Mapo Eggplant So Good You'll Want More Rice 麻婆茄子 Chinese Spicy Aubergine Brinjal with Minced Meat

Hi and welcome to Spice and Pans. I'm Roland and today I'll show you how to make a super delicious mapo brinjal. We are taking that classic mapo flavor and pairing it with melt-in-your-mouth eggplant that soaks up every bit of that savory glossy sauce. Oh so good. If you're looking for an absolute rice killer dish for lunch or dinner, let's start cooking. Hi friends, before we start cooking, just a quick life update. You probably know my wife Jamie as the person who's always behind the camera. Well, she recently started a new career. It's something she's been working very hard on and we are both really excited about it. So I'll let Jamie tell you herself. Hi everyone, I'm now a property advisor in Singapore and it feels good to finally say that. Don't worry though, we'll still be sharing recipes with you every week on this channel. But if you, your family and friends are thinking about buying, selling, renting or investing property in Singapore, I hope you think of me. Just send me a WhatsApp message for a chat. Thank you for always supporting us. It really means a lot to us. Alright, enough talking. Let's start cooking. Now we're going to fry our eggplant first. Heat up a wok. Add in a suitable amount of oil. A little bit more oil is fine because it makes the frying so much easier. Move the oil a little bit. I have with me over here 300 grams of eggplant which I've cut into sizes like this. Now if you don't want them to sort of oxidize, we need to soak them in salted water. Alright, and then just let them dry. Okay, now we just put everything in. I'm using medium heat right now. We just want to sort of cook and soften them so that later they will absorb the beautiful sauce that we make much faster and easier. Just spread them out. Make sure they have contact with the pan or wok and we let them cook for about a minute before we stir them again for another minute. A minute is up. Let's just stir fry this a little bit or move them around. We just want to soften the eggplant and not actually burn them. So that's the reason why we need to move them around a little bit. You know that the eggplant is ready when it's soft to the touch. Now if you don't want to go through this step, you can of course cook it in the sauce but it will take a longer period of time and you will need to adjust the water or the water for the sauce accordingly. But frying them beforehand will actually cook the dish much faster and as you can see some of the eggplant is already soft to touch. This is what we want. It's pretty fast actually. Just move them around. Frying them will also give them a very nice caramelized color. Just remember to move them around. Now normally in restaurants what they do is that they will actually deep fry this so that it's much faster for them but at home we don't want to use so much oil. Hence we are doing just pan frying. We also know when this is ready when it has sort of a little bit translucent like this. This piece is not ready yet. As you can see it's still not very translucent. So just fry this a little bit more. When they have charred beautifully like this, that means this is done. We'll just remove them from the heat and set them aside. Now we'll start to make our sauce. In the same pan you don't need to wash it. Just add a little bit more oil. Add in 20 grams of young ginger chopped up like this. Move them around a little bit. Once you can smell the beautiful fragrance from the ginger we'll add in garlic. Five cloves of garlic chopped. Put them all in. Same thing. We just want to have the fragrance out before we add in our minced pork. Now that I can smell everything I'll add in my minced pork. Add in 200 grams of minced pork. Now if you do not take pork for our Muslim friends you can actually change this to minced chicken or beef. Or in some places in China they actually use mutton or lamb. Just mix them up and chop them up well. We need to actually make them spread out a little bit and cook them. Now I'm using medium heat so you can do the same. We need to cook this until we do not see any more redness. Don't over fry your minced pork because otherwise it will be too dry later. Okay this is something that is good for me. Now we add in one and a half tablespoon of spicy broad bean paste or dou ban jiang. One teaspoon of powdered Sichuan pepper. Actually in Chinese supermarket right they call this Chinese prickly ash powder. Now if you can't get this of course you can just dry roll some Sichuan pepper and then crush them. A few dashes of pepper. Mix them up well again. You want to fry the oil until it's straight in color. Oh this is smelling very very good. Of course if you want this to be more spicy feel free to add in a little bit of bird's eye chili. A little bit more numbing then you can add in a little bit more of the Sichuan pepper. Look at how pretty this is. Now we'll add in our water. 250 milliliters of water. Put them in. Mix them up well. We add in our eggplant. Spread them out. Put the lid on. We simmer this for five minutes. I'll see you back in a while. Five minutes is up. Let's have a look. Wow look at how pretty this is. Give this a light stir. Now we need to thicken this up with cornstarch solution. Beautiful. Turn the heat down to medium low and slowly add in some cornstarch. Just a little bit at first. Give it a stir. A little bit more. Slowly add in your cornstarch solution so that you can decide how thick or what's the kind of consistency that you like for your sauce. Oh look at this. How pretty this is. Excellent on rice. Now this is almost done. Last thing we need to do is to add in spring onions. Add in a bunch of chopped up spring onions and it's time for our lunch. Delicious. And now the dish is done. Let's have a taste. Oh smells really authentic. Let's try this. Green jowl. Super tender. Coated very well with the beautiful Mapo sauce. Fantastic. Rice with the easily three to four bowls of rice. This is really really fantastic. It's savory, it's a little bit spicy, a little bit numbing. The taste is perfect. So ladies and gentlemen, I hope you like our video. Do click like on our video and do subscribe to our channel. Thank you for watching and now it's your turn to cook. See you. Bye-bye. Very very good.