Eggplant in sweet and sour sauce, Chinese style

I highly recommend trying!

Ingredients

• Eggplant - 2 pcs.
• Soy sauce - 70 ml
• Garlic - 4 cloves
• Balsamic vinegar - 1 tbsp. the spoon
• Sugar brown or white - 1 tbsp. the spoon
• Ground ginger - 1 teaspoon
• Potato or corn starch - 1 teaspoon
• Ground red chili pepper - 1/3 teaspoon
• Green onion - 1 feather
• White sesame - 2 tbsp. spoons
• Vegetable oil (sesame) - 3-4 tbsp. spoons

Directions

1. Pour soy sauce into a deep bowl.
2. Peel the garlic and squeeze through a press into a bowl with soy sauce.
3. Add balsamic vinegar and brown sugar. (If you don't have brown sugar, feel free to substitute it with regular white.)
4. We also add ground ginger and starch to the sauce. (It doesn't matter which starch you use, either potato or corn starch will work.)
5. Mix the sauce well until smooth, so that the starch and sugar are completely dissolved.
6. If you want to get a savory dish, then at this stage it's time to add something spicy to the sauce. I used red chilli powder. I didn't have the task of making the eggplant spicy, just wanting a little spiciness, so I added 1/3 teaspoon of chili pepper. Mix the chilli with all other ingredients.
7. We're done with the sauce, let's move on to the eggplant.
8. The first thing to do with eggplants is, of course, wash them. Then cut off the stalks and peel the eggplants from the hard peel. In my opinion, the easiest way to do this is with an ordinary vegetable peeler. The peeler easily removes the skin from the eggplant, and also does it quite carefully.
9. Most often, for this dish, eggplants are cut into oblong sticks. It is most convenient to first cut the eggplant into oblong slices. Then cut the eggplant slices lengthwise into several long bars.
10. And then cut across into cubes of the desired length (no longer than 2 centimeters).
11. For serving, we need green onions, which we cut in advance at an oblique angle.
12. If we touched on the topic of serving, then I recommend warming up some sesame seeds in a dry frying pan in advance. Do not neglect this advice, because when heated, the taste of sesame seeds opens up and it acquires a wonderful aroma. You need to warm up the sesame seeds on a fire below medium, stirring constantly, no more than a minute. As soon as the sesame becomes a little yellowish, immediately remove it from the heat so that it does not burn, otherwise the taste of the dish will be spoiled.
13. Put the pan on medium heat. Pour sesame oil into it. (It is acceptable to replace sesame oil with olive oil or sunflower oil, but I would recommend using sesame oil!)
14. Put the eggplant in the pan and fry until light golden. This will take about 10 minutes.
15. When the eggplants are fried, add the sweet and sour sauce to them, which we prepared at the very beginning of the recipe. Cook eggplant in sauce for 3-5 minutes. During this time, the sauce will thicken enough, and the sugar contained in it will begin to caramelize.
16. Arrange eggplant in sweet and sour sauce on a plate. Decorate with green onions and sesame seeds. Let's put it on the table.
17. Bon appetit!