Melzanes Parmigiana


#1

I love this recipe and its been a family favourite for years in my house- my grown up kids will happily canter back home for this. This dish has also been instrumental in converting many an aubergine-hater when served as a side dish. A couple of tweaks to a tried and tested recipe and voila, Keto modified. Not posting many quantities as obviously it depends how many mouths you are feeding and also that isn’t how Italian home cooking works really. It’s a simple dish but a bit time consuming at the beginning- well worth it though for deep rich cheesy tomatoey goodness with a little crunch.

Ingredients
Aubergines sliced across into rounds as thick as your thumb
1-2 eggs depending on size
1/2 a tin of chopped tomatoes
A squeeze of tomato purée
Mozzarella
Fresh Parmesan
Olive oil
Salt pepper and garlic
Splash vinegar
Whatever low carb flour substitute you prefer (but not coconut)

Method- aubergine
Break the eggs into a flat dish and whisk.
Place flour sub into another flat dish with the salt and pepper
Get a large pan on the hob with olive oil heated until it ripples.
Dip each aubergine round into flour, then egg, then flour again it only needs a light coating (NOTE you can skip this entirely and grill or direct fry the aubergine but it wont have the desired crunch and it will drink all your oil)
Fry in batches until soft and starts to colour, set aside. You may need to add more oil.

Method- sauce
Combine the tinned tomatoes, purée, vinegar and some of the salt and pepper.
Line an ovenproof dish with half of it.

Method- assembly
Layer the cooked aubergine slices on top of the sauce.
Pour the remaining sauce on top
Slice up your mozzarella and Parmesan ( I use a potato peeler on Parmesan, it gives a nice thin slice)
Put the cheeses on top, Mozzerella then Parmesan.
Bake at 160 degrees Celsius for 40- 50 min, until everything is reducing and bubbling and the cheese is starting to crisp at the edges of the pan.

We have it with a chopped flat parsley salad to complement the richness. Hope you enjoy this recipe, when i ran it through Carbs Manager it came out at 13g net carbs per generous serving.


(Bob M) #2

You might have to translate this for us in the US. Aubergine = eggplant? This thing?

image

A tin of chopped tomatoes = a can of chopped tomatoes? If so, how big? Tomato puree = what? Hob = stove/cooktop?

What’s an aubergine round?

It sounds like a good recipe, but I just want to ensure I’m making it correctly.


(Allie) #3

Slice I guess, and yes, aubergine = eggplant.


#4

Sorry about the language barrier :smile:
Aubergine= eggplant
A tin = a can, I used half a tin/can so 200grams
Tomato purée= tomato paste I think
The rounds are the slices you have cut as described in the method
The hob is your stovetop
I’ll have to go bilingual when I post another recipe. Hope that has helped/ explained


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #5

In the U.S., tomato puree is wetter. It’s simply tomatoes that have been put through a blender. Tomato paste, on the other hand, is cooked down until the water is gone and it’s pretty solid.

I used to make tomato sauce for my pasta by taking a large tin of pureed tomatoes and combining it with a small tin of paste. If you use the “wrong” one, it’s no big deal, just adjust the rest of the liquid or cook it down a bit more to compensate.


#6

Tomato purée in the uk comes in a tube and is very firm. It’s a good pint though, you make this with only just enough sauce to cook it as the veg release water as they bake and I’ve had some horribly wet and claggy versions of this!


(Bob M) #7

That’s tomato paste for us. Recipes can use that for various reasons, including if you cook it in the pan, it can add some umami-type flavors. In the US, we get ours via small cans/tins, though I’ve been buying them in a tube with a cap. Since you use so little usually, the small cans are harder to store, though there are techniques to store them in the freezer. But the tube stores well in the fridge, as no air gets into it. I’ve had many tomato pastes from the can develop mold (mould?) in the fridge.

By the way, I’m a fan of British/UK-ish spellings of words instead of US-ish spellings. For instance, colour makes way more sense to me than color. The benefit to the former is that there’s a hint how to pronounce it, whereas with the latter, you just have to know how it’s pronounced.

For so many words in the US, we just have to know how they are pronounced. Consider spite and respite. One would think it’s spy-t and reh-spy-t (where the e is silent and the i is as in eye), but it’s reh-spit. Why? Gah!


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #8

The difference between Kansas and Arkansas used to confuse me terribly, when I was a kid. But a lot of British words are the same; you just have to know that “minging” rhymes with “singing,” whereas “whinging” rhymes with “binging” (in fact, I prefer to spell them both with an “e” after the “g” to make the pronunciation clear).

And my favourite British words are family and place names that sound quite differently from their spellings: Avebury (Avery), Berkeley (Barclay), Beaufort (Buford), Buccleuch (buck-CLUE), Cholmondeley (Chumley), Penistone (get your mind out of the gutter, it’s Penniston, lol!), Tagliaferro (Tolliver).


(Jane) #9

And even more confusing when you consider you pronounce someone who is from Arkansas… an Ar-KAN-san.


(Bob M) #10

As it should. Like respite (reh spit) and spite (spight), makes no sense.

Though some of those British words are way up there, too.

I do think a lot of the British spellings help, like colour instead of color. Accents or other indicia over letters can help too, but the US has been removing all of those.


#11

It’s weird how conditioned you are to your local words; it never even occurred to me that this could be read as anything other than Penniston.

I was sitting here this morning going, “What’s gutter-ish about th…ohhhhhhh.”


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #12

Programmers call it “the Scunthorpe problem,” for similar reasons. Even searches on “bass fishing” get blocked by some aggressively censorious sites.

Don’t know if I mentioned this before, but search for “Tom Scott Scunthorpe” on YouTube for a hilarious rant on the topic.