Chinese Stuffed Fried Eggplant
Plus, how to deep fry at home
So this week, I wanted to share how to make my all time favorite eggplant dish: zhaqiehe, stuffed fried eggplant.
This’s one of those dishes that you can find throughout the country, with competing claims to its origin – most likely, either up in the Northeast, or alternatively down in coastal Zhejiang (though if I was a betting man I might actually put my chips on Shandong – seriously, that province seems to be time and time again the originator of a lot of these “countrywide” dishes). I first fell in love with this dish though at a fly restaurant outside of Chengdu that served it alongside a salt and peppercorn dip, so I wanted to mimic that one for this recipe.
Now, this dish’s actually relatively straightforward, so I’ll try not to waste too much breath on the recipe itself. Instead, in the notes below I wanted to talk a bit about deep-frying at home – our set-up, and why I think it shouldn’t feel as intimidating as it does to a lot of people. Provided of course, you have a wok – the king of the deep frying vessels.
Ingredients
So this eggplant is generally stuffed with pork but what that exactly looks like really depends on your philosophy of the dish. If you don’t eat meat or something honestly feel free to straight up skip the pork – deep fried eggplant is… awesome without as well. Sometimes we feel lazy and don’t want to stuff it, and stuffing-less is still perfectly tasty.
At the other extreme, you’ll see some people stuff this with what can only be described as a ‘meatball-sized’ filling. That’s ok too. For us personally, we like this with what’s basically just a thin smear of pork filling – just enough to add a slight bit of richness and complexity.
Chinese eggplant (茄子), 1. Note that this is actually a southern Chinese eggplant – they’ll sometimes use a firmer sort up in the north. IIRC they’ll use the same sort of eggplant in Japan too – the flesh of the eggplant gets super tender after frying. Tender, that is, to the point of ‘mushy’. Because of that, I personally sometimes find myself preferring the northern sort of eggplant for stir-fries and the like BUT in a dish like this (or grilled Chinese eggplant) that leans into that texture it’s really awesome. The eggplant inside gets sort of gooey, so you have this crispy on the outside/gooey on the inside situation going on.
Pork Belly (五花肉) -or- Ham (后腿肉), ~75g. Roughly 2/3 lean and 1/3 fat. We used the ham cut because the pork belly we usually get at the market here in China can get super fatty. In the West the belly’s generally leaner, so that’s probably what I’d personally opt for. The lean:fat ratio is an estimate, this doesn’t have to be an exact science. We’ll be mincing this by hand.
Ingredients to mix with the minced pork filling: ~1 inch of ginger (姜), minced; white part of one scallion (葱), minced; ¼ tsp salt, ½ tsp sugar, ½ tsp cornstarch (生粉), ½ tsp light soy sauce (酱油), ½ tsp liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒), ~1/8 tsp white pepper powder (白胡椒粉), 1 tbsp water. Basically just a bit of minced scallion and ginger, together with the usual marinade suspects. In addition though, we’ll add in a tablespoon of water to make the filling juicer.
Ingredients for the dry coating: 20g AP flour (中筋面粉), 10g cornstarch (生粉). So the eggplant’ll get dusted with this mix of dry coating, then stuffed, then coated in the final batter.
Ingredients for the wet coating: 50g AP flour (中筋面粉), 20g cornstarch (生粉), ½ tsp five spice powder (五香粉), ¼ tsp salt, 90g water. Apologies for the weird quantity of water here – we originally did it with 100g, but felt it was a touch too thin.
Ingredients for the ‘salt and pepper’ dip: ¼ tsp whole Sichuan peppercorns (), ½ tsp salt, ½ tsp MSG (味精). So this is the classic “jiaoyan” (椒盐) mix – the pepper in that ‘salt and pepper’ referring of course to Sichuan peppercorn (note: the perhaps equally famous Cantonese ‘salt and pepper’ seasoning is, while historically derived from this, a bit different). Note that traditionally, Sichuanese salt & pepper is a mix of four parts salt to one part Sichuan peppercorn – we swapped half the salt for MSG simply because that one specific fly restaurant outside of Chengdu had a quite obvious kick of MSG in theirs (which we quite liked). Lastly, I know the small quantity of Sichuan peppercorns makes for awkward measuring – we’re looking at roughly 15-20 peppercorns.
