To find the best way, I tried five different methods:
- Salting, resting, and pressing the slices first gets rid of
moisture through osmosis. Like a leaky water balloon,
as the moisture leaves the eggplant, its structure
weakens, allowing you eventually to press out the excess
air. This works fairly well, but it requires quite a bit of
pressure, it’s easy to over- or undersalt the slices, and
sometimes you’re still left with uncompressed sections in
the center of the slices, which means undercooked,
astringent finished results. The method works for
recipes with caramelized eggplant and rich tomato
sauce like Pasta Alla Norma (here) where you’re going
to be cooking the eggplant slowly and thoroughly, but in
this case, it’s too unpredictable.
- Steaming the eggplant slices in a bamboo steamer will
rapidly soften them to the point that you can easily
