Eggplant. They're used all over the world in so many different cuisines.

Whether it's Italian or Indian...

The one thing about eggplant

is a lot of people don't know what to do with them.

When you cook them, they can be a little bit bitter.

Now, a way to alleviate that bitterness is to salt them.

You slice them up and then you salt it and you'll see...

What will happen... See this moisture that's coming out of the eggplant?

A lot of that will be the bitterness that you find in the eggplant.

See that?

There's quite a bit of water there.

One way of dealing with it is salting it.

Another way of doing it is cooking it a little more than you would expect.

Now, to make a baba ganoush, for instance,

which is the smoked eggplant dip,

what you have to do is you have to burn the outside

to get that beautiful smokiness.

So you can stick it straight under the grill,

you can throw it on a barbie, you can put it directly on a fire.

And I've got a couple here to show you just how far you take them.

Have a look at that.

So you'd look at this and think,

"Oh, he's totally destroyed it. You know, he's burnt it."

But, in actual fact, what you do is you go through

and you sort of cut that in half...

..and then when you have a look inside the eggplant here,

you'll see it's started to soften up a little,

but you can actually go ahead and remove the seeds quite easily.

Of course, you remove the skin,

but you're going to get this delicious smokiness.

There's so many different ways to cook with the eggplant.

So roasting them is one way of breaking down that fibrous vegetable.

Salting them is another.

Over here I've salted some eggplant

and I've washed, of course, the salt off

and then I've made the classic ratatouille,

which is great.

I've got a grill on over here

and I'm going to literally grill some of this eggplant.

So I'm going to give it a quick wash

and then I'm going to throw it onto the grill.

And then, of course, it's important

that you just get a nice clean tea towel and dry it

before you go ahead and put it onto the grill.

Just with a little bit of oil. Nice hot grill.

You need to really cook it quite well because eggplant,

when you cook it well, it goes a little mushy, but that's OK.

Don't worry about the texture. Worry about the flavour.

Another drizzle of oil on top.

And we're going to let that cook down.

When you cook this on an open fire or even just on a grill,

make sure you prick it with a fork.

If you don't prick it with a fork, it might explode.

The pressure can build up in an eggplant.

If you've got it in a really hot oven

or under a grill or something like that, it can just pop open.

You know, the temptation is

to turn it and cook it like you would a zucchini.

But it needs a little longer cooking than that

so make sure you leave it on the grill a little bit longer.

They also absorb quite a bit of oil,

so be quite generous when you are cooking the eggplant

with how much oil you use.

Right, now I'm going to bring you back over here

to this eggplant that we roasted.

I'm just going to take the skin off

and you can see how easy it literally just sort of peels off

in your fingers like that.

If you see here, I'm just going to scrape some of this away.

If you pick this up and you eat this eggplant like this,

forget about the texture and forget about how it looks

and just think about the flavour.

Mmm! It's so delicious.

So all you need to do

is cook it a little more than you think is appropriate.

So my ratatouille is looking delicious.

It's great to freshen it up with a little bit of basil or mint.

There's so many different cuisines that really love this stuff

and it's because they know how to cook it.

If you have a look at this now,

it's been on for about 15 minutes or so,

I've just been turning it every now and then,

and you can see that it's the perfect accompaniment

to something like an antipasto plate

or just a vegetable on its own with a little bit of fetta and mint.

It's so, so tasty.

You could finish it with just a little twist of pepper,

a tiny little squeeze of lemon juice

and a little bit of extra virgin olive oil.

You've got a beautiful side dish. Delicious vegetable there.

A little bit of mint. You could put a bit of Persian fetta on the top.

It's such a diverse vegetable and there's so many ways to cook it.

So go away and experiment. I promise you won't be disappointed.

Mmm!

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