Oil, for frying. This was about ~4 cups with our wok. A little bit more than usual because you can easily crowd these guys. Obviously, the precise quantity of oil’ll depend on your wok/set-up.
Process
High level overview here – mince the pork and mix in the ingredients to make the stuffing. Toast the Sichuan peppercorns and grind them together with the salt and MSG for the dip. Slice your eggplant in a way that leaves a pocket for stuffing, dust it, stuff it, coat it, fry it (we’ll be doing a double fry here).
Hand mince the pork – cut into a dice, and chop for ~4-5 minutes. Slice by first cutting into thin sheets, then pile those sheets up and cut into slivers, then align those slivers and cut into a dice. Then just grab your knife and start chopping. Note that this doesn’t have to get super pasty like Lion’s Head Meatballs or something, this kind of texture is just fine. 4-5 minutes should be enough to get you there.
Mince the ginger and scallion white. Toss in a bowl with the pork.
Add all the “ingredients for the pork filling” in minus the water. Mix well for ~1 minute. Then add the water and mix for another minute. Or until the water’s combine. Set aside.
For the dip: toast the Sichuan peppercorns over medium heat for ~2 minutes. You’ll generally know the peppercorns are done toasting once they leave little oil splotches on the pan/wok, but for this amount here that might be a little tough to see. Alternatively, the peppercorns are done once they’ve deepened in color and you can see little bumps on the husk like this.
Toss the peppercorns in a mortar together with the salt and MSG, and grind until fine. Or about ~3 minutes of pounding. Note that for this small quantity of peppercorns spice grinders kind of suck – if you don’t have a mortar, bash it with the butt of your knife a bit before putting it in the grinder.
Prepare the dry and wet coating. Dry coating, just mix the flour and starch together. For the wet, first mix the flour, starch, five spice, and salt together thoroughly for ~1 minute or so then add the water and mix again. You don’t want to overmix the wet coating here – if gluten develops , it could get overly hard after frying.
Slice the eggplant: cut ~1/2 inch, but stop 90% of the way; move over another half inch, then cut all the way down. This is kind of tough to describe with pictures, but this is basically what it looks like in action. This is what the final result looks like. The time mark in the video’s at the three minute mark in case I’m not super clear here – what we’re looking for is a bit of a ‘pocket’ to put our stuffing in.
Dust the eggplant slices with the dry coating. Dust both sides, and sprinkle a bit in the middle to help the filling stick. Shake the eggplant piece a few times to get off any excess.
Spoon ~1tsp of the pork filling in the eggplant slices, then press down to make a sort of ‘sandwich’. Push in or scrape off any excess filling that comes out. This is what they’ll look like after stuffing.
Set up the wok/wet coating for deep-frying. So we’ll need to coat these guys with the final batter, then one by one as we coat, move them straight over to the wok for frying. Note that our wok was just large enough to fit all this in one batch. If you have a wok that’s smaller than 42cm, then you’ll probably have to do two batches.
Coat and deep fry the eggplant slices. Get a wok with ~4 cups of oil up to about 180 centigrade. Then:
Give each eggplant slice 3-4 flips in the wet batter, and immediately drop them in. We’ll be going one by one here, so try not to move too slow. Two at a time would also work great.
Flip the eggplant slices periodically. Your oil temperature will now be lower, which’s perfect. We’re aiming to fry this at ~145C.
Fry for about five minutes, or until the eggplant begins to turn lightly golden brown. Remove.
Heat the oil up to a blistering ~200C, then add back the eggplant. Fry for ~30 seconds.
Remove. Toss on a paper towel lined plate.
Serve with the salt and peppercorn dip.
On Deep Frying at home
I watch a lot of Adam Ragusea. He belongs in that sub-category of excellent food YouTubers (along with Alex the French Guy, My Name is Andong, and Joshua Weissman) that consistently pump out great content. The other day I was watching a video of his entitled “deep frying at home is a BAD idea” which I… disagreed strongly with. The video is here if you want to watch, but I figured that now would be as good of a time as any to talk a bit about deep-frying at home, and address some common concerns.
