Verdict: Alton Brown's Eggplant Pasta

Oh, Alton Brown.  How many times have I geeked out watching “Good Eats” and thought about how much I’d love to sit and have a conversation with you over something awesome like homemade pretzels or parsnip chips?  The answer to that, my friend, is MANY.  My husband and I adore you.  Your lemon meringue pie is my main excuse to buy huge bags of lemons. When I saw this recipe for Eggplant Pasta posted on Ezra Pound Cake’s Meatless Mondays with your name right there, I immediately stopped to read it.

And eggplant!  My darling, underrated, and misunderstood vegetable.  Ever since I was introduced to Eggplant Parmesan at the Midway during my vegetarian days, I have loved you.  I have snacked on paper-thin, fried, salty slices of you.  I want to learn new ways to enjoy your meaty flesh and yummy seeds.  Eggplant instead of pasta? I thought, that’s brilliant!

You can tell, then, that I had high expectations for this recipe.  Perhaps I expected too much, but this fell miserably short of the transcendent flavour experience I anticipated.

Eggplant Pasta
from Ezra Pound Cake
Adapted from Alton Brown’s “Good Eats: The Early Years”

Servings: 4

• 2 medium-large eggplants
• Kosher salt, for purging
• 4 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 teaspoon garlic, minced
• 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
• 4 small tomatoes, seeded and chopped
• 1/2 cup cream
• 4 tablespoons basil chiffonade
• 1/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan
• Freshly ground pepper

1. Peel each eggplant leaving 1-inch of skin at the top and bottom unpeeled. Slice the eggplant lengthwise, about 1/4-inch thick. Evenly coat each slice with salt, and let them rest on a wire rack for 30 minutes. Rinse with cold water and roll in paper towels to dry. Slice the pieces into thin strips to resemble pasta.
2. In a large saute pan, heat the oil. Add the garlic and red pepper flakes, and toast.
3. Add the eggplant “pasta,” and toss to coat.
4. Add the tomatoes, and cook for 3 minutes.
5. Add the cream, and increase heat to thicken sauce.
6. Add the basil and Parmesan, and toss to combine. Season with pepper. Serve immediately.

My thoughts:

- First off, holy labour intensive meal.  Peeling eggplant without a vegetable peeler SUCKS.  Also, I don’t understand why I left 1 inch of skin at the top and the bottom.  For a splash of colour, I assume?  If I made this again, I’d cut the skin off.
- I should really get a baking rack someday.  It would make my life easier.  Since I didn’t have one, I had to run paper towels all over my countertop and lay the eggplant on them, salt them, flip them, salt them again, let them drain a bit, transport them to another surface, lay down more paper towel, lay them down on the other side, and let them drain.
- I thought my strips were a pretty nice, small, even size… until I re-read this recipe later on and see that she mentions “fettucine” width.  Err.  These were not fettucine.  These were a little chunkier, which might explain my next problem:
- The recipe says to add the eggplant, toss to coat, add tomatoes, cook for three minutes, add sauce, thicken. In as little time as this took, however, my eggplant was NOT cooked through.  I had to boil my eggplant in the sauce for five more minutes or so for it to lose the weird, raw, styrofoam-esque texture.
- On a positive note, after all the work, this did taste pretty good.  I enjoyed it, my husband hated it (he doesn’t like eggplant) but loved the sauce, and our nine month old daughter thought it was the yummiest thing in the entire world.  But, I mean, LOOK AT IT.  Then go look at Ezra Pound Cake’s shot of this dish.  Go ahead.  They look like completely different meals.  And by that I mean mine looks kinda like dog food.

I think that if I chopped the eggplant smaller (perhaps pulsed in a food processor to leave it chunky and rustic), this would make a really tasty dip. However, I doubt I will be making this again.  For the amount of time and effort this meal takes, it needs to blow me and my husband out of the water.  This did not.

Alton Brown? You’re on notice.