This eggplant moussaka recipe was found by my husband and for few years he was the one to cook it. Now it’s getting into my cooking repertoire and, since it’s crazy delicious and not too hard to make, I’ll share it with you.
Eggplant Moussaka Recipe Ingredients
- one big eggplant
- 1 lb. ground pork (fatty is good) (about half a kilo for my European readers)
- 2 onions
- 1 teaspoon of paprika
- pepper to taste
- salt to taste
- parsley
- shredded mozzarella
- tomato sauce
- salt
- pepper
How to Make Eggplant Moussaka
- Peel the eggplant.
- Slice the eggplant in half a centimeter round slices.
- Put salt on these slices and let them “sweat” a little.
- In the meantime put the ground pork meat in a bigger pot and start cooking it. You don’t need oil, it will let its own fat. Break it apart, while it cooks slowly.
- Dice the 2 onions and add to the meat.
- In the meantime, prehreat the oven to 450 and then wipe the eggplant slices with a paper towel.
- Put parchment paper on a tray, sprinkle some olive oil on it and add the eggplant slices. You can sprinkle a little oil on them as well.
- Get the eggplant slices into the oven to bake a little, while you make sure the meat + onions are cooking slowly in the pan.
- When the eggplants seem to be browned a little (don’t burn them, they’ll cook further with the meat) and dried, take them out.
- By now the meat mixture should be cooked. Add a teaspoon of paprika and pepper to taste. We don’t add salt to this mixture, there is already salt on the eggplant and the mozzarella tends to be salty as well.
- Now you can also add a handfull of chopped parsley. I usually buy a big bunch, wash it. Then I dice and put it into the freezer.
- Get a heat-resistant glass baking dish (not too big, as the portion is small) – I use a round Pyrex dish for this) and line it with eggplant slices. Leave few for the top.
- Get the now spiced meat mixture and place it in the cooking dish. Cover with remaining eggplant slices.
- Add mozzarella. A lot of people usually put the tomato sauce under the cheese, but we like it like this, since the mozzarella doesn’t get burnt and it’s juicy and yummy.
- So add as much mozzarella as you feel like. Then cover with the tomato sauce.
- Get it into the oven and bake for about 30-40 minuntes.
Don’t need to tell you how much you’ll fight over this meal, as it’s super tasty and everybody will want to eat it 😉
Moussaka Recipe Easy
In order to make it easier for you to cook your healthy eggplant moussaka (cooked from scratch, nothing storebought), I like to organize the cooking into few stages:
- STAGE 1: peel, cut and salt the eggplant. Then leave it for a while, maybe in this time to clean up the kitchen or do some other work. At the same time, you can start preheating the oven, this allows you to have it ready by the time the eggplants go in.
- STAGE 2: after drying the eggplant slices, put them on the tray and into the oven. Now you also start the ground meat in the pot and dice the onions. By the time you have the onions ready, the meat left some of its water.
- STAGE 3: meat is done, eggplant slices are baked, time to throw in all the ingredients together and place again to bake.
Does moussaka contain eggplant?
There are more types of moussaka. You have vegetarian moussaka, potato moussaka etc. In this case we use an eggplant and no potatoes (some actually mix them together).
What is the difference between lasagna and moussaka?
I’m no huge cook, so I’ll try to find few differences: our moussaka uses pork (I like cooking more with pork than veal), ragu sauce (the lasagna meat sauce) is usually done with veal. We don’t use pasta in moussaka and it’s not layered similarly (we have eggplant around the meat and then cheese and tomato sauce.