The Eggplant Experiment

So, last week, my boyfriend and I tried to cook eggplant and I'm just now getting around to telling you about it. We love getting dishes with eggplant at a couple of restaurants and they are always so good that my boyfriend started to wonder how you go about cooking eggplant. The dishes we like include fried eggplant, but we wanted to try baking it. He has been really interested in trying new stuff when it comes to cooking and he wanted to try baking something with crushed up Nilla Wafers as the breading, so that's what we did. If it sounds a little weird to you, it sounded odd to me at first too, but it really wasn't that noticeable, just a tad bit sweet. Anyways, here are the steps we took for making this. 

The first thing you do is cut your eggplant up into slices. They can be large slices because you will be draining the eggplant after this which will make the slices a lot thinner.

Now, onto the most time consuming part of making eggplant: draining! We covered each piece with salt, stacked them like this in between two plates, and put something heavy on top (we ended up placing a hammer on top because this was unstable after awhile). We let them drain for about 30 minutes, but the eggplant turned out very very strong. Some people online recommend anywhere from an hour to over night, so it's really up to you, but if we do this again, I would probably let it drain for about 2 hours. Also, if we do this again, we would probably drain them more evenly. Instead of stacking them like this, maybe laying them flat on a sheet.

And now we have nice thin slices of drained eggplant! To get some of the excess juice out, I squeezed them in between the palms of my hands over the sink. If you think you may need to do this, it helps!

Now, take those Nilla Wafers and crush them up!

It helps to crush them in between two plates if mashing them up with your hands isn't doing the trick.

For mine, I mixed in some of these regular Italian style bread crumbs. We bought them just in case the Nilla Wafers didn't work out, but I used both just to get a little more coverage on the eggplant patties.

The next thing you want to do is put some flour on a plate like this.

And then pour some milk into a container like this. We used almond milk, so if you also want to use almond milk, it works!

Now we start to bread the eggplant! First, place a patty in the flour and cover.

Then dip it into the milk. 

And stick the bread crumbs on trying to get as much coverage as you would like!

Just continue to do this with all of your eggplant patties.

Once that is done, bake them at 425 degrees F for 10 minutes on each side and that's it!

Now, you can do whatever you would like to do with your eggplant patties. We decided to make an eggplant sandwich, so we bought some hamburger buns to put them between. 

We also got this delicious feta cheese to put on our sandwiches!

And here it is! It really wasn't too bad, I just wish the eggplant wouldn't have been as strong as it was. It was a little overpowering. But I still wanted to share what we did so that anyone can tweak it the way they want. Feel free to give feedback if you try it! I would love to know how others are cooking their eggplant!

Overall, this was a fun experience and I would really like to try this again and see how it turns out. Thanks for reading! :)