Miso-glazed Eggplant (Nasu Dengaku)
Miso-Glazed Eggplants
No one seems to like eggplants. This is easy and quite tasty! I swear.
Ingredients
Rating: 10/10
This is the recipe I used from Pickled Plum. However, this recipe is SUPER easy to eyeball. The breakdown is below:
Prep the eggplant
Make the sauce
Cook the eggplant
Broil the eggplant OR heat the sauce + pour over
The Eggplant
I used medium Italian eggplants for this recipe to make it single-serve. Technically speaking, you should opt for small eggplants every time since larger, commercially-available Globe eggplants don’t taste like anything. If you use regular mega-eggplants, you can also cut the eggplant as slices instead of halving so you' aren’t stuck eating half of a giant eggplant at once.
Aesthetic aside, you should score the eggplant to cook the eggplant more evenly AND for the miso sauce to seep deeper into the flesh of the eggplant. Refer to diagram below for how to score. Do NOT cut the skin — it’ll just fall apart!
How to Eyeball this Recipe (and make it a easy, go-to recipe for future reference)
The miso liquid is very easy to eyeball. Its a combination of the following ingredients. Read below for logic.
Miso paste (can be red or white) - the flavor of this whole dish. You should be using significantly more of this than the rest of the ingredients.
Mirin - a sweet condiment. Can sub with rice vinegar + more sugar.
Sake - this is to balance out the sweetness of the dish. I used equal parts this to mirin. Worst case scenario you can sub water.
Sugar - mostly for aesthetics of browning in the end. Just a spoonful is good.
This is what the consistency CAN look like. It’s too runny and not pasty enough. If you use more miso, it’ll be more paste-like. It doesn’t really matter as long as it tastes good and not too salty.
Cooking the Eggplant (and a lazy alternative)
After you do all the prep, you want to cook this 99% of the way on the stove. Doesn’t matter what pan you use, but you do want a lid or foil to cover it to steam for a bit.
Start skin-side down, then flip to the flesh side if you’re using halves.
If the flesh looks a bit burnt, that is okay. If it is SO burnt that it smells bad, discard.
After it’s cooked, that’s when you spoon on the glaze and broil for 2-3 minutes.
If you DON’T want to broil the eggplant (and dirty another dish), heat the sauce in a pan to warm it up and then drizzle on top of the cooked eggplant. It’s just as tasty and practical.
