Selecting Eggplants for Vegetarian Spicy Eggplant

Series Summary

Traditional Indian cuisine has a rich and distinguished cultural heritage that traces back to the Vedic period of India's history. Full of herbs and spices, Indian food has been strongly influenced by the vegetarian roots of ancient religious dietary practices, including Hindu Ayurveda and Middle Eastern Islamic cuisine. Thus, in India, food is not merely food, but also a mark of distinction within India's intricate caste system—and regional Indian culture and society in general.

Since the 15th century, Indian spices have been traded throughout Europe; and slowly but surely, they have made inroads with cultured Western restaurant patrons. Today, it’s not uncommon to go down the street to a local Indian food restaurant for a casual bite to eat—or even to find Indian spices integrated into Western recipes. In fact, Indian food has gained so much popularity, it stands to rival Italian and Mexican food as ethnic cuisine of choice in many large cities. As such, it is important to know how to cook different Indian food recipes.

In these easy vegetarian cooking videos, learn how to make two Indian recipes: spicy eggplant and spicy cauliflower. Our expert will walk you through these dishes step-by-step, with ingredients needed, how to cut and peel the vegetables, how to season the mixture, and how to cook each dish on the stove. Enjoy.

Video Transcript

"NEHA GHERA: Hi, this is Neha on behalf of Expert Village. And today I'm going to tell you a recipe which is direct from the heart of India. Of course, I'm talking about eggplant. Yummy, it's a recipe which has gone on. I'll be including so much, so much that you'll be having fun then you'll have it. Well, it's a recipe which is called eggplants with spicy gravy. So before starting, let's have a quick look that what all we need to make this recipe. We need to have eggplants. The eggplants are quite small over here. I mean, you can always experiment with eggplant. If you want have big eggplants, you can have that but make sure that they're longer eggplants. As I can see, I have right now smaller eggplants. There always many varieties of eggplants. They might be smaller. They might be longer. Try for this particular recipe that you should have smaller eggplants. Here's my smaller eggplants which I'll be surely using later. Let's see what all we need other than eggplants. We need to have refined oil. We need to have red chili, ginger-garlic paste. We have turmeric powder. We have turmeric which is actually dissolved in water. The [SOUNDS LIKE] silvy, rolly, adding something peppy, peppy to our recipe."