Ever oven-roasted an eggplant for a baba ganoush or some other dish? Ever roasted or blanched tomatoes to peel off the skins for a pasta sauce or a salsa?
Then this recipe is for you.
It’s super-simple, zero-waste–and flavor packed, because a lot of flavor lives in skins. It’s versatile, because it then gets used as a flavoring salt any way you might want to use a flavoring salt: eggs, salads, avo-toasts, to finish hummuses or other spreads, hot rice and ghee; really wherever your imagination takes you, or wherever salt with a little oomph is needed.
Plus there’s almost nothing to it.
This “recipe” is an off-shoot of my making several roasted eggplant and tomato chokhas lately (served with those littis you see being dipped into ghee in the images above). Instead of discarding the peels, I dried them further (on low oven heat) to a crisp. The tomato peels simply got ground and mixed with salt (rock salt plus some smoked Maldon salt I had sitting around); the eggplant with red chillies, mor-molagai or curd-soaked sun-dried chillies–and salt.
You could even just mix the two, or keep adding flavorful dried-and-powdered vegetable peels to the mix, adjusting the salt as you go. Store in airtight jars & use in place of salt wherever you want just that je-ne-sais-quoi bit of extra smoky flavored taste on anything.
Zero waste, easy peasy, simple wow.
Note: this won’t work if you do your chokha roasting directly on an open flame as that chars the skins just too much to be of any further use. But it’s great if you use an oven, which gives you a bit more control over what happens to your peels. Or, if you’re blanching tomatoes to remove skins.
Which one appeals (er, a-peels?) to you more—the eggplant-chilli salt in or the tomato peel salt?
PS: this makes for great little edible gifts!
