Eggplant Types: Learn About the Different Types

This morning we harvested our eggplant field trial, and it felt like a good time to bring some fruit in and show off the major different types that we have in our assortment and explain the ways in which some of them are different and the ways in which they're a little bit similar, even if they might look a little bit different and try to increase everyone's familiarity with what I think is a pretty diverse, pretty interesting assortment of different eggplants.

American or Italian Eggplants

Starting here, we have what I think most people are familiar with when it comes to eggplant. It's the type that you're going to see most often in the grocery store. We would probably categorize them as American or Italian style eggplants. Both of them are going to have either very, very dark purple to black colored skin, a bright green calyx and stem.

The American types tend to be a little bit wider and more bell shaped, the Italian types a little bit smaller and more teardrop shaped, but they're fundamentally very similar varieties. They have the thickest skin of any of the types here, which is both a good and a bad thing in my opinion. Good, in that they're very durable. They can handle being harvested and brought out of the field with a minimum of scratching and blemishing. The challenge is, as I imagine many of you are familiar with, the thick skin is a little bit more bitter. It's not something you necessarily want to eat. Something that I like about some of the other types that we're going to talk about is how they have a little bit of a thinner skin, a little bit sweeter, less bitter flavor.

But to finish with the black skinned eggplant types, they have sort of large, vigorous, bushier plants that tend to be very prolific. The varieties that we sell all are very high yielding, very uniform, and are geared towards, people who are growing them for commercial production or just want a lot of eggplants in their garden.

Graffiti Types & White-Skinned Types

Moving on from that, we have two varieties that are very similar in some ways to the Italian or American types. The major difference being the color of the skin. So we have the striped or graffiti types, and we have the white skinned types. And both of them have pretty similar yield and plant habitat compared to the American black skin types. But they have, clearly, a different colored skin. And with that slightly different eating quality, the purple types tend to be a little bit less bitter, a little bit creamier. Unfortunately, that beautiful purple and white coloration doesn't last when you bake it or cook it, it tends to fade to sort of a uniform brown. The white types also fade a little bit, though you can definitely tell that the skin that it started with was lighter.

They're actually my favorite in terms of eating quality. I think that they have by far the least bitter, sweetest flavor, and when you cook them up, they can have a really creamy texture. I think that they work really well for pretty much all of the sort of usual eggplant dishes that people cook here, eggplant parmesan, baba ganoush, any of those things.

Japanese or Chinese Eggplants

The next type that I'd like to talk about are the Japanese or Chinese style eggplants. They're both fairly similar, though, with obviously different cultural backgrounds. In any case, they are much longer and thinner than the more traditional types. And because of that, they cook much more quickly. They have a smaller seed cavity and thinner skin, meaning that they have in general a more uniform creamy texture, and the thin skin, I'm personally fine with eating them with the skin on.

That thinner skin does mean that the fruit dehydrate a little bit more quickly after harvest, meaning that they should be kept in a more humid environment and either sold or eaten more quickly to make sure they don't get soft and dehydrated. But unlike the traditional American types, where you put it in the oven or on the grill and are waiting for, you know, an hour before you're ready to actually eat it, these cook very quickly.

You can stir fry them, steam them, and they'll be done quickly enough that I've accidentally burned them before because I was expecting them to take as long as I was used to. Finally, we have the Turkish or Middle Eastern type eggplant, which I think has sort of a nice cross in traits between the traditional American type eggplant and the Eastern Asian types.

They're longer and thinner, with a smaller seed cavity, meaning that they will cook more quickly, have that sort of nice, uniform, creamy texture. But they also have a slightly thicker skin, more similar to the American types, meaning they don't dehydrate and dry out as quickly as the Asian types do. The eating quality, I think is, flavor wise, a little bit more similar to the American types.

They have a little bit of a stronger eggplant flavor, a little bit more bitterness to them than the Asian types. But they go really well with a lot of Middle Eastern cooking, roasted, all of those sort of traditional ways that you would eat the eggplant that you bought at the supermarket. These work perfectly for that as well.

Thank you for taking the time to learn a little bit more about the Johnny’s assortment. And hopefully you've come out of this with a better understanding of some of the major types of eggplants that are out there for you to try.

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