Baba Ghanoush
Here's the list of ingredients:
- One whole eggplant
- Four (or more or less) cloves of raw garlic
- 2 or 3 tablespoons of tahini paste
- Pinch of salt, a tea spoon or so of fresh cracked black pepper
- Freshly chopped parsley and cayenne pepper (optional)
- The juice from a whole lemon
A tip from Alton Brown about choosing an eggplant. Smaller eggplants have less seeds in them, which make them less bitter. Also, male eggplants have less seeds, and you can tell by looking at the divot on the bottom of the eggplant. If the divot is round, it's male. If it's oval-shaped, it's female. And now you know.
Start by cutting the top off the eggplant, and cutting it lengthwise and putting it cut-side down on a roasting sheet. Place in an oven pre-heated to 400F and leave there until the skin starts to wrinkle and blister. Remove from the oven, take the peeling off and put the remaining innards in a colander. Mash it up and let it drain and cool in your sink for a half hour. Eggplant can be pretty bitter and alkaloid-tasting, and doing this will remove a lot of that.
Once the eggplant is cooled down, throw it, along with the garlic, salt, pepper, tahini paste, and lemon juice into your food processor. Blitz until a smooth puree. Taste it at this point. You can add more seasoning, and add the cayenne and parsely. It's important to just add the parsely now -- doing it earlier will puree it into the baba ghanoush. It's nice to have the odd flake of parsely still whole.
A lemon juice trick. Some lemons are pretty firm and can be hard to squeeze. You can get around this by softening them up before you cut. Just roll them on a cutting board with the palm of your hand. Push fairly hard. They will juice much easier.
At this point, you're done. You can add other things to it, if you like. But it should look something like this:
