Oven baked eggplants are incredibly delicious. However, the dish can be easily spoiled if you overexpose it in the oven or choose the wrong baking temperature. Therefore, before you start cooking, you should familiarize yourself with all the nuances of cooking these vegetables.
Eggplants are vegetables that are suitable both for canning and for making light soups, vitamin salads, casseroles and snacks. The easiest way to get a delicious, and most importantly - healthy eggplant dish is to bake vegetables whole, in halves or slices in the oven.
Baked eggplants can be either an independent dish (especially if herbs, spices and cheese were used during cooking), or act as a side dish for meat and fish. However, in order for the dish to turn out tasty and healthy, it is important to correctly prepare the vegetables for baking, and when cooking, strictly observe the temperature regime and set a certain baking time for a particular dish.
The fact is that the cooking time for eggplants directly depends on the size of the baked pieces - the larger they are, the longer the heat treatment should be and vice versa. For example, if eggplants are baked in the oven, cut into circles of 1-1.5 centimeters, then their cooking time should not exceed 20 minutes (at 180-190 degrees). Medium-sized fruits, cut in half, require a little more time for full baking - 30-35 minutes of exposure in the oven at a temperature of 190-200 degrees. Well, for baking medium and large eggplants whole, you need to spend up to an hour when baking in an oven preheated to 200 degrees.
It is also worth noting that eggplants require special preparation for heat treatment, since some vegetables have a peculiarity of bitterness. Removing bitterness from fruits is easy, but it takes time. For example, if you want to bake vegetables, cut into pieces, then the slices should first be sprinkled with salt, kept for 30-40 minutes, and then rinsed in cold water. Whole fruits need 12 hours of soaking in a saline solution (a tablespoon of salt per liter of water).