Our frying set-up: We deep-fry in a 42cm round bottomed wok over a gas range, keeping temperature with a dirt cheap temp gun (those little infrared thermometers, you can pick one up for like $20). We have a small ‘side oil’ pot for the deep-frying oil that we cover with a lid and keep on the counter. We’ll strain that in, and swap it every couple weeks. We often use that frying oil to guoyou, i.e. prepping meat (and some vegetables) for stir-fry using a super quick coating-less deep-fry.
So that’s our set-up. I figure that a lot of Adam’s concerns are pretty widespread, so I figure that I could address them one by one.
Concern #1: What do I fry in? The best I got at home is a dutch oven, which easily crowds in comparison to a commercial fryer. If all I had to deep-fry in was a dutch oven, I’d be right there with Adam. Frying in a dutch oven sucks - it easily crowds, and you need a… metric fuckton of oil. He uses 2-3 quarts to deep fry – I generally use 2-3 cups. The shape of a round bottom wok – or, hell, even a flat bottomed one – makes it so that it needs far less oil and it doesn’t crowd. Cylindrical containers make comparative zero sense to fry in.
Concern #2: Oil temperature ends up being super inconsistent at home, you end up needing to mother the flame – especially annoying on an electric stove. So yes. I agree that this whole process would be tasngibly tougher on an electric range – another reason why electric stoves should be declared illegal and forcibly banished from civilized society (not you though induction, we’re cool). But here’s the thing: you (usually) don’t need to be overly paranoid about the precise temperature when deep-frying… hell, traditionally Chinese cooks would estimate the temperature of the frying oil by how rapidly bubbles are forming around a pair of chopsticks.
Concern #3: Frying oil is dangerous. Sure. But so are charcoal grills and wood stoves. Hell, if we’re really concerned about safety we should probably also never keep knives in our kitchen, or really any heat source. Survive solely on lunchables and multi-vitamins – it’s the American dream, right? [/s] Driving to work has claimed more lives than deep frying ever will. Don’t be stupid while deep-frying, take normal precautions… BUT it bears mentioning that 2-3 cups of hot oil’s a lot less dangerous than 2-3 quarts.
Concern #4: Fried foods will get soggy as you wait to cook everything else. I mean… this really depends on what food you’re cooking and when kind of meal you’re making. Generally speaking, I don’t thing things get soft that fast. Between, say, the final fry here and the eating, I think you definitely have enough time to, say, whip up a stir-fried vegetable. In the context of a larger meal, yeah you want your mise to be in order, but that’s basically true of all meals. Especially larger Chinese meals.
Concern #5: What do I do with all that leftover oil? Adam instructs people to put the oil back in the bottle, and then toss it. After one use. Of course that’ll feel super wasteful – you’re using a dutch oven (needs a notorious amount of oil) then immediately disposing it. Those must be some expensive French fries!
Concern #6 (not mentioned in the video): Ok, so I’m saving my oil to fry with again. Feels like I’m gunna need to do a bunch of deep frying, doesn’t feel very healthy. So even with all of that said, I think this here is the kicker. Doesn’t matter how streamlined your set-up is, if it means that you’re cooking deep fried foods all the time, that’s probably not the healthiest lifestyle choice. To be honest, what makes ALL OF THIS worth it is the fact that prepping stuff by passing it through oil (1) barely adds any calories and (2) makes for some of the best stir-fries you’ll ever make. Want to know the real reason a lot of homecooking stir fries don’t taste like the restaurants? It ain’t your stove. It’s that the restaurant passes through oil, and most homecooks don’t.
The cool thing about passing through oil is that you really don’t need that much oil – even less than the 2-3 cups I mentioned above. For one of these posts I passed through oil with a half a cup of oil just to prove a point – because of the shape of the wok, even that small amount was enough to get the job done (though it was borderline). That’s much less than you’d need for pan-fried chicken!
So if you get in the habit of passing through oil (sensible if you like to stir fry things, IMO), you’ll generally almost always have a cup or two of oil out on your counter. Then treating yourself to something deep-fried? All the headache of simply adding 2-3 cups to your already available oil pot.
Though Adam’s right in that it’ll cause your place to smell if you’re doing a lot of deep-frying. A couple days though is pretty dramatic. With proper venting it’ll likely linger a couple hours. Definitely burn some incense or light a yankee candle or some shit.
TL;DR: Use a wok for deep-frying. Don’t use too much oil. Save it after use. Re-use for passing stuff through oil for your stir-fries.