STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

I always salt the eggplant. If you're doing a baked eggplant dish, the consistency won't be right because you'll have a lot of extra water in the dish. I've gotten into the habit of always salting it, but I'll ask DH (the food expert in this house) whether or not it matters when you're grilling it.

I try to salt my eggplant, but sometimes I'm just too lazy to bother. Unfortunately, I can always tell the difference. I use a method that Alton Brown demonstrated on Good Eats (a whole eggplant episode!) which is as follows:

1. Cut eggplant into rounds (even if you're going to then dice it, just stick with the rounds first).
2. Place rack of some sort over sink, like the kind you would use to cool cookies on.
3. Place eggplants on top of rack.
4. Sprinkle salt over eggplants, and let sit for about an hour or so. For this, I generally use plain regular table salt (the kind in the big blue container) instead of the sea salt that I actually cook with. I think the sea salt pieces are just too big to work, even if I grind them.
5. After about an hour or so, just kinda brush off as much salt as you can.
6. Pat eggplant rounds with paper towels to blot off as much of the excess water as possible. A good deal of the water will also have just run off straight into the sink.

I tried looking for a quick video showing this technique, but I couldn't find it on Food Network's website, but I'm sure it's on YouTube somewhere.

I also do the same thing to squash and zucchini and really, any vegetable that's primarily water and I know will get mushy when cooking.