Win Son and Win Son Bakery are just around the corner from us, two of our favorite neighborhood restaurants.

Luckily, since the Win Son cookbook came out last year, the recipe for the fried eggplant was published by Bon appétit. The Fried Eggplants With Labneh and Spiced Cashews is a dish we ordered ever time we eat at Win Son.

I had two Italian eggplants sitting around. The recipe calls for Japanese eggplants, but they are close enough. Instead of labneh, had sour cream. Not that any of this mattered since we didn’t really follow the recipe.

The main thing was slicing the eggplant and tossing it with rice flour. The rice flour helped dry out the eggplant and created a crispy crust in the frying oil. Rice flour has become my new favorite cooking ingredient lately, and it creates an unbeatable texture on something like eggplant.

I started frying them off in small batches giving extra attention to the skin side to ensure it cooked through. The rice flour also helped protect the flesh from breaking down too much while the exterior browned.

Meanwhile, my wife set out to make a sauce. We were also frying up Zucchini fritters from Alicia Kennedy (we used eggs).

She started with the sour cream and then started adding flavors. The goal was not to replicate Win Won’s eggplant dish, but use it for inspiration.

Although it looks a bit like Russian dressing, this is a spicy sour cream dip. The chili crisp enhances that spice.

We served the fried eggplant with the spicy dip, along with zucchini fritters. We saved the leftover dip and it was also spectacular with the tortilla chips we had the following night.

Ingredients

4 oz Sour Cream
Teaspoon or two of cumin
Teaspoon or two of coriander
Gochujang Hot Pepper Paste
Squirt of Lemon Juice
Some Tahini
A few teaspoons Chili Crisp
Teaspoon or two Dry Harissa
Salt and pepper

Mix everything together and serve.