Eggplant kadaifi recipe offers rich Mediterranean flavour

North By Northwest's Sheryl MacKay got a little tutoring in vegetarian cooking last November when she met Yotam Ottolenghi, one of the U.K.'s biggest celebrity chefs.

Ottolenghi is a big proponent of making vegetables interesting, and believes they can hold their own against any meat dish when cooked right.

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"Luckily, more people are getting interested in vegetables. Not just people who cook at home, but people who cook in restaurants. People know more about vegetables now than four years ago," he said. "You could just eat potatoes all your life, but there's so much more out there!"

Ottolenghi fuses Middle Eastern cooking with Western and Asian sensibilities to create unique dishes that have earned him fans though his delis and his writing and blogging for publications such as The Guardian. He tells Sheryl that one ingredient he's passionate about these days is kadaifi, a sort of pastry usually used for sweets like baklava.

In this recipe, Ottolenghi turns the ingredient into a base for a savoury dish.

To make this recipe, you'll need the following ingredients, and the full recipe is posted below:

Eggplant Kadaifi Nests

Nests

• 4 medium eggplants (2 ¾ lb or 1.2 kg)
• ¾ cup plus 1 tbsp or 200 g ricotta
• ¾ cup or 65 g coarsely grated aged pecorino
• scant 1 cup or 25 g flat-leaf parsley leaves, chopped
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• scant ½ cup or 110 g unsalted butter, melted, plus extra for greasing the baking sheet
• 5 ½ tbsp or 80 ml sunflower oil
• 8 oz or 240 g kadaifi pastry
• salt and black pepper

Red pepper and tomato salsa

• 1 medium red pepper (5½ oz or 160 g)
• 1 red chile
• 3 cloves garlic
• 4 tomatoes, peeled (14 oz or 400 g)
• 2 tsp sherry vinegar
• 3½ tbsp or 50 ml olive oil
• ¼ medium red onion, very finely diced (3 ½ tbsp or 30 g)
• salt

RECIPE

Preheat the oven to 500ºF/250ºC. Pierce the eggplants in a few places with a sharp knife. Place them on a baking sheet on the top rack of the oven (keeping space for the peppers underneath) for 1½ hours, turning them occasionally, to blacken all sides. Remove from the oven and, when cool enough to handle, scoop the flesh into a colander, discard the skin, and leave the flesh to drain for at least 30 minutes.

While the eggplants are roasting, prepare the salsa. Put the pepper, chile, and garlic on a baking sheet and place underneath the eggplants in the oven for 10 minutes. Remove the chile and garlic, turn the pepper, and roast for another 20 minutes. Once the skin is blistered, put the pepper in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap. When cool, peel and seed both the pepper and chile and peel the garlic.

Cut half of the tomatoes into ⅜-inch/1-cm dice and set aside. Seed the remaining tomatoes and place in the bowl of a small food processor along with the pepper, chile, and garlic. Whiz to a paste, add the vinegar and ¾ teaspoon salt, and then slowly add the oil to make a thick sauce. Transfer to a bowl, add the diced tomatoes and onion, stir gently, and set aside.

Mix the drained eggplant in a bowl with the ricotta, pecorino, parsley, egg, ¾ teaspoon salt, and a good grind of black pepper. Lower the oven temperature to 425ºF/220ºC. 

Now make the kadaifi nests. Mix together the melted butter and sunflower oil. Remove a ⅔ oz/20 g bundle of pastry from the pack and place in a small bowl. Add 1 tablespoon of the melted butter and oil and toss together so the pastry soaks it up. Take the bundle and spread it flat on a work surface into a rectangle roughly 6 by 2-inches/15 by 5 cm. Spoon 1½ tablespoons of the eggplant mixture onto one end of the pastry and then roll the pastry very loosely around the filling into an airy ball, so all the filling is covered. Repeat with the remaining pastry and filling and arrange all 12 stuffed balls inside a buttered baking dish or baking sheet, 12½ by 9-inches/31 by 23-cm, so that they are touching one another snugly. Drizzle over all the remaining butter and oil. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, until the top of the nests are golden and crunchy.

Serve at once, with the salsa on the side.

To hear the full interview, click on the audio labelled: Mediterranean eggplant kadaifi nests by Yotam Ottolenghi