Eggplant and Black Bean Sauce

[Shel_B]

Toots loves eggplant with black bean sauce, and has asked me to prepare it at home. I've never made it, and can't tell from recipes I've found on line what may be good or not. So, perhaps the mavens at eGullet can help.

I'd appreciate any good, proven recipes and techniques, bearing in mind that we don't have a wok and Toots' apartment stove doesn't lend itself to wok cooking. It would be nice to get some suggestions for a prepared black bean sauce (I bought some Lee Kum Kee sauce yesterday, but perhaps there's a more interesting version out there) as well as a recipe or ideas for making my own. Toots does not care for green peppers so recipes that include an alternative, as opposed to just leaving them out, would be especially appreciated. In any case, any ideas would be welcome.

None of the recipes I've looked at thus far have suggested salting and eliminating water from the eggplant which, I understand from other recipes, may be a good idea. Comments on this technique? FWIW, I'm not a big fan of eggplant so I've never prepared it - this is just for Toots.

Thanks!

Edited November 13, 2011 by Shel_B (log)

[Alex]

If you use the Search box for "black bean sauce" (with the quotes), you'll get two recipes from Recipe Gullet and two pictorial recipe threads from hzrt8w. There's no specific eggplant recipe, but you might be able to adapt one of them. (I've made several of hzrt8w's recipes, and they're spot on.)

Salting (+ rinsing and pressing) eggplant is often useful for the bigger and more common purple globe variety, but it's unnecessary for the smaller Japanese or Chinese types, which probably is what you'll be using for this dish.

That's really nice of you to make this specially for your inamorata/inamorato.

[Shel_B]

Thanks for the pointer and your comments. Looking forward to playing with this new recipe idea. Kind regards,

[sheetz]

Traditionally the Chinese will deep fry the sliced eggplant before incorporating in the sauce ingredients. It soaks up more oil this way, but that's almost certainly how restaurants make it.

Edit: This youtube video perfectly illustrates how to cook Sichuan-style spicy eggplant. It's in Chinese but it should be pretty easy to get the gist of what's happening. A black bean sauce version would be almost identical except for the different sauce.

Edited November 16, 2011 by sheetz (log)

[scott123]

Considering that garlic sauce and sesame sauce are both known offshoots of brown sauce and that General Tso's and Orange are most likely brown sauce offshoots as well, I'm thinking it's highly likely that black bean sauce is augmented brown sauce also. Just like Indian restaurants save time by making a base and using it for many of the curries, I'm relatively certain that Chinese short order cooks treat brown sauce in a similar fashion.

Even if black bean sauce is an entirely unique creation, unless you're getting it at an upscale establishment, I think the odds that there's some form of sugar in it are astronomical, an ingredient that none of the eGullet recipes include. The razor clam recipe contains Mirin, which is sweetened, but, imo, there's not a Chinese short order cook on the planet willing to shell out the money for Mirin.

In my quest to make old school NY Chinese restaurant food at home, I tried a lot of prepared sauces. In theory, someone should be able to bottle an authentic tasting sauce, but, in practice, I've never seen it. Corn starch, in a cooked sauce, will break down and lose it's thickening abilities overnight, so that makes mass produced sauce a bit trickier, but there's modified starches that should sub nicely. For whatever the reason, bottled sauce is one big bag of fail. Expect any prepared sauce you buy to be close, but not quite right.

Woks, by the way, are not that critical for making Chinese take out at home. A solid large frying pan and a red hot burner will work fine- as long as you don't crowd the pan.

[threestars]

Very nice video! Thanks for sharing...

[Shel_B]

Thanks for all the input thus far. Ideas abound ... off to the market tomorrow to get the eggplant and some other ingredients and play around with some recipes on Sunday.