Eggplant Parmigiana is one of the most famous and loved Italian recipes, it is specially prepared in southern Italy with many delicious variations! Like fried, grilled, baked, with mozzarella, and other types of cheese.
This dish does not have a clear origin place but three places still constantly fight over that it was made there. These 3 places are; Sicily, Emilia Romagna, and Naples.
The answer to this enigma seems to leave no doubt that the eggplant parmigiana is of Sicilian origin.
How can a certainly southern recipe have a northern name?
Some say that the dish was born in Sicily in the late Middle Ages and that it was originally a preparation based on fried aubergines sprinkled with pecorino. Served with Parmigiano cheese, in today’s era, combining tomato sauce with Parmigiano.
Parmigiana derives from “Parmeciana”, which in the Sicilian nineteenth century indicated a “shutter made of wooden slats positioned like pegs on a ladder, one above the other”.
Original Eggplant Parmigiana Recipe
Ingredients
Tomato Sauce
- 2-3 tbsp EVO oil
- 1 ½ cup tomatoes puree
- 1 small onion chopped
- salt and pepper
- fresh basil leaves
Eggplant
- 2 medium-large size eggplants
- 3.5 oz grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese or Pecorino cheese
- salt coarse
- sunflower oil
Instructions
- Wash and dry the eggplants, cut them with a mandolin by length.
- Place the slices inside a colander and sprinkle with a little bit of coarse salt.
- Leave it like this for at least 1 hour.
- Meanwhile, take care of the sauce.
- In a large saucepan, pour a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and add the chopped onion, let it brown lightly.
- Pour the tomato puree and cook for at least 30 minutes, adding salt and pepper.
- Heat plenty of sunflower oil.
- Rinse the aubergine slices and squeeze them with your hands, being careful not to break them.
Fry them in hot oil and then dry on absorbent paper:
- On a serving plate sprinkle a little sauce on the first layer, arranging the eggplants slices horizontally.
- Cover them with sauce and sprinkle with Parmigiano cheese.
- Repeat the same procedure, this time arranging the aubergines vertically, repeating the step with the sauce, and then the Parmigiano.
- Continue in this way to form the layers, inverting the sense of the eggplants each time.
- On the last layer, pour the remaining tomato puree and sprinkle with Parmigiano.
- You can garnish with basil leaves.
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