Savory Eggplant Pie

This Savory Eggplant Pie is a delicious Eggplant, tomato, and cottage cheese recipe to accompany your meals. It is an appetizer that can serve at room temperature. Also, we can cook it easy and with few ingredients that we always may have in the refrigerator.

This kind of savory pie with various vegetables is a convenient solution to cook healthily and clean the fridge. So we can use the vegetables we want or have at our disposal, combined with the cheeses or dairy by-products we have or like, the spices, and the type of dough that we can prepare more easily.

So, all we need is a puff pastry or Brise dough, or phyllo dough, etc., and the filling we like and our savory cake or pie are ready.
This time I prepared it with Pasta Matta (crazy dough), a kind of dough of Italian cuisine, but very similar to our pie dough (Phyllo) which cook with flour, water, salt, and olive oil.
Also, it is a simple cooking dough, but above all, it opens easily, and you can endlessly experiment with savory cake, pie, savory strudels using this type of dough.

Also, try this another Eggplant Pie Recipe

Ingredients

• A puff pastry, Brise, Phyllo, or Pasta Matta (Crazy Dough)

For Crazy Dough (pasta matta)

• 250 g all-purpose flour
• 40 ml of olive oil
• 100 ml of room temperature water
• ½ tsp of salt

For the filling

• 2 large eggplants or 1 eggplant and 1 zucchini
• 3 eggs ( one yolk keep for topping)
• 250 g of cottage cheese
• 50-100 g minced Parmesan or other favorite cheese
• 3-4 small tomatoes or 7-8 cherry tomatoes
• fresh parsley
• salt, pepper, olive oil, one garlic clove
• 1 tbsp of sesame seeds or black seeds (nigella)

Directions

How to make Crazy Dough

1. First, add flour to the bowl. Then, create a hole in the middle and add salt, oil, and water.
2. Next, start mixing by adding the flour gradually until it forms a dough.
3. Knead the dough until we see we have a soft dough in our hands.
4. If we want to add fresh spices for more flavor, at this stage, we add a tablespoon of freshly ground spices that we like thyme, parsley, dill, etc. Then, we will knead the dough until the spices are evenly distributed and form a ball.
5. Wrap the dough in film plastic bags and let it rest at room temperature for 30 minutes. In this way, you can open it more easily. You will see that the dough is not sticky, but it is very soft and roll easily.
6. Also, I used a baking sheet to put it directly in the pan where we will bake it, as you can also bake it together with the paper to make it easier to remove it from the pan at the end.
   
7. Transfer the dough to the baking pan at 26-28 cm in diameter, cover the sides of the pan well, and pierce the bottom with a fork so that it bakes and drains properly.

Prepare the filling

1. First, for the filling, we need to cook the eggplants for a few minutes until they soften a little. There are two ways to cook them:
   1. First, cut the eggplants into medium or small cubes, salt them and marinate them with olive oil. Bake them in a preheated oven at 200 degrees for about 10 minutes.
   2. Second, in a pan, add a little olive oil, a clove of garlic, and add the diced eggplants for a few minutes until slightly softened. If we also use zucchini, we add them as well.
2. When the eggplants are ready, transfer them to a bowl to cool, season with salt, pepper, fresh parsley. Add the sliced ​​tomatoes and grated cheese.
3. Next, add the eggs to another bowl and beat (one yolk egg keep aside). Add the cottage cheese, and mix. We will add this mixture to the eggplants and mix well.
   Also, add the prepared mixture to the baking pan above the rolled dough, arrange it and fold the noodle nicely on the sides.
4. Then, take the egg yolk set aside, add a tablespoon of milk, and mix them well. Brush the top of the pie with it.
5. Finally, sprinkle the noodles with sesame seeds and black seeds as desired and place them in a preheated oven at 190 degrees for 45 minutes.
6. Take the pan out of the oven, let it cool a bit, and when it is lukewarm, take it out of the pan and transfer it to a serving plate. We will serve it in slices as desired.

Bon Appetit!