And here's all you'll need. Two eggplants, about one pound each. Three cups of fresh homemade tomato sauce. Three tablespoons of grated parmesan cheese. One and a half cups of part-skim ricotta cheese. One egg, beaten. A half a cup of fresh chopped parsley. Four ounces of fresh mozzarella cheese, diced. Two teaspoons of garlic powder. A quarter cup of fresh chopped basil. A little olive oil cooking spray. And some salt and pepper to taste. I've got my oven preheating at 400 degrees because instead of breading and frying the eggplant the way my mom would, I am going to simply roast it. This step alone is going to make the whole dish a lot fresher and a lot lighter. Now, all that I did to my eggplant was cut it into quarter inch rounds and then I salted each side with just a little bit of salt. And then I put it in a colander and let it sit for about 30 minutes. Now what the salt does is it draws the excess moisture out of the eggplant so that when we cook the eggplant, it's really tender and meaty. So it's been about 30 minutes that my eggplant has been sitting with the salt and just take a look at how wet the eggplant is. That just goes to show you how much moisture the salt has extracted from the eggplant. So I'm just going to lay them out on a towel so that it can absorb any of that excess moisture. Then I'm just going to lay another towel right over the top and just pat the eggplant dry. Then once they're good and dry, I'm just going to lay the eggplant out on a couple of rimmed baking sheets that I sprayed with a little bit of cooking oil. Now just make sure that you don't overcrowd the pan because what will happen is instead of roasting, they'll steam and then we're not going to get the depth of flavor that we're looking for. Okay, good. Let's season them up. Now eggplant is a lot like mushrooms in the fact that they absorb as much oil as you give them. So I like to skip the oil altogether and I just give them a nice light coating of the cooking spray. Then I'm going to season them with a little bit of salt and I go light on the salt since we salted them up a bit already. Some fresh black pepper and some garlic powder. And then once you have them all seasoned, flip them over and do the same thing on the opposite side. So now we just want to pop these into the oven and they're going to cook for about 20 minutes or so or until they're nice and golden brown. And remember, we do want to flip them about halfway through the cooking process. In the meantime, we're going to work on the ricotta filling. All you need to do is combine the ricotta cheese with the beaten egg. This is going to help to bind everything together. A little bit of fresh chopped parsley and a little bit more salt and some fresh black pepper. I really like to season all the different layers of the dish as I go. And then, just going to mix that all together. Just bring it together. Okay, the eggplant is ready to go. Oh yeah, and look at this. Mission accomplished, guys. We've got a nice brown coloring on top there. Looking good. So I'll just give them a minute to cool here and then we are going to assemble our eggplant parmesan. So we're going to start with about a half a cup of tomato sauce spread out right on the bottom of our glass baking dish here. And then, on top of the sauce, you're going to start to layer the eggplant. Now you want the eggplant to overlap a little bit, but don't worry if it's not perfect because once it cooks, it's all going to come together. Then, you're going to take about half of the ricotta cheese mixture and start to gently spread that right on top of the eggplant. And finish it with about a tablespoon of the parmesan cheese right over the top. Then we're back to the sauce and we're going to do it all again. Now my mom actually learned a lot about cooking from her best friend's mom, Jenny. And Jenny is an amazing Italian cook. What I learned from Jenny is that if you want to lighten up a lasagna or a parmesan like this, you want to skip the mozzarella cheese because that's what weighs it down. Jenny would actually skip the mozzarella altogether, but me, I'm just saving it for the top. So once I'm done with this layer, I am going to lay one more layer of tomato sauce. Just spread that out and then we're going to finish with a little bit of fresh diced mozzarella cheese. So we still get that ooey gooey factor without making the dish too heavy. And then last, one more tablespoon of parmesan right over the top. And this baby is ready to go into the oven. So I'm popping it back into the 400 degree oven for 30 minutes and you're going to see the eggplant and the sauce will be bubbly and the cheese will be all melted. Now what I love about a dish like eggplant parmesan is that you can make everything ahead of time and assemble it and then pop it into the refrigerator until you're ready to bake it off. So it's a great make-ahead meal. Let's check out our parmigiani. Oh my goodness. Look at the way that cheese melted and browned right over the top. Now you just want to give this a good 15-20 minutes to cool off a bit so everything can set up. So this way when you cut into it, you got a nice piece of eggplant parmesan. So the next time you're looking for this family favorite but just a little bit lighter, make sure you try my baked eggplant parmesan. For this recipe and others, check out dannysfees.com. I'm Dannys Fees and I'll see you guys next time with another clean and delicious quick bite. Oh my God. I think that I'm using the wrong size pan. What? Really? This isn't the pan I used last time. What? Shoot. It's bigger. You know what? I'm just going to transfer it to the smaller pan. We have to or it's not going to work. It's too big. We'll just transfer it. You just got to do what you got to do. Okay. Transferring. Oh well.