Well, last night I did something new. I tried my hand a eggplant pizza. A friend mentioned wanting to try it recently, so I became curious and decided to give it a go.
I've never cooked or even eaten eggplant, so I had to google how to just determine what makes an eggplant ripe. Seems that you want to find one with a green(ish) leaf hat and a bit of green still in the stem. Check! It also needs to be springy to the touch without leaving indentations from your grip. CHECK!!! Finally, I suppose it needs to be large enough to slice reasonable platforms for the toppings as the eggplant acts as the doughy pizza crust. (check?)
I found a simple pizza sauce recipe online and followed maybe 80% of it, straying where I thought there was too much of a particular spice. I also 86'ed the sugar and, instead, added more black pepper and just a bit of crushed red pepper flakes. I think that was a good trade. I slices the eggplant lengthwise thinking it would provide more surface for toppings, but I think I will cut more circular slices next time. That just seems easier to manage on the baking pan. Too, you can only fit maybe three pepperonis when the cut is long and narrow. Additional toppings mound up and got ...awkward.
I sliced maybe one-quarter of a red onion, half of a small green bell pepper, one small vine tomato, a handful of baby spinach, and mozzarella cheese. The cheese I found was actually pre-sliced, so that helped. So was the pepperoni.
First, the eggplant slices were salted and placed between sheets of paper towels. The salt was to pull moisture from the slices while the towel absorbed it. Otherwise, the eggplant likely would have turned soup. As it was, it was still quite soft so maybe next time I let this sit for at least an hour. Maybe two.
Once I gave up on waiting, I then coated each slice with olive oil.
Not virgin olive oil, mind you. That has a much lower burn temperature---something I accidentally discovered when cooking fish in my old apartment. Not pretty. Once coated front and back, black pepper was added. Then, I tossed the tray into the oven at 450 for about 15-20 minutes. The top somewhat browned, but the side laying directly against the pan was cooking well. It actually started to smell like bread, at a point. I then pulled the pan, flipped the eggplant and loaded up the toppings. Some with tomato and some without, as I did not know how that would play given the already high moisture content of the eggplant. They played well, in the end.
Back to the oven for another 10 minutes or so. Once the mozzarella started to melt and spread, I turned on the broiler to low for an additional 5 minutes. Once I could smell the pepperoni, I checked one last time to confirm that nothing was burning, and that the cheese had begun to singe a bit, I pulled the tray and plated.
Forgive the cruddy mobile pics, but my kitchen space is small. I could not taste "eggplant" over the other ingredients. The only weird thing that might throw some people off was just the texture. It was still soft and wet. Perhaps a different cut angle, a longer drying period, and a bit more practice might fix that.