I’m calling this crostini but I used pretty large slices of bread since this was made for dinner rather than for a snack. I’d call it bruschetta but I didn’t rub the bread with garlic which I think disqualifies it. If I wanted to be less pretentious I would just call it toast but if I weren’t at least a little pretentious I wouldn’t be posting photos of food I cook on the internet, right?
I used long, thin eggplants which were the only variety I hadn’t yet purchased from the Greenmarket. Any eggplant will do though since I haven’t noticed a lot of difference in taste between varieties. The tahini sauce was thick and did a nice job keeping the tomatoes from making the bread soggy and made this heavy enough to be an entree. Hummus could be substituted but the tahini’s strong flavor was the punch in this dish for me.
Ingredients:
2-3 eggplants
sea salt
olive oil
8-10 oz. tahini
5-6 cloves of garlic
3 lemons
2 medium tomatoes
1 medium yellow onion
toasted bread
Peel and slice the eggplants into around 1/4 inch slices. Layer them in a dish, adding a little sea salt to each layer and refrigerate for 20 minutes or so to draw out some of the moisture and bitterness. Rinse the salt off of the eggplant and pat dry. Fry the eggplant in single layers in a hot skillet with a little olive oil. I like the eggplant to be very browned and a little crispy.
Put the tahini, garlic, a tablespoon of olive oil and the juice of two lemons into a blender or food processor. Blend, adding a little water until it is turned into a thick sauce rather than a heavy paste. The tahini I used was particularly thick and took about a cup of water.
Chop the tomatoes and onions, mix them together adding some salt and lemon juice.
Assemble the layers on toast with the eggplant on the bottom, tahini sauce in the middle and tomato and onion mixture on top. This was great at room temperature.