Don’t like eggplant? Love it? Eggplant Adobo is for you

Five basic ingredients—soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, bay leaves and peppercorns—turn Asian eggplants into a tangy, vegan Philippine adobo dish. Recipe below.

WE LOVE EGGPLANT. We also understand that some people don’t. There’s that slightly bitter taste that just puts them off. That’s one reason we really love Asian varieties of eggplant—they’re slightly sweet, without any bitterness. Of course another big reason we love Asian eggplants is that we most often encounter them on menus in Chinese restaurants—seek them out, in fact. Recently, a Filipino eggplant dish, Eggplant Adobo, caught our eye. Having just made Chicken Adobo, the unofficial national dish of the Philippines, we were intrigued, to say the least.

Chinese or Japanese, these long, slender eggplants are thinner skinned and more delicately flavored than their standard American globe brethren. Chinese eggplants tend to be paler in color than Japanese, and their flavor is said to be milder. But many recipes use them interchangeably. In our garden, Marion grows the Japanese variety (and she notes that a single plant will produce more eggplants than a family of four will eat in a summer). When we’re shopping for them, the kind we find in the store is what we get. We got the ones for this dish in H Mart, a Korean food store chain.

Whichever you get, they’re easy and versatile to cook with too. We’ve sliced them lengthwise and grilled them, roasted them and, most often, sautéed or stir-fried them. Whatever method you use, they cook quickly and are quite tender.

What makes this dish adobo? According to Mark Bittman, you can “adobo anything” with five basic ingredients: soy, vinegar, garlic, bay leaves and peppercorns. Regarding the vinegar, traditional Filipino recipes often call for cane vinegar, but we’ve also seen rice vinegar, apple cider vinegar and plain white distilled vinegar. We used distilled vinegar, but might substitute rice vinegar for a slightly milder flavor next time.

Eggplant Adobo is quick and easy to throw together. As is, it is a tart, delicious vegan side dish. By adding some ground pork, you can turn it into a lunch main course. See Kitchen Notes for the details.

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Eggplant Adobo

Five basic ingredients—soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, bay leaves and peppercorns—turn Asian eggplants into a tangy, vegan Philippine adobo dish.

Course Side Dish

Cuisine Philippine

Servings 3 as a side

Ingredients

• grapeseed oil or other neutral oil
• 3 Japanese eggplants, about 1 pound total, stems trimmed and cut into 1-inch slices
• 5 large cloves garlic, chopped
• 1/3 cup rice vinegar or distilled white vinegar
• 1/3 cup reduced-sodium soy sauce
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
• 2 bay leaves
• salt, if needed
• steamed white rice, for serving

Instructions

• Heat 4 tablespoons oil in a large skillet or sauté pan over medium high flame. Working in batches, brown eggplant slices on both cut sides, about 3 minutes per side. Add extra oil as needed (eggplant sucks up oil—you will need it). Transfer browned slices to paper towel-lined plate.
• Reduce heat to medium. Add oil to pan if needed, then add garlic. Cook, stirring constantly, until aromatic, about 45 seconds.
• Add vinegar, soy sauce, sugar, black pepper and bay leaves to pan, stirring to combine. Return eggplant to pan. Reduce heat to simmer and cook until eggplant is tender, 3 to 5 minutes.
• Adjust seasoning with salt, if needed. Serve with white rice.

Kitchen Notes

Ah, the optional pork. By adding a little animal protein, you can turn this into a lunch main course for two. After browning the eggplant, add 1/4-pound of ground pork to the pan. Cook until just no longer pink, then add the garlic and continue the recipe as above.

Liz’s Crockery Corner. Most of our antique dishes were made by a particular manufacturer, usually in Staffordshire, but this one is a bit unusual. It was made in Staffordshire, but the mark it bears is that of Rowland & Marsellus, a company in New York that didn’t make anything itself, but instead, starting in the 1890s, commissioned various English potteries to manufacture dishes depicting particular scenes, and then sold them on to various American outlets.

The majority of Rowland & Marsellus dishes were souvenir plates. Often they depicted romantic or famous spots—Plymouth Rock, Yale College, the Longfellow home in Maine; there are tons featuring scenes from American cities, with, say the city hall in the center and important local sites—bridges, colleges, cathedrals—arrayed in cartouches around the rim. (Those plates might have three or four different marks on the bottom—one for R&M, one for the actual manufacturer, one for the retail shop that sold the plate, and one naming the scene on the front.) Other R&M souvenir plates showed famous figures—Robert Burns, Clara Barton, Paul Revere (on his horse, bien sûr) and of course, Shakespeare. Yet others were so-called historical scenes, generic castle-tree-water scenes like this one, which I think was made by the British Anchor Pottery Company for Rowland &Marsellus some time in the early 20th century.