How to Make Baba Ghanoush

Hello, welcome to DeDe’s Mediterranean Kitchen. Today we are going to be making Babaganoush.

Bababganoush is an Eggplant dip that’s really healthy. It’s similar to hammus if you saw my hammus episode you can refer back to that. Or you can just watch this it’s really easy put together I'm going to show you how to make it and how to eat it. You can eat with pitas, you can eat it as dip, you can eat with some meat, and you can eat it as a side dish. It’s really great. What you do is first of all you want to get an eggplant, a medium sized eggplant. Not the small ones but a medium sized one and you want to put it in the oven and let it roast for about an hour on about 400 degrees. Now you want to put it directly on the rack you don’t want to put anything under it, you don’t want to take it saggy. After you let it roast for about an hour, you want to put it in a plastic bag as I have here and close the plastic bag.

What we are going to do is we are going to peel the eggplant in order to get the insides to make the paste. Now I have already let it set for about 20 minutes and I'm going to take it out and I am going to show you how easy it is to peel it. Now see the skin close away very easily as you let it set think a little bit too long. You don’t want let is set more than about 15 minutes in the plastic bag. And then just finish peeling it all away. Now what I did I took up all the inside of the eggplant I'm not including the top in it and place it in a bowl.

If you want, you can cut this up with a knife just a little bit just run the knife across it, leave the season there. They add texture and they add some taste. What you are going to add is the juice of about a lemon and a half. This some are for reserve incase you see that it needs it, two garlics mashed with some salt and you are going to add some tahini sauce which again is the sesame seed paste. You are going to have about half a cup of that to the mixture. Now you’re going to have to mash it, some people prefer this in a blender, it becomes very smooth and some people prefer it just smashed by hand and it has more texture.

Now the tahini sauce helps it get thick, what I usually do is I get a mortar and I get the granule for the mortar and I just mash off the eggplant. It just avoids having any chunks that are too large. Now to serve this, get a plate. You’re going to want to put this in a plate and then spread it around in a circular motion, so just you can just turn the plate and then turn the spoon the opposite way.

After you finish spreading it, we are going to garnish it at a little bit. Let’s get some chopped parsley and put them in the center of it and then some Paprika for color. Now Paprika is not too spicy, let us put around the Bermuda plate. Adds nice color and then put some olive oil on top of it. There you go, we have a beautifully colored dip or side dish that you can eat with pitas bread, with vegetables with some meat, put it in on sandwich. It’s really great and it is really healthy. Enjoy and join me again for DeDe’s Mediterranean Kitchen.