Involtini di melanzane (Eggplant Rolls)

As much as I adore a proper parmigiana di melanzane, whether it’s the Neapolitan version Angelina used to make or the lighter Sicilian version, it has to be said it’s quite a project. So for moments when you don’t want to spend hours in the kitchen, you might want to add involtini di melanzane, or Eggplant Rolls, to your repertoire.

While they have that same unbeatable combination of eggplant with tomato and cheese, involtini di melanzane are much easier and quicker to make than a parmigiana. In fact, if you’re working with young eggplant that don’t need pre-salting, you can whip up a batch of involtini in under an hour without a sweat.

As for a parmigiana, you start off by pre-cooking slices of eggplant. There are various ways to skin this particular cat. Back in the day they were usually lightly floured and fried, but these days griddling, grilling or oven roasting are more common. You then roll the eggplant slices up with a cheesy filling, nap them with a simple tomato sauce and bake them briefly in a hot oven, just until the cheese melts. There are probably as many fillings as there are cooks, but perhaps the most popular is the one I’m presenting today, scamorza cheese and sliced ham.

Involtini di melanzane make a fine almost vegetarian main course or, in smaller portions, a lovely antipasto. And since you can serve them cold, they’d also make a delicious addition to you next summer buffet table.

Ingredients

Serves 4 as a main course or 6 as antipasto

• 2 medium or 3 small eggplants, about 1kg (2 lbs) (see Notes)
• 250 g (1/2 lb) scamorza cheese (or another mild, meltable chese, see Notes)
• 250g (1/2 lb) sliced cooked ham
• salt
• olive oil

For the sauce:

• 1 bottle of tomato passata
• 2-3 cloves of garlic
• A few basil leaves
• a good pinch of salt
• 50 ml (1/4 cup) olive oil

For baking:

• Freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese, q.b.
• olive oil, q.b.

Directions

Make the sauce

Put the passata, garlic, oil and a good pinch of salt in a saucepan. If your passata is very thick, dilute it with a bit of water.

Let simmer gently for 10-15 minutes, adding the basil leaves about 3 minutes before the sauce is done. When it’s done simmering, the sauce should be quite loose but not thin or watery.

Taste and adjust for seasoning; the sauce should be quite savory. Remove from the heat and set aside until needed.

Prep the eggplant

Take the eggplants and remove their tops. Slice them vertically into thin but not paper thin slices. Brush them lightly with olive oil on both sides.

Heat a greased griddle or stovetop grill pan, and when it’s very hot, lay down the eggplant slices. Griddle or grill them on both sides until lightly golden brown, perhaps 2 minutes a side.

Remove the slices to a plate and season them lightly with salt. Let cool completely.

Form the rolls

Take each slice of eggplant and place a slice of ham on top, folding or trimming the ham if needed to fit the eggplant. Then on the short end of the eggplant slice, place a ‘log’ of cheese about the size of your pinkie. Roll the slice up around the cheese. Repeat with the rest of the slices.

Assemble and bake

In a baking dish large enough to hold all the rolls snugly in a single layer, spoon on a goodly layer of tomato sauce.

Arrange the eggplant rolls on top of the sauce, crease side down.

Nap the rolls with more sauce, then sprinkle generously with the grated cheese. Drizzle everything with a bit of olive oil.

Bake in a hot oven for about 10-15 minutes, or until the cheese has just started to melt.

Optionally, if you like your involtini di melanzane browned top, you can run the baking dish under a hot broiler for a minute or two.

Let cool for a minute or two before serving.

Notes on involtini di melanzane

Choosing your eggplants

For making involtini di melanzane you want long, purple eggplants. Look for ones large enough to make decent sized rolls, but not too large. Here in the US, you can find truly gigantic eggplants. I wouldn’t recommend them for this dish. Larger, older eggplants tend to be more bitter and seedy. And have thicker, tougher skins as well.

For today’s post I used larger specimens of so-called ‘baby’ eggplants, about 18-20 cm (7-8in) long and 6 cm (3-1/2 in) wide weighing about 350g (12 oz). Each eggplant produced six rather petite rolls of 7.5 cm (3 in) x 4 cm (1-1/2in), to my mind perfect for an antipasto serving for two or three people. For a main course, I’d go for medium sized eggplants, weighing say about 500g (1 lb) each.

Prepping your eggplant

If you are using smaller eggplants with few if any visible seeds you can simply brush them with oil and grill or griddle them straight away. For larger eggplant, especially if they have seeds, it may be prudent to sprinkle them with salt and let them sit in a colander for about an hour. Then pat them dry and proceed with the recipe. (No need to salt the fried slices again later, of course.)

