Sutta Katthirikkai Thuvayal/Smoked Eggplant Thuvayal (Thogayal) - From Rajesh, Sydney

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Sutta Katthirikkai Thuvayal/Smoked Eggplant Thuvayal 

This is a south Indian way of cooking the Big Brinjal. I will very soon post the North Indian version of this called as Baingan Bartha.

When I was a kid, I never liked eggplant/brinjal. But I love thuvayal in any form. So to make me eat brinjal, my mom used to make me this dish. This is the second time I tried out this dish, and it came off very well. In fact it tasted better than the first time.  The recipe was given to me by my mom, and I managed to execute it to near perfection!

Ingredients:

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1 big eggplant

2 cloves of finely chopped garlic

1 onion – finely chopped

1 tomato – finely chopped

Little of mustard seeds and cumin seeds

2 dry red chillies.

Little tamarind water.

Little oil and salt to taste.

Insert a knife or any other sharp object with a handle, in the eggplant. Apply a little oil on the skin of the eggplant.

Place the eggplant on fire, and rotate it slowly. This process will burn out the skin, and will cook the eggplant as well. This needs to be done for about 10 minutes, until the skin becomes black, and the eggplant gets cooked and soft. 

After it cools down, remove the skin, and cut the eggplant into small pieces. Keep this aside. This will be used later.

Add little oil to a heated pan, and then add mustard seeds, cumin seeds and dry chillies. After this, add the finely chopped garlic, and then onions. Saute this until it becomes golden brown. 

After this, add the finely chopped tomatoes. Saute until the tomato is also cooked.  Now, depending on the preference, we can add a little chilli powder, or a masala powder of your choice, to spice it up a bit. 

However, make sure that you don’t add too much of masala powder. We don't want the flavour of the masala to dominate the taste of the smoked eggplant. 

Now, add tamarind water. The quantity of the tamarind water should be lesser than what we add for sambhar. It also depends on the number of tomatoes that we have added. The more the tomatoes, the lesser the tamarind water has to be. Also, the tamarind water should not make the dish like a gravy. It may be actually a better idea to just add a spoon of tamarind paste. 

Now, allow this to be cooked for 2 minutes. Now add the smoked and cut eggplant. Saute well for minutes. Add salt to taste.

Now you have a lovely side dish ready!! This goes well with Chapathi or with rice as well. In fact, this will be a good side for curd rice as well. Try it out, enjoy the dish, and post your comments. 

Sending this recipe for Vegan Thursday.

Dip/Chutney everyday cooking south Indian - Side Dishes Traditional vegan