Baingan Bharta/Roasted Eggplant Curry is a delicious and smoky North Indian variation of the Mediterranean baba ganoush. This simple dish has unique smoky flavors that come from grilling the eggplant on direct fire or charcoal. The grilled eggplant is then chopped or mashed, spiced up and cooked to a delicate finish. This baingan bharta/roasted eggplant pairs well with Indian flat breads like roti/paratha and steamed white rice. Paratha is made from a simple dough of flour, salt, oil, and water. The dough is divided and each piece is rolled out and smeared with a generous amount of ghee, butter, or shortening, and sprinkled with flour to help provide definition between the layers.*
Paratha is a type of flaky, layered flatbread common throughout South Asia. They can be simple — layered with your choice of fat (such as ghee, butter, or shortening) and rolled into a variety of shapes (such as square, round, or triangular) — or they can even be stuffed or filled, such as in aloo paratha or Mughlai paratha.
“Paratha, while definitely bread, is not baked the way that naan is. Rather, it’s fried in a tawa, a stone frying pan, using butter or cooking oil. While naan is generally rolled out once and slapped up against the side of the tandoor, paratha often gets rolled out multiple times, creating a very flaky bread,” says the Little India Restaurant in Denver, Colorado.**
“The word ‘baingan’ refers to eggplant/brinjal and ‘bharta’ means mashed. So baingan bharta refers to eggplant mash. The taste of this dish depends on how well you roast the eggplant. This curry tastes good even without the smoky flavors but if you can infuse some smoky flavors into the eggplant, then it tastes heavenly and delectable,” says Mrs. Sowmya Raghavan at Sowmya’s Spicy Corner, where she features many authentic vegetarian recipes.
Ingredients:
1 medium eggplant