The eggplants need to be sliced thin, but not so thin they break apart when you try to roll them up. I find a thickness of about 1/2cm (1/4 inch) or slightly thicker works well. Bear in mind that the slices will shrink on the griddle or grill. A mandoline makes for short work of the task and produces even, precise slices. But in a pinch a sharp knife and a steady hand will, of course, get the job done.

Many—probably most—modern recipes for involtini di melanzane will have you salt the eggplant slices before grilling without brushing them with oil. The salting will tenderize the eggplant, and skipping the oil results in a lighter dish. But I find that, at least with the eggplant available where I live, un-oiled eggplant invariably has a rather unpleasant rubbery texture, no matter how well cooked it is.

Choice of cheese

The ideal cheese for involtini di melanzane, to my mind, is scamorza. It is a kind of firmer, drier version of mozzarella. And like mozzarella, it comes plain or smoked. It melts beautifully, but it holds it shape so it doesn’t ooze out of your involtini. That produces a lovely creamy filling that still has some bite.

The thing is, where I live scamorza is about as easy to find as a unicorn. You can buy scamorza online, but there are also easier to source alternatives. Mozzarella is the most obvious one. If you go this route, dry mozzarella sold wrapped in plastic is actually a better choice than fresh. If you do use fresh mozzarella, make sure it’s well drained. Then lay your ‘logs’ on a paper towel for a few minutes to dry. (See below for other cheeses you could use.)

In any case, and especially if you’re using a soft cheese like mozzarella, do keep an eye on the filling as your involtini are baking. The cheese should melt but if it starts to ooze out, take your involtini out of the oven pronto.

Passata

Of course, top choice for making the sauce is your own homemade passata di pomodoro, for which see this post. But if you don’t have the time, look for a store bought passata that isn’t too thick or over-puréed as so many unfortunately are. (I’m not a huge fan of the uber-popular Mutti or Pomì brands for this very reason.)

The whole topic of passata brands deserves its own post, which I’ll get around to one of these days. (Ditto for canned tomatoes.) But for purposes of this post, one brand that I highly recommend is the regrettably hard to find Posardi brand from Sardinia. It has a lovely taste and a nice light texture. An excellent domestic (US) brand is First Field, made from Jersey tomatoes.

If you can’t source a decent passata, you could make the sauce with polpa di pomodoro or a milled canned tomatoes.

Variations

There are almost endless versions of involtini di melanzane to explore. Some relate to how you pre-cook your eggplants, but mostly the variations lie in the filling and sauce.

You can grill the eggplant if you like on a proper gas or charcoal grill. This will give the dish a rather smoky flavor, of course. I would recommend slicing your eggplant a bit thicker. And do be careful not to burn the slices.

You can also oven roast the eggplant slices. Just arrange them on a cookie sheet, brush them with oil, and bake in a hot (200C/400F) oven for 10 minutes per side, or until lightly golden brown.

If you want to go old school, you can shallow fry the eggplant slices, which you will have lightly floured, in olive oil. And if you want a dish that’s truly goloso as the Italians would say, you can also dip the slices in beaten egg before frying, as if you were making Angelina’s parmigiana di melanzane.

Fillings galore!

Also as mentioned at the top, you can vary the filling for your involtini di melanzane to your liking. Substiute prosciutto or Speck for the ham, for example. You can also switch out the cheese. Any meltable mild cheese would work here: a mild provolone, fontina, Emmenthal, even a young Gouda. If you’re going with Speck, why not pair it with a smoked scamorza or another smoked cheese? In some recipes, ricotta is added to the filling as well, sometimes mixed with cubed or shredded mozzarella. This kind of filing can be enhanced with fresh herbs. As for the topping, if you want a more assertive flavor, you can substitue pecorino romano for the parmigiano-reggiano.

You can also use sliced cheese rather than ‘logs’. You will lose that creamy center, but the taste will be nice all the same. It’s practical when you’re using, for example, sliced mild provolone.

If you want a vegetarian dish, simple: just omit the ham. Or, for a more interesting filling, you might want to add ricotta and perhaps grated parmigiano-reggiano and a bit of minced parsley or basil.

There’s also a dish called involtini di melanzane con carne with a hefty ground meat filing. But that dish is sufficiently different that it’s best left for its own future post.

Making involtini di melanzane ahead

Since these eggplant rolls are quite tasty at room temperature, this is a dish that you can very much make ahead of time. If you prefer to eat them hot, you can prepare and assemble the dish beforehand and just pop them in the oven when you want to eat. They can also be reheated quite successfully.