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This Japanese eggplant recipe makes the vegetable taste irresistible! Roast it with garlic and ginger for a simple side dish.
Looking for a Japanese eggplant recipe? Here’s an easy to cook it that makes it taste so irresistible, you won’t be able to stop sneaking bites. Try this roasted Japanese eggplant with garlic and ginger!
Alex and I picked up this veggie at our farmer’s market, and we couldn’t stop ourselves from devouring the entire platter. Roasting eggplant makes it lusciously tender, and with a sauce of garlic, ginger, and Sriracha, it’s absolutely irresistible.
What makes Japanese eggplant unique
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 it’s lighter color than globe eggplant, the type that is very dark purple with a rounded bottom. The Japanese eggplant has a sweeter, more delicate flavor than globe eggplant, thinner skin, and fewer seeds.
We found a few Japanese eggplants at our farmer’s market, but we sometimes also find it at mainstream grocery stores. We actually tried this recipe with globe eggplant to see if there was a flavor difference. Turns out, the Japanese eggplant was much tastier!
Tips for this Japanese eggplant recipe
This Japanese eggplant recipe stars the flavors of fresh garlic, ginger, and soy sauce. It takes about 35 minutes to roast the eggplant, but it’s well worth it for the hands-off method. 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. The flavor is dependent on fresh: no jarred garlic or dried ground ginger here!
- Peel the ginger with a spoon. Ginger root is notoriously hard to peel with a vegetable peeler, but peeling it with a spoon works like a charm! A microplane is our tool of choice for grating garlic and ginger, but you can also mince with a knife.
- Roast 35 to 40 minutes. Roasting a little longer gets the eggplant to the “falling apart” stage; the shorter end still has a little chew and it holds together.
Storing leftovers
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:
Miso Glazed Eggplant
Soy-Glazed Eggplant Donburi
Eggplant with Sesame Ponzu Sauce
Nasu Dengaku - Miso Glazed Eggplant
Easy Japanese Eggplant Recipe (Teriyaki Nasu)
Dietary notes
This Japanese eggplant recipe is vegetarian, vegan, plant-based, dairy-free, and gluten-free.
Wow, this was great! We had 1 large Japanese eggplant; I did double the sauce, and was happy I did. Sesame seeds and scallions and a few dots of Sriracha was perfect.
Sauce is tasty but only covers the very exterior of 1 lb of eggplant. Since eggplant is very bland by itself the rest of the piece of eggplant is pretty tasteless. Will make more sauce next time and let it soak in to the interior before cooking. With this batch I scraped the flesh out and mashed it to maximize the sauce to eggplant ratio.
Easy and yummy. LOVE japanesse eggplant and like that this is an oven roasted recipe