Eggplant Aioli

A side effect of filling up people’s fridges every week is noticing what is already in them. I love knowing what people have in their fridge; it helps me to understand their taste buds and food habits and basically cook for them better. Usually they’ve cleared it out to make room for my food, so it’s just the food in the door of the fridge left.

Ketchup and mustard, hot sauce, mayo, pickles , salsa, maybe some probiotics and fish oil, it’s pretty standard for most people. I’m slowly trying to add recipes to this site to replace those condiments. I know it’s not a perfect science, the reason that those ingredients are in the door of the fridge is because they keep forever, and I am giving you healthier but perishable recipes. I still think it’s nice to have a healthier alternative if you find that any of those condiments have high turnover because you or your family are actually consuming a lot of them.

I’m a mayo person. I like it on sweet potato fries, on a veggie burger, in a collard wrap. This, I believe is a direct result of growing up in the low-fat 90’s, when fat was bad and we would order our California rolls mayo-free and load up the fat-free (but sugar-abundant) ketchup onto everything else.

Despite my later in life love for it, I don’t really eat mayo, there’s not a very good argument for highly refined oil, questionably sourced eggs, sugar and other additives. At the end of the day all it is is a way to change the texture of oil so that you can eat more of it. It still tastes good though, so luckily there are ways of mimicking it in a nutrient-dense way.

This Avocado Caesar Salad dressing is one of my faves, you don’t miss the mayo for a second. This ‘Salad For One’ dressing is hemp-based, and makes a pretty delicious dipping sauce for oven-baked sweet potato ‘fries’ too.

And now we also have an eggplant-based ‘aioli’. All aioli means is garlic mayo, and that’s what this is, except in place of the egg we’re using egg….plant. We boringly steam it with the skin on, to keep those nutrients, and then purée it with some soaked cashews (oil replacement), roasted garlic (because steamed eggplant tastes like almost nothing, but we wanted to override the ‘almost’ with a more comfortably familiar flavour) (plus garlic hates cancer), and lemon juice, because all good mayos have some bright acidity and it might as well bring some vitamin c with it.

I stumbled upon this secret, smooth eggplant skill one day when I had some leftover Baba ganoush and added it to homemade tomato soup (there are always tiny bits of food in my house that I need to use up) and it resulted in something far more delicious than I was expecting.

You can use this eggplant aioli anywhere that you would use mayo (like on our favourite Veggie Burger), but don’t stop there. Toss it with some zucchini noodles and kale for a delicious pasta that has more veggies than many salads, add it in place of cream to soups, add a spoonful to your favourite salad dressing for some creamy texture or in your Sunflower Seed ‘Tuna’ Salad.