You know how gardeners joke about stuffing bumper crops of zucchini in mailboxes or sneaking them onto neighbors’ porches? That’s my eggplant crop this year. Last year’s plants struggled, so we not only improved their soil and care but also planted more starts for good measure. The plants have responded, pumping out multiple full-size eggplant every few days.

My favorite eggplant dish is a smoky Middle Eastern dip called baba ghanoush, so I’ve been making a lot of it this summer. When I first started preparing it at home, I tried numerous techniques to give the eggplant the perfect smokiness. Roasting or broiling were tasty, but the best flavor came from grilling over charcoal the long, thin halves of Japanese eggplant or the round, thick slices of oval Italian ones. Once the eggplant are grilled and peeled, the dip takes about 2 minutes to make, as I share this week in my Twice as Tasty column for the Flathead Beacon.

Learn more about grilling eggplant and get the complete recipe for Grilled Eggplant Baba Ghanoush in my column.

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Twice as Tasty: Smoking

Once I started grilling eggplant for baba ghanoush, I couldn’t stop exploring. So I took the next step of actually smoking the eggplant, bringing the flavor to yet another level. I started smoking them over a fair bit of heat, the way I originally smoked chilies. The temperature was merely a by-product of my low-tech smoker setup: I needed to light a handful of briquettes to keep the wood chips smoldering.

This summer, I’m testing smoke tubes: perforated, stainless steel cylinders that you can fill with hardwood pellets and set inside any gas or charcoal grill. Once lit, a smoke tube burns for hours without a heat source, making it ideal for cold-smoking cheese and vegetables.

Without that extra heat, smoked eggplant lose some of their moisture yet hold their shape, so I’ve been smoking and searing them for vegetarian barbecue. For baba ghanoush, you can smoke and then grill the eggplant for ultimate flavor. Or you can use my old-school technique and add a few briquettes so that the eggplant smokes at or below 200°F, cooking even as the hardwood pellets add their smokiness.

Twice as Tasty: Freezing

When I have an eggplant bumper crop, I smoke, grill, and then puree an entire rack at a time. The prep stops there because eggplant puree freezes beautifully, making baba ghanoush a year-round favorite.

I freeze just the puree in 1-cup portions, defrosting it and then adding the other ingredients when I want to enjoy the dip. As with smoking, my freezing tools have evolved over the years. I originally divided the puree into individual 4-ounce containers, but these can be awkward to store. My latest favorites for freezing purees and stocks are silicone ice trays in 1-, 4-, and 8-ounce sizes. Nine 1-cup cubes of eggplant puree fit into a gallon-size zip-close freezer bag and stack neatly with other bags in my little chest freezer.

You can learn more about my favorite freezing techniques on this blog page.

Want more Twice as Tasty recipes? Get my books! Click here to order a personally signed, packaged, and shipped copy of The Complete Guide to Pickling directly from me. I also share tasty ways to use pickles in The Pickled Picnic; it’s only available here.