Japanese Eggplant With Garlic Ginger

Looking for a Japanese eggplant recipe? Here’s a hands-off way to cook it that makes it taste so irresistible, you won’t be able to stop sneaking bites. Try roasted Japanese eggplant with garlic and ginger! We picked up this veggie at our farmer’s market and couldn’t stop ourselves from devouring the entire platter. Roasting eggplant makes it lusciously tender, and beautifully paired with a sauce of garlic, ginger, soy sauce and Sriracha.

What is Japanese eggplant?

We found a few Japanese eggplants at the farmer’s market next to the globe or American eggplant. What’s so special about this variety? Japanese eggplant is native to Southern and Southeastern Asia and has been used in Japanese, Chinese and Indian cooking for thousands of years. It has a long, narrow shape and a lighter color than globe eggplant, which is very dark purple with a rounded bottom. In terms of flavor, the Japanese eggplant has a sweeter, more delicate flavor, thinner skin, and fewer seeds. We tried this recipe with globe eggplant to see if there would be a flavor difference. Turns out, the Japanese eggplant was much tastier!

Tips for this Japanese eggplant recipe

This Japanese eggplant recipe pairs the flavors of fresh garlic, ginger, and soy sauce, which pair brilliantly with this fruit (yes, it’s a fruit!). While it takes about 35 minutes to roast the eggplant, it’s well worth it for the hands off method. It also makes the flesh beautifully tender. Here are a few tips for this recipe:

Roast at high heat. An oven temperature of 425°F makes perfectly tender eggplant. Use fresh ginger and garlic: no substitutes! The flavor is dependent on the fresh varieties: no jarred garlic or dried ground ginger here! Peel the ginger with a spoon, then grate with a microplane. Ginger root is notoriously hard to peel with a vegetable peeler: it’s knobby and the skin is tough and stringy. But peeling it with a spoon works like a charm. A microplane is our tool of choice for grating garlic and ginger. Roast 35 to 40 minutes, until the desired tenderness is reached. Roasting a little longer gets the eggplant to the “falling apart” stage; the shorter end still has a little chew and it holds together.

Leftover storage

This Japanese eggplant recipe tastes best the day it is made. If you’d like to store leftovers, they work refrigerated for up to 3 days in a sealed container.

More Japanese eggplant recipes

There are so many ways to prepare this delicious vegetable, including many traditional Asian recipes for preparing it. Here are a few ideas from some recipe creators with Japanese heritage from around the web: