Turkish · Main
İmam Bayıldı
- Intermediate
- 80 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with a briny, maritime salinity, aromatics blooming from the first bite, trailing gentle sweetness.
Ingredients
- 4 slim aubergines
- 2 onions, sliced into half-moons
- 4 tomatoes, grated; 6 garlic cloves
- 120ml good olive oil; do not measure with fear
- Sugar, salt, parsley, lemon
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
BraisingKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Peel aubergines in stripes; fry whole in olive oil until soft and bronzed; slit open like a canoe.
- Stew onions slowly in the same oil until sweet; add garlic, tomato, a pinch of sugar.
- Stuff the slits generously; nestle in a pan with a splash of water and more oil.
- Cover and braise gently 30 min. Cool to room temperature: never serve hot. 30 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Braising 39 recipes
- The pieces went into the liquid already deep brown on their faces, and the pot floor gave up its fond to that liquid rather than keeping it.
- The liquid comes partway up the pieces and stays there for the whole cook (not submerged, not run dry), and it never boils: the surface trembles and no more.
- It went long enough for the collagen to convert: a fork twists in it with almost no resistance, and the piece still lifts out whole rather than falling into shreds.
- The liquid has become a sauce: it has body, it coats the back of a spoon, and it tastes concentrated rather than thin and washed out.
- The meat is moist and seasoned through to its centre, not dry fibres sitting inside a good sauce.
Where it goes wrong The oven or the burner ran too hot and the liquid boiled, so the fibres tightened and squeezed their moisture out: it shreds dry into a thin greasy liquid, and more time makes it worse rather than better.
Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias 150 recipes
- Take any three pieces from anywhere in the pile: they match closely enough in every dimension that you would have to measure them to argue otherwise.
- The cut faces are flat and clean rather than ragged or crushed; leaves and herbs are cut through, not bruised, and the board carries no dark smear where they were.
- The stated size is the actual size, held against a rule or a known reference rather than called about right.
- Everything in the pile is the shape that was asked for: no wedges, no half pieces, and no offcuts swept in to avoid waste.
- They cook evenly, which is the entire point: at the end of cooking nothing is still raw and nothing has collapsed.
Where it goes wrong The knife was dull, or the vegetable was never squared off first, so the pieces vary: the small ones are mush by the time the large ones are cooked, and the dish has two textures where it wanted one.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chianti Classico or Barbera d’Alba
- Also Right
- Vermentino for the lighter plates
- From the Taps
- Italian pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- San Pellegrino Sanbittèr
Tomato’s acid demands equal acid: Italian reds evolved beside the sauce, and the regional pairing is the safest law in wine.
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