Sesame Sweet & Sour Aubergines (Japan)

This was a recipe that sounded and looked amazing.  Soph and I both love sweet and sour flavouring - my brother-in-law however does not.  So, we decided to only call them baked sesame Aubergines in front of him. 





It was quite a simple process to prepare the aubergines for the oven but they take one and a half hours to cook so it needed to be done quite far in advance of the rest of the meal. 

The first step is drying out the aubergines. We used rock salt for this which worked out ok but we really should have ground it up to make it more effective.  

You then mix together the ingredients for the sweet and sour.  

There was one small hiccup with this recipe. The sweet and sour mix called for something called Mirin, which we did manage to find in the stores.  However, upon looking at the bottle when we got home, it appeared that what I had picked up was not actually what Soph had pointed to when she saw the bottle that said Mirin and was, in fact, a different rice wine.  We had read that Sake or rice wine could be used as a substitute for Mirin so we decided it was ok for us to use this wine as well.  

We also needed rice wine vinegar, which we couldn't find, but we decided to use a small amount of white wine vinegar, since we'd used this in every sweet and sour recipe we'd ever made and it had worked well for us. 

The recipe also states that the ginger should be washed and chopped but not peeled.  I don't like ginger as it is and I was even more worried when I saw that it had to be included with it's skin on, but we persevered nevertheless. 

When the sauce is ready, you sit the aubergines in it (having scored each cut side first so that they fully absorb the ingredients).  The aubergines then bake for 1.5 hours, turning every half hour. 

The aubergines baked very well and looked nice but unfortunately they did not taste particularly good.  It was actually very hard for us to put our  finger on exactly what was wrong with it, since it was so difficult to eat that we could each only eat one piece. 

For a little while we debated whether our problem with it was simply that we didn't have Mirin or rice wine vinegar, which could well be the case. They were also only luke warm at the time we ate them so maybe fresh out of the oven they would have tasted better.   

If we do try this one again I think we'd definitely have to use Mirin and rice wine vinegar as the recipe asks for.  Anyone who has the correct ingredients should definitely give it a go and I do hope you get a better outcome.  It's definitely not complicated to make and, although they do take a while to cook, none of the individual steps are particularly time consuming.