Baba ganoush
Units
Temperature
Servings
Ingredients
Baba ganoush
- 1 kg aubergines, about 3 large ones, heavy for their size rounded
- 90 g tahini rounded
- 50 ml lemon juice rounded
- 2 garlic cloves, crushed to a paste with a little of the salt rounded
- 7 g fine salt rounded
- 30 ml olive oil rounded
- 10 g flat parsley, chopped, for the top rounded
- to taste pomegranate seeds or sumac rounded
Method
Method
- Char the aubergines whole directly on a gas burner, a barbecue, or under a grill turned as high as it goes. Turn them every few minutes with tongs. They should look destroyed, blackened all over and collapsed, which takes 20 to 30 minutes on a flame.
- Rest them in a covered bowl for 10 minutes. The trapped steam loosens the skin.
- Split them and scoop the flesh out, leaving the blackened skin behind. A little burnt fleck is good; a lot is bitter.
- Drain the flesh in a sieve for at least 30 minutes. Do not skip this. Aubergine holds a startling amount of bitter grey liquid, and the difference between a watery dip and a good one is that liquid going down the sink.
- Beat, do not blend. A fork or a whisk keeps some texture. In a food processor it turns to grey paste and loses the character entirely.
- Add tahini, lemon, garlic and salt, taste, and finish with oil, parsley and something jewelled on top.
Notes
- A grill or an oven gives you no smoke. If you have no gas flame, the honest answer is that you are making roasted aubergine dip, which is nice. A quarter teaspoon of smoked paprika or a couple of drops of liquid smoke is the pragmatic fix.
- The draining step is the one people skip and it is the one that matters most. Press the flesh gently against the sieve at the end.
- Less tahini than hummus. This should taste of smoke and aubergine, with the tahini in support. Recipes that push it to hummus levels lose the point.
- It keeps 4 days and the smoke gets stronger, not weaker.
Ingredient substitutions
- Pomegranate molasses stirred in at a teaspoon adds a sour depth common in Syrian versions and is well worth it if the bottle is open.
- Greek yogurt instead of some of the tahini makes a lighter, tangier dip, which is a Turkish direction rather than a Levantine one and no longer vegan.