Hi everybody, I'm April Bloomfield. I am at The Spotted Pig in NYC and today I'm gonna
do a Caponata which is basically an Italian Eggplant Stew. We've got some sautéed eggplant
that I've lightly seasoned and drained in a colander. It'll help take away the bitterness
and it'll actually concentrate the cells of the eggplant so when you fry them in the oil
they won't absorb so much fat. So these are nice and golden brown and they are really
kind of creamy inside, like this. You can actually see that that's a perfectly cooked
eggplant. And then we've got a little base of some celery, a little bit of onion, and
this has been cooked for about thirty minutes, until they're nice and soft. A little tomato
sauce, again it's been cooked for about thirty minutes. We've got some nice garlic going
on, we've got a little bit of chilli which is great because it's gonna make it nice and
bright. A little bit of celery leaf that was saved from the whole head of celery that we
used. Some parsley. We're gonna finish it with some nice black and green olives, some
nice toasted pine nuts and a little bit of caper. And I made this quick herb vinegar.
It's basically a red wine vinegar with a little tarragon, a little parsley and a little mint.
So first of all we're gonna put some oil in a pan. So you can just see it's starting to
smoke so we're just gonna add that like this.
We're just gonna add some chilli, we're just
gonna crush them a little bit in between our fingers. Okay so these are ready now, they're
nice and golden brown. The garlic's toasty, it smells really good. We're gonna get the
tomatoes and we'll probably go a quarter of these tomatoes so we're just gonna sprinkle
them. It's probably about half a cup of tomatoes for this amount, two pounds of eggplant.
So we've got the fried eggplant, it's all kind of room temperature right now, it's got good
colour. We're just gonna put it in very gently into the bottom of the pan. We're gonna give
it a light stir.
Smells good. I've got a few of these salted capers. We're just gonna do
a little pinch. They add a nice saltiness to it, little bit of herbaceousness which
is kinda cool. This is a green olive, this is a Cerignola from Italy. This is gonna add
some salt and some umami. The little Niçoise from France. We're just gonna break those
up really rustically. Give this a light stir just to incorporate it all, kind of marry
it together. We're gonna add a little bit more salt, not too much because we've got
the capers, we've got the olives. This is the best bit, the herby vinegar. We're just
gonna do a couple of splashes. We've got so much sweetness going on it there, from the
onions and the celery and the eggplant, so this is gonna cut all the way through that
and it's gonna make it nice and bright.
Just got a bit of celery and parsley, just gonna
sprinkle this on top. Bit of pine nuts, been lightly toasted. The pine nuts, they add a
bit of texture, a little bit of nuttiness. They kind of bring it all together. So that's
it guys, that's my Caponata. If you have any comments please feel free to drop them in
the comments box and thank you for joining me on the Food Tube channel.