Chinese Eggplant with Spicy Garlic Sauce

This Chinese eggplant recipe is perfect for all you eggplant and chilli lovers. Soft, meltingly tender eggplants are coated in a silky smooth sauce just bursting with sweet, smoky, salty and spicy flavours

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Chinese Eggplant Recipe

There are many Chinese eggplant recipes out there, with the Yuxiang eggplants and Sichuan eggplants coming to mind. They all have a fairly similar make up and method and are all delicious!

Today’s Chinese eggplant with Spicy Garlic Sauce is very easy to put together, with 2 distinct steps to it. This is because we pre fry the eggplants before cooking the whole recipe. I do this in 2 batches in my wok with a little oil each time. However, you can just as easily do it in your airfryer, if you prefer. I’ll give you both methods.

This is what we’ll be doing:

1. Prep all the vegetables and aromatics.
2. Mix sauce ingredients in a bowl.
3. Fry the eggplant slices, about 6 – 7 minutes.
4. Fry it all up in about 7 minutes.

That’s it. Sounds easy, right?

Ingredients

Eggplants

You can make this recipe with any eggplants you have access to. The traditional long and thin Chinese eggplants, or the long and thick ones, it makes no difference to the final flavour. In the summer, when there are so many other kinds of heirloom eggplants about, you could experiment with those too, as I do.

I’ve given you the weight of eggplants we need, so it doesn’t matter what size they are, just aim for a similar-ish weight.

Eggplants are not difficult to cook at all. Some people like their eggplants a little on the sturdy side when done, whole others, like me, love them with a meltingly soft texture. The recipe here will give you eggplants that are beautifully cooked to the soft stage.

To salt or not to salt eggplants? Traditionally, yes, we’d soak them to draw out any bitter juices. But modern varieties don’t need to be soaked anymore, they’re fine to be used as they are. But I shall leave this up to you. If you prefer to soak your eggplants, do what you usually do before continuing with the recipe.

Aromatics

We have ginger and quite a few chillies and garlic in here. It is called “spicy garlic sauce”, after all! You can play around with the type, as well as the heat level of your chillies. Use less or mild chillies for a milder Chinese eggplant dish.

We then finish off our recipe with some chopped up spring onions.

The Sauce

The sauce makes up the flavour base. We mix all the ingredients together to make cooking easier. It uses easy-to-find ingredients. Let’s take a look.

• light soy sauce – this is the generic soy sauce used in Chinese cooking. It’s watery and very salty.
• dark soy sauce – darker than the above, as it’s brewed for longer, and is usually used for added depth and colour.
• rice vinegar – standard Chinese rice vinegar that is pretty common in supermarkets here in the UK. Regular clear vinegar will do too. For a tangier and deeper flavour, you could also use Chinese black vinegar (click to read more)
• white sugar
• cornflour (cornstarch in the US) for thickening
• water

So that’s basically what we need to cook up our Chinese Eggplant with Spicy Garlic Sauce. Make it gluten-free by using a gluten-free soy sauce for both the soy sauces above. Tamari is gluten free and will work as a substitute for both.

How to Serve this Chinese Eggplant Dish?

This eggplant dish has a full on flavour. It’s salty, spicy and a just little sweet. I love it best with some plain white rice. This allows me to enjoy its bold flavours best.

But if you would prefer serving it with some egg fried rice, by all means, that works too.

It’s a great vegan side dish, you really don’t need anything else if you’re happy with just the one dish and rice. However, it’s also right at home as part of a Chinese meal. Or any East or South East Asian meal.

Here are some dishes you can serve this Chinese eggplant dish with. Let’s get our aprons on!