The Best Ways To Use Eggplant For Restaurant-Level Meals At Home

Are you craving eggplant but not quite sure how to prepare it? Perhaps you've enjoyed an eggplant dish or two in restaurants and would like to cook them at home, but the thought feels daunting. After all, certain vegetables just taste better at a restaurant than at home — until now, that is. We asked Quentin Garcia, Executive Chef at Thompson Palm Springs, to teach us the best ways to use eggplant for restaurant-level meals.

Whether serving a vegetarian-friendly meal or a meat-based dish, Garcia has the inspiration to get you started. He explains that an eggplant can be light or heavy for a main course. "If light, then I would go in the direction of a chawanmushi or make a sort of eggplant tofu with a soft curd." On the flip side, he notes, "If going heavy, eggplant responds very well to grilling and smoking brushed with thyme and herbs."

For meat lovers, Garcia can't recommend grilling enough. "One thousand times again and again grilling this over charcoal, basting with the natural fat of the animal, [and] smoking with herbs and woodchips soaked in red wine." Rest assured, you can still get that perfectly smoked flavor without a smoker, and to help out, look to this guide to smoking foods in an oven.

Eggplant can easily be the star of a dish. But what if you want to incorporate it more subtly into your meals? Garcia has ideas for that, too! And although you'll be testing those culinary skills at home, people will feel like they're dining at a top-notch restaurant.

Have you ever tasted a dish and wondered what that mystery ingredient is? As you savored each bite, you couldn't pinpoint what made it so magical. To provoke this sensation, we recommend using eggplant as an ingredient rather than the main focus of a dish. To truly get creative, we turned to Quentin Garcia. "If cooked right, a hard roast on this vegetable works wonders. Using this as the base of purees and umami-based rubs is incredible."

Pureeing eggplant opens up a wide world of culinary options. You can always use it for dips like an easy baba ganoush. And when aiming for a smoky harissa eggplant dip, paprika definitely enhances this food. We also recommend using the eggplant puree as a base for hearty stir-fries or as a bruschetta spread. However, Garcia encourages budding chefs to experiment further by "using that puree to fortify a sauce."

Garcia shares one of his eggplant success stories as a concrete example. "I cooked A5 wagyu in its own fat and wrapped it with a rub of burnt eggplant puree, kelp, and caviar." These rich ingredients sound like a mouth-watering umami bomb, and Garcia surprised us by sharing that the eggplant stole the show. "The way the eggplant carried the flavor of the beef was the real star of the dish as a whole," he said. Garcia's tips prove that you can get the best flavors from the unlikeliest ingredients, and you shouldn't be afraid to play around with what you know — and what you don't know.