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tagged: greek food, greek food eggplant crostini, greek food eggplant tomato sauce, greek yogurt recipeThe Perfect Greek Eggplant-Crostini!
Posted by keeptalkinggreece in Eat-Drink
A quick and easy to prepare snack or starter is the best you can eat on hot summer days. Last year I invented what I call “The Perfect Greek Crostini” inspired by the Italian, Greek and Turkish cuisine. It combines Eggplants, light tomato sauce, garlic yogurt and fresh basil served on toasted bread slices.
The kick for my creativity was the fact that I like the products but found their combinations rather boring or too heavy for summer.
Fried Eggplants (Greeks love them) alone are boring and rather too oily for my taste.
Eggplants with tomato sauce (all Mediterraneans die for this dish)… hm… nothing special either!
Aubergines with tomato sauce and cheese (Italian Melanzane alla Parmigiana) would send me directly to my couch for a long nap.
The idea to add a Turkish note (refreshing yogurt!) came to me the day I was having lunch at my mom’s home. She had prepared fried eggplants with tomatoe sauce and as I was carving for garlic (it happens to me once in ten years!) I added several raw garlic slices on top of the tomato sauce. Ough! Until the evening I had drunk liters of water, soda, coca cola, lemonade, in short everything that was cool and liguid in my fridge.
I learned my lesson and I promised to myself to find a light and soft solution for my carving of these products’ combination!
The recipe below would be enough for four people as a starter.
You will need…..
2 round eggplants
good olive oil
1 big red tomato without peel and seeds, 1 teaspoon sugar
1 cup of full fat -Greek- yogurt, 2-3 tablespoons Milk
2 garlic gloves
1 loaf of ‘farmers’ bread.
Salt, Pepper, Dry Oregano, fresh Basil leaves.
How to do it…
Cut the eggplantsin rather thick slices, springle them with salt and let them aside for some 30 minutes. Wipe them dry and fry them in quickly olive oil until they get color. Take them out of the frying pan and let them dry on kitchen paper.
Mash the tomato in the food processor. Add the tomato pulp with some olive oil, salt, pepper, oregano, sugar and some water to a small pan. Stir and let cook for about 10 minutes.
Mix the yogurt with the milk until it is thick creamy. Smash the garlicgloves ( I use only one) and add them to yogurt with a springle of salt. Mix well and let it cool well in the fridge.
Wash the basil leaves, dry them and cut them with your fingers in big pieces.
Cut the breadloaf in 1cm slices. Toast them under the grill.
The arrangement is simple: Put an eggplant slice on a slice of bread, add a spoon of yogurt, a spoon of tomato sauce and one or two basil leaves.
Arrange on a plate and serve with chilled white wine, beer or plain water!
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Great idea! Thanks for sharing it with us!
Thanks! I’d love to share more summer recipes but I am not in a mood for cooking and do not have pictures to accompany the post
Great idea, only basil is difficult for me this year, I do not have any fresh, maybe I could replace with fresh spearmint. What do you think ?
Spearmint…hm… Spearmint… it would match better with zucchini. Why don’t you try a zucchini-spearmint crostini variation? And send us some pictures too?)
If you can’t find fresh basil, flat parsley would do better as alternative, I believe.