Eggplant With Minced Pork 魚香茄子

Eggplant with minced pork, yu heung ke zi, is literally Rina’s favourite Cantonese dish, or at least one of them. It’s a traditional Chinese dish and it goes so good with rice. That’s why, every time I make it, I make a big pot of rice to go with it.

The version in this recipe is from a night in Atlanta. We were driving north toward the Great Smoky Mountains and planned to sleep at a Cracker Barrel, but it was only 7 o’clock, so we parked in a Target parking lot and cooked dinner there first: this eggplant, a three egg soup and a pot of rice. You can watch me make it. I’d made it on camera once before at a campground too, with a ground beef and pork blend, so this page combines what I said both times.

The eggplant goes in first. It takes a while, so be patient with it.

Getting the eggplant right

The eggplant is the whole dish. The right texture is soft all the way through. You can’t have any hard centers, there shouldn’t be a crunch or a chew to it. If it’s still hard, it’s not ready yet. But you don’t want to overdo it either, where it’s all mush. It won’t look good and it won’t taste good.

Eggplants take quite a while to get soft, especially thick pieces. What I do is feel which pieces are getting soft and move them out of the center, because the center of the pan is the hottest. The thick, hard pieces go in the middle, the smaller ones go to the side, and I just keep rotating. I only take it to about 80% done, because it cooks again once the pork and sauce go in.

The eggplant also soaks up the oil. I had to add more twice. And in Atlanta I cut way too much, so I only cooked part of it. The dish would have been huge, I’d have had to do it in two batches. At the campground I had the opposite problem: I only had one eggplant left because we ate a lot of it the day before. There wasn’t a lot of eggplant in the dish, and two would have been better.

The sauce

I use a jarred spicy garlic sauce made for this dish. It’s a little bit on the spicier side, so I add a little water to mellow it down. In Atlanta I used about 3 tablespoons. At the campground I used about two and a half scoops, which was basically half the jar.

Dinner in the Target parking lot in Atlanta, with the three egg soup on the side.

How it turned out

It came out soft, and Spencer asked for more rice before I’d even started eating. At the campground the verdict was “not too tough, not too soggy, that’s the perfect texture,” and Rina really liked it. It was a little spicy, even with the water I added.

For the rice, I use the pressure cooker: 3 minutes on high pressure, then 10 minutes to let it come down naturally. I make extra on purpose. Whatever’s left goes in the fridge for fried rice the next day, since fried rice is better with leftover rice anyway.