Pasta Alla Caponata | Sicilian Vegetable Pasta | Food Wishes

[Music]

Hello, this is Chef John from foodwishes.com with pasta ala capanada.

That's right. I'm going to show you how to turn this famously delicious Sicilian vegetable relish into a sauce, which we will then use to make one of the most delicious pasta dishes ever. In fact, it's so delicious and satisfying, the carnivores in your crew will not even realize it's vegetarian. And to get started, we will prep the star of the show. A couple nice small firm eggplants.

And of course, when we buy these, we want to look for dots, not

slots. Right? Eggplant that have a round dot at the end usually have less seeds than ones that have a large slot-like shape at the end. So, you want to check for that before you buy. But either way, we'll go ahead and trim the green part off the top. And then, no matter what eggplant recipe we're talking about, people will always argue whether it should be peeled or not.

But instead of taking sides, let's do what I think is best, which is to peel off half the

skin. And I think that way we get the best of both worlds, right? Something that's more visually interesting and has a little bit of that texture, but not too much. And then what we'll do once our eggplant is peeled is take a knife and cut this into thick slices about a/ inch thick or so. And for me, the best tool for this is a large serrated bread knife, which will go through that tough skin with almost no effort.

And that's it. We'll go ahead and line up a few slices at a time and slice them into strips. And then once we have strips, we can turn it and slice across into cubes. And of course, some of the pieces are going to be smaller or larger than others, which is fine, but we do want to try to get most of them fairly uniform. Not just for visual reasons, which is part of it, but mostly so our eggplant pieces cook at the same rate.