Pasta With Silkiest Eggplant Sauce From Francis Lam

Eggplant can be a mystery. Will it brown handsomely or stick to the pan? Will its flesh relax or stay stiff and chewy? Will it be sweet or bitter? Is it a boy or a girl? (This last one is a red herring. See the tip below for what you should really be looking for.) This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t cook eggplant. We should. Once we find a few recipes we trust, we can handle its ambiguities. But if you haven’t found yours, or you just don’t want to deal with it all, do as food writer and editor Francis Lam does: Let your eggplant go free. To avoid the texture struggles altogether, Lam harnesses eggplant’s affinity for oil and its talent for turning to mush, and makes pasta sauce out of it. You get all of the lovely eggplant flavor and silken texture, with none of the stress. Best of all, it’s often sweltering outside during peak eggplant season—and unlike recipes that call for roasting, frying, or singeing over an open flame, this is all done on the stovetop, in a reasonable amount of time, over moderate heat, so you—like the eggplant—can go free, too. A few more tips: Seek out fresh, not withered, eggplants that are heavy for their size with taut, firm skin; they’re much less likely to be seedy and bitter. Feel free to take the flavors any direction you like, from fish sauce to chile oil to capers or other pickled bits (Francis has lots more ideas in the video below and on The Genius Recipe Tapes podcast). And use other vegetables that make good carriers for other flavors, like zucchini or cauliflower, adding more liquid as needed for ones that don’t give off white as much of their own. Leftover pastas aren’t usually friendly to reheating. This eggplant pasta actually makes a nice cold or room temperature pasta salad the next day (not all do), but it also turns into a mean frittata. Tucking noodles into a pan of eggs, like Viana La Place and Evan Kleiman do in *Cucina Fresca,* means you can take advantage of their seasonings and springy texture, while protecting the pasta from further cooking. From the leftovers of leftovers files, the frittata, in turn, makes an excellent sandwich filling the next day. Recipe from Food52 Genius Recipes: 100 Recipes That Will Change the Way You Cook, Ten Speed Press (April 2015). Helpful tools for this recipe: - Le Creuset Dutch Oven - Italian Pasta Pot - Five Two Wooden Spoons