Easy and delicious tortang talong is a staple of Filipino home cooking. It’s also a canvas, ready to be topped to your liking.
Tortang talong, a comforting eggplant omelet, was one of the first dishes that Tita Becky, a content creator focused on Filipino cooking, learned to make when she was little. Back in Santa Rosa, in the Filipino province of Laguna, her family had a chicken coop, which meant fresh eggs all week. Plus eggplants were cheap, sometimes free, because neighbors grew them in the yard.
These eggplants weren’t like the stout, drop-shaped Italian ones, nor were they like the giant, dark-purple globes sold ubiquitously in the United States. They were Asian eggplants — often labeled as “Chinese eggplants” or “Japanese eggplants” — long and slender, a vivid, sugarplum purple and much, much sweeter.
In a Filipino household, where there’s eggplant, there’s also egg. It feels almost poetic to coat a grilled, peeled and flattened aubergine in a little seasoned beaten egg and then pan-fry it in oil until crisp, browned and delicious. A staple of Filipino home cooking, tortang talong (pronounced TORE-tahng tuh-LONG) is an exceedingly resourceful, ingenious egg dish. It’s also a canvas for the cook.
For Amelia Rampe, a chef and recipe creator, tortang talong tastes best when the eggplant is charcoal-grilled whole until absolutely custardy. During this cooking process, she said, “the skin acts as a protective sheath” while the moisture inside turns into steam and collapses the spongy flesh.
At Leland Eating and Drinking House in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, the chef Delfin Jaranilla increases the egg count from one per eggplant to four.Credit…Janice Chung for The New York Times
Flattening the eggplant.Credit…Janice Chung for The New York Times
“There’s beauty in the structural breakdown,” said Ms. Rampe, who has contributed recipes to New York Times Cooking.
After interviewing dozens of Filipino and Filipino American cooks for this column, it became clear that for many smoke is a main ingredient. Whenever Ian Rivero smells charred eggplant wafting from the kitchen, he knows that tortang talong isn’t far away. Charring an eggplant — truly blackening its skin — he said, “has this really specific smell, a little sweet-leaning.”
Mr. Rivero, whose debut cookbook, “Filipino Style,” comes out in February, has recently been broiling his talongs “for a more hands-off approach.” Whether you broil the eggplants (which takes about 20 minutes) or roast them over an open flame (which takes about five), you can get enough blackened skin for that quintessential flavor, the kind that makes dishes like baba ghanouj so hauntingly delicious. With so few ingredients in tortang talong, that smokiness is key.
The many eggs in Mr. Jaranilla’s version pool around the eggplant.Credit…Janice Chung for The New York Times
Mr. Jaranilla in the kitchen.Credit…Janice Chung for The New York Times
If you live in New York and want to taste an expertly calibrated iteration, down to the smokiness, head to Leland Eating and Drinking House in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where the chef, Delfin Jaranilla, increases the egg count from one per eggplant (the Filipino home cook’s standard) to four. At first, he made his version of the classic for dinner, until his business partner and the restaurant’s owner, Randi Lee, asked him: This is more of a brunch dish, don’t you think?
Upping the eggs wasn’t just a brunch move. The eggs are more seasoned than the dish’s center — that perfectly charred, peeled, flattened, battered and pan-fried eggplant — which means you bounce from one extreme to the next: from smoky and sweet, to salty and savory, to fresh and green with local cherry tomatoes, arugula and a lemon aioli. A shower of pecorino makes the dish feel slightly Italian, but it’s decidedly Filipino at heart.
A fresh, green salad and tomatoes counter the richness of the dish at Leland Eating and Drinking House.Credit…Janice Chung for The New York Times
Though the eggplant omelet is lovely on its own, its tablemates — a bowl of rice, a squirt of banana ketchup and some kind of relish or salad, usually — turn the singular dish into an everyday luxury. That’s what Filipino food is: celebrating the ordinary, making use of the ingredients you have.
My friend and colleague Amber Spry, who regularly cooks and eats the dish, says what you pair it with is up to the house.
For some, that may be ketchup or a spiced vinegar with chile and garlic; for others, a cane vinegar-doused relish of tomato and onion. Mr. Rivero prefers his with mango. Ms. Rampe likes to add aromatic lamb crumbles. For Ms. Spry, it’s some form of salad made with fresh ingredients like chile and scallions, a foil to the rich yet somehow still light eggplant.
For anyone who finds banana ketchup too sweet, you could stir a little sriracha into plain ketchup, as the chef and journalist Wilma Consul does. I love tortang talong with a really good soy sauce and a cheek of lemon for spritzing all over.
If tortang talong is a canvas for the home cook, it’s also a love letter to the diner. Tita Becky makes the dish several times a week for her husband and son. When cooking for others, it’s the everyday that feels the most special.
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