During one of my month-long stays as the private chef for Spanish singer Rosalía, I cooked eggplant for her every day for a month straight.
She loved eggplant.
My fingers were dyed purple.
Eggplant was the first fruit—often considered a vegetable, but technically a fruit!—to make me gasp as a kid. At five years old, I was awe-struck when I saw them being plucked from my school garden.
So, when I stared at the eggplants sitting on my counter, I could see their potential for chile relleno.
Chiles rellenos usually call for fresh Poblanos or another type of fresh chile, such as chile de agua, to be fire-roasted first, peeled, and painstakingly cleaned of any seeds and strings before filling them with cheese or another shredded protein like chicken; if you’re in Vallarta, you’ll find chiles rellenos filled with smoked fish or skate machaca *chef’s kiss*
The many steps to chiles rellenos are very much worth it, but eggplant is the shortcut I didn’t know I needed.
Roasting eggplant over an open flame and resting it on the grates of your stove, just like you would with fresh chiles, is very much possible. While roasting, eggplant can drip a little, but a quick wipe-down around the burner is a fair trade-off to avoid turning on the oven at all costs, especially during this late summer heat wave.
Roasted eggplant needs zero peeling and zero cleaning. You can go from roasted to filling its custardy flesh with cheese and threading it with toothpicks to keep the slices together and keep it oh-so-traditional.
It all comes together with a quick Sungold or cherry tomato salsa that cooks while you’re frying the chiles. This salsa doesn’t require a molcajete or a blender.
It’s all minimal.
It’s hot.
You’re hot.