Composition / ingredients
Step-by-step cooking
Step 1:
To prepare caigans with eggplant and cheese, you will need: eggplant, cheese, salt, eggs, cumin, butter, dill.
Step 2:
Wash the eggplants, remove the stems, prick in several places with a fork.
Step 3:
Boil the eggplants in salted boiling water until soft for 15 minutes.
Step 4:
Remove the eggplants from the water. Put it under pressure for a while so that the excess liquid goes away.
Step 5:
Cut the eggplant lengthwise, select the seeds with a spoon. It is impossible to remove all of them, at least some part.
Step 6:
Cut eggplant into medium cubes.
Step 7:
Crumble the cheese.
Step 8:
Combine the chopped eggplant, cheese, cumin, half of the softened butter, mix gently. It is better to use ground cumin. I had only cumin seeds, I crushed them in a mortar.
Step 9:
Grease the baking dish with butter. Lay out the eggplant with cheese, smooth it out.
Step 10:
Beat the eggs until smooth. If desired, add salt, but very little. It is necessary to take into account the taste of cheese.
Step 11:
Pour the vegetable mass with beaten eggs. Spread the remaining butter on top.
Step 12:
Bake the caigana in a preheated 180 degree oven for 20-25 minutes.
Step 13:
Wash the dill, dry it, chop it finely.
Step 14:
Serve the kaigana warm, sprinkled with chopped herbs. Enjoy your meal!
The recipe interested me with its mysterious name. Probably, this dish belongs to the Ottoman (and now Turkish) cuisine. In the first cookbook, there was only one recipe for kaigana - from eggplant. A couple of decades later, several recipes for this dish have already appeared.
In some of them, kaigana resembles scrambled eggs. It is cooked with minced meat; rice; with parsley and onions; with onions, vinegar and cinnamon, and even sweet - with powdered sugar or jam. And also with the addition of flour, milk and spices. All this is mixed and fried in butter on both sides. In this case, kaigana resembles pancakes with baking.
I liked the kaigana option in the oven more. So it turns out more tender and more useful.
This dish can be a full breakfast or you can serve it for dinner, supplemented with fresh vegetables and herbs.
Caloric content of the products possible in the composition of the dish
- Chicken egg - 157 kcal/100g
- Egg white - 45 kcal/100g
- Egg powder - 542 kcal/100g
- Egg yolk - 352 kcal/100g
- Ostrich egg - 118 kcal/100g
- Eggplant - 24 kcal/100g
- Cow's milk cheese - 260 kcal/100g
- Sheep cheese cheese with 50% fat content - 370 kcal/100g
- Dill greens - 38 kcal/100g
- Zira - 112 kcal/100g
- Butter 82% - 734 kcal/100g
- Amateur unsalted butter - 709 kcal/100g
- Unsalted peasant butter - 661 kcal/100g
- Peasant salted butter - 652 kcal/100g
- Melted butter - 869 kcal/100g
- Salt - 0 kcal/100g