Eggplant w/ Basil & Chili Paste Stir-Fry Recipe มะเขือยาวผัดพริกเผา - Hot Thai Kitchen!

สวัสดีค่ะ Welcome to Hot Thai Kitchen. So I get a lot of requests for an eggplant stir-fry recipe but for one reason or another I just never got around to doing it. But today is the day and if you have my cookbook you know that there is an eggplant stir-fry recipe in the book but this one is going to use a little bit of a different technique and it's also a different sauce so if you have the book try both and see which one you like better. Alright, it's super easy. Let's get started. So I'm going to start with the sauce. I've got here some soy sauce, this is Thai soy sauce. You don't have to use Thai soy sauce, any kind of soy sauce would do. I'm going to add some fish sauce to this and you know people ask me why do you have to use both fish sauce and soy sauce because you know they're both salty sauces. Well they both have very different flavors and when you combine them you get a more sort of a more complex flavor. Of course you can just use one or the other if you don't have both. Oyster sauce. Oyster sauce, soy sauce and fish sauce. This is what I call the trinity of stir-fry sauce. Together, the three of them, any stir-fry is good with these sauces. Now the main ingredient for the sauce for this is Thai chili paste or nam prik pao. Now I have a recipe for how you can make this from scratch if you can't buy it. This is not the only brand that there is but it seems to be the most widely available brand. My favorite brand is actually called Mae Pranom. So this is quite sweet. This brand especially. So because I'm using quite a bit of the chili paste, I'm not gonna add any sugar at all. If you're using a different brand or if you're making your own, you may have to adjust for the sugar a little bit at the end. And I'm just gonna thin this out with some water and with a mini whisk, give it a good mix. Oh and as an FYI, there is dried shrimp in Thai chili paste for those of you with shrimp allergies, something to think about. Okay that's the sauce, super easy. Now let's deal with the eggplant. So eggplant. So I'm using a Chinese eggplant, sometimes it's called a Japanese eggplant. In Thailand we use a similar eggplant, looks exactly like this except it's green rather than purple so either would work. What I've done here is I've just sliced them into pieces like this and how I did that is first I sliced them into rounds on a bias and then I cut each round in half. So the first thing I'm gonna do is pre-sear the eggplant. So in my cookbook, I talk about first deep frying the eggplant before you stir fry it. Today I'm gonna show you a different technique that I discovered that works just as well and that is pre-searing the eggplant. And the reason why, I mean you could just throw the eggplant in the wok and just cook it all in one go but I find that if you do that, the eggplant just ends up being a little bit mushy because it takes so long to cook in the sauce. This way it'll cook most of the way here and then when you throw it in the wok it'll just be very quick and the dish looks better in general like that. So I'm just gonna heat a flat skillet and then once it's hot, just gonna put the eggplant down. And then you wanna just flip them so they are, the flat side is being seared. You may have to do this twice if you have a smaller pan and you just wanna let that sear until it's nice and browned on one side. Okay, so the bottom side is starting to brown. I'm gonna flip them. It doesn't need to cook all the way. Get it, you know, medium rare. Okay, so now that the other side's a little bit browned, we can remove them and you don't have to remove all of them at once. You'll notice that the pieces with a lot of seeds will tend to cook faster because it's not as dense. The pieces from sort of the top part of the eggplant will take a little longer to cook because it's just a little bit denser. And then as it sits in this bowl, it'll also continue to steam in each other's heat and that'll cook it a little bit further. Alright, a couple of ingredients before we get started. So I've got here some ground chicken that I'm gonna use for protein. I love ground meat with eggplant. I don't know, something about the texture of the two just works really well together. You can do ground pork, you can do even crumbled tofu. I wouldn't do ground beef just because the flavor's a bit strong. In here, I have some garlic and some chilies, which I'm gonna pound in my smaller mortar and pestle, if you notice. And I've chosen some big chilies because they're less spicy and it gives me a lot more color than if I were to go with the tiny little ones. Try not to look at it because it can jump into your eyes if the smell is any indication. I think that's gonna be a lot spicier than I thought it would be. Alright, now we are ready to go. I'm gonna transfer my garlic and chili paste into the wok. Put a little oil in there and turn the heat on. And I just start the garlic and chilies on sort of medium heat. You don't want the garlic to burn too quickly, you want to give it some time to infuse into the oil. So the garlic's starting to brown now, it smells really good. I'm gonna go in with the chicken and I'm gonna just try to break that up. And what I find, especially with commercially ground chicken, is it's really stiff. They grind it really fine, so a splash of water helps loosen it up a bit. It becomes a little easier to break it apart for some reason, it's so sticky otherwise. The chicken is about 80% done now. I am going to add the eggplant, all of it. Adam's dying over there with the fumes of the chilies. And the sauce goes in. You're right, I'm sorry. Okay, this'll be quick. And now I'm just gonna mix this just until the eggplant is fully, fully cooked. Because at this point the eggplant is just kind of partially cooked. That looks good. And see, if you don't pre-cook the eggplant, this step takes a long time. It's not as hot here now with all the liquid, so that's why you either want to pre-deep fry it or pre-sear it. That looks delicious. Now, to finish everything off, I've got some Thai basil. Whoo! Lots of Thai basil. And I'm gonna turn that off. Just toss it together until the Thai basil is wilted. And that's it! How easy is that? Those eggplant pieces just look delicious. I just love the texture of eggplant when it's done. It's just so soft, silky. Mm-mm-mm. Ta-da! All right. Now, you definitely want to serve this with rice. And since I have so much different colored rice now instead of white rice, I am going to have brown rice with it. This is brown jasmine rice. Best kind of brown rice there is. And there isn't a lot of sauce pooling at the bottom, and that's because the eggplant has absorbed much of that sauce. Mm. Oh, I love that. Mm. Wow. Eggplant, to me, is such a magical vegetable. I mean, when it's raw, it's sort of this dry, spongy, foam, styrofoam-looking thing. But when you cook it, it just becomes soft and juicy and almost melts in your mouth, and it absorbs any sauce you put around it. It's so good. When I was little, I didn't like vegetables in general, but the eggplant was definitely one thing I always, always loved. It didn't even look to me like a vegetable. It was this magical sauce sponge. So I hope you give this a try. It's a little sweet, a little spicy. Ooh, I'm still coughing from all the chilies in the air. But it's actually not as spicy as it looks. The Thai basil, floral and aromatic Thai basil and eggplant is just a match made in heaven. So I hope you give it a try. The recipe, as always, is on hotthaikitchen.com. And when you make it, send me a photo on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. And if you love the show and you'd like to support us, check out my Patreon page. I'll put the link somewhere around here. And I will see you next time for your next delicious Thai meal. Air out the room. Delicious.