baba ganoush

Baba ganoush is an amazing creamy dip that has NO CREAM! I believe a great baba ganoush is created with smoked veggies and has peppers! Yumm! I am getting excited just thinking about it.

There are so many different recipes for baba ganoush. However, I would say that you need eggplant, tahini, oil and seasoning to be the base of any baba ganoush. The rest is just play to your palate.

note:

• If you like to feel the heat from your dip add 2 more jalapeños + 1 pasilla pepper

• If you don’t like spice, remove the jalapeño from the recipe. Pasilla peppers are not spicy. Using the Schoville Heat Unit (SHU), the scale to measure how spicy something is, the pasilla pepper falls in at about 1,000-3,000 SHU. While this number sounds quite large, a jalapeño comes in at about 5,000 SHU, and a habanero can come in as high as 350,000 SHU.

ingredients

• 2 pounds Italian eggplants

• 1 pasilla pepper

• 2 jalapeño peppers

• 10 medium cloves of garlic confit, if not using garlic confit, use 5 cloves garlic minced

• 1 lemon, juiced

• 1/2 cup tahini

• 1/4 cup avocado or grape-seed oil, plus more for brushing veggies

• 1/2 bunch cilantro, roughly chopped

• 1 teaspoon salt

• 1/4 teaspoon ground cumin

garnish

• cilantro

• high quality oil such as extra-virgin, avocado oil, grape-seed oil

• smoked paprika

• salt and pepper to taste

steps

1. Preheat smoker to 400. Preheat according to your grill.

2. Prep the veggies. Slice eggplant in half and brush with oil. Leave peppers whole, and brush with oil. Salt and pepper all veggies.

3. Grill those veggies for 60 minutes. Put the veggies on the grill, the eggplant should be cut side down. After 30 minutes, wrap eggplant and peppers in foil.

4. Combine ingredients. While letting the eggplant and peppers cool, get the rest of the ingredients ready into the food processor: garlic, lemon juice, tahini, cilantro, and oil. Once cool enough to touch, add the flesh of the eggplant to the food processor by using a spoon to scoop it out, leaving the skin and stem behind. For the pasilla pepper, remove the stem and seeds before adding to the food processor. For the jalapeño, remove the stem.

   • pro tip: I like to keep the seeds and pith because that is where the capsaicin glands, aka the heat!

5. Blend for 5 minutes.

6. Serve. Scoop into bowl. Top with garnish of your choice!

enjoy!