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Vegetables

Aubergine

A sponge that drinks whatever oil it is given, and one of the vegetables air frying most improves.

What it does in fast-moving hot air

Raw aubergine flesh is a porous, air-filled structure — closer to a sponge than to a solid — and that structure is why it soaks up oil in a pan. In hot moving air the air pockets collapse under heat rather than filling with fat, and the flesh goes creamy while the cut faces brown. The skin is tough and stays that way. Undercooked aubergine is unpleasant in a specific way — squeaky and bitter — so this is a vegetable where the longer end of the range is usually the right one.

Why the cut matters

Aubergine in a pan absorbs an extraordinary amount of oil. In an air fryer at 200°C for fifteen minutes it does not, which makes this one of the clearest cases where the appliance produces a genuinely different dish rather than a slightly worse version of a fried one.

Cooking pages

  • Aubergine cubes — Inch-and-a-half cubes, fifteen minutes at 200°C, with far less oil than a pan needs.

There is deliberately no cooking time on this page. A food does not have one — a cut, at a thickness, in a state, at a loading, in a particular appliance does. That is what the pages above are for.