Recipe: vegetarian Iman Biyaldi

I love aubergines. I have a dress printed with the purple vegetable. I wrote about my abiding love for them in this article. One of the best aubergine dishes is Imam Biyaldi, stuffed aubergines, which translated means the imam (a muslim priest) that fainted. Maybe because the dish is so damn delicious.

My daughter is getting married later this year. Last week we went to a wedding meal tasting which cost £200 for three sharing plates of food. Everything to do with weddings is ridiculous.  You have to pay to try on dresses, generally £30 an hour. You don’t even get that money back if you buy the dress. At least with the wedding tasting you get the £200 back if you use the caterer.

The first plate was the vegetarian option, imam biyaldi. While the pescatarian option was very good (salmon with a pistachio crust with a lemon butter sauce and some crushed potatoes) the vegetarian option wasn’t great. So few chefs can do good vegetarian food. The chef had stuffed it with onions, which weren’t cooked long enough, with no tomatoes that I could detect. It had a nice pepper sauce, but not enough of it. Restaurant vegetarian food is invariably underpowered and under-seasoned. Carnivore chefs are used to cooking meat, whereby you don’t have to do that much to it.

It takes time to do good veggie food. And it helps that I have an Aga which cooks slowly and thoroughly, caramelising vegetables.

So I decided to remake it myself. Following in the steps of Felicity Cloake, famed for her extremely useful ‘how to make the perfect’ series, where she takes a classic dish and compares recipes, finally coming up with her own version,  I checked out other recipes. I followed two recipes in the Guardian: one by Ottolenghi and the other by Middle Eastern specialist Sally Butcher.

Sally adds some of the aubergine interior to the stuffing and fries the entire thing, no baking. She also adds pekmez, which is a grape or fruit molasses. Many families in Turkey and the Middle East make their own, using it as a sour sweetener. I happened to have a jar in my pantry – bought years ago – it lasts forever.

Ottolenghi fries then bakes the aubergines, doesn’t use pekmez or aubergine in the stuffing but does add red peppers which I liked.

Both recipes instruct the cook to peel some of the skin off the aubergine, to make zebra type stripes. The Ottolenghi recipe soaks the aubergine in salted acidulated water for 45 minutes, tells you to add the aubergine peelings to the water, then never mentions them again. In the end I decided to throw away the strips of skin.

I live off the A5, the old Watling road, the bottom of which, between Maida Vale and Marble Arch, is known as Little Arabia.  In the summer the tables outside the shisha shops are filled (mostly with men) till very late. It’s a lively scene.

I went down to one of the numerous Middle Eastern mini-supermarkets and asked the lady at the counter: do you put some of the aubergine for Imam bayaldi in the stuffing?

Of course! she said. My mum would tell me off if I didn’t.

So there you have it.

Here is my ‘perfect’ recipe. I’ve chosen aspects of both recipes: I prefer fried then baked (I like the extra caramelisation that the oven provides) rather than just fried. I like to add a red pepper. I add ground coriander. I prefer fresh tomatoes to tinned. The stuffing mixture is a little bit caponata-ey so you could switch it up by adding capers, pine nuts and sultanas, and the balsamic or sherry vinegar to get a sweet/sour vibe.