Vegetable caviar: How to cook vegetable caviar
Vegetable caviar, how to cook at home? Nutritious and low in calories. Technology and finesse of cooking. Step-by-step recipe with photo recipe.
Let’s make the most delicious vegetable caviar today. This recipe is very, very relevant at this time of year because supermarkets and markets are overflowing with cheap seasonal vegetables. Vegetable caviar is a versatile dish that can be served as a salad, side dish, or spread on bread. It goes well with many dishes, and meat, and chicken, and spaghetti and potatoes… The dish turns out very fragrant and rich. Summer vegetable caviar from ground vegetables will prove to be especially tasty. Of course, this dish is for an everyday table, but for a small family vacation, it can be served as an appetizer.
Caviar is prepared very simply and rather quickly and it is delicious both hot and cold. Although I like it better, it’s still cold. It is made from a variety of vegetables. I chose the simplest and cheapest products – zucchini, carrots, and onions. You can add other vegetables or substitute for this snack. Eggplants, peppers, tomatoes, squash, etc. are suitable here. When the harvest is pampered with its abundance, it is possible, and even necessary, to use all that is available. It is a good idea to add vegetables with mushrooms (mushrooms or oyster mushrooms). It will prove to be a very spicy dish. Nevertheless, no matter what vegetables you cook, you get healthy vegetable sweets that you can not only cook very quickly but even stored for the winter for future use and stored in jars.
- Caloric content per 100 g – 92 kcal.
- Dosage – 1
- Cooking time – 1 hour
Ingredients:
- Zucchini – 2 pcs.
- Garlic – 2 cloves
- Ground black pepper – pinch or to taste
- Onions – 1 pc.
- Vegetable oil – for frying
- Carrots – 1 pc.
- Sugar – 1 tsp.
- Salt – 1 teaspoon or to taste
- Tomato puree – 2 tablespoons
- Tomatoes – 1 pc.
Step-by-step cooking vegetable caviar
Peel the carrots, rinse with cold running water, wipe with a paper towel and cut into medium cubes. Take a suitable cast iron pan or non-stick pan and pour in the odorless vegetable oil (3-4 tablespoons). Add a little butter to create vegetables with a pleasant, delicate taste. If, on the contrary, you want the dish to be more nutritious, replace some of the oil with a little water.
- Heat the pan well, set the stove to medium, and put the carrots in hot oil.
- Peel the onion, rinse under running water, wipe off too much moisture, cut into cubes and send to the pan with the carrots. Mix everything together and continue to fry the vegetables.
- Wash the zucchini under running cold water and wipe with a paper towel to remove any excess liquid. Cut the ends on both sides and cut the fruit into cubes, like all previous vegetables. Send chopped zucchini to the pan with the vegetables.
In general, cutting vegetables is not important because I then grind them into a puree. Therefore, you can cut them as much as you want. Although there are options for vegetable caviar, where the vegetables are not chopped, it is in chunks. If you want to cook this way, cut all the food into the same size so that it looks good in the dish.
For the recipe, choose a young zucchini, with a thin skin, unformed seeds, and small size, about 20 cm in length and 300-350 g in weight. Large ripe fruits are also suitable, but then remove the dense skin from them and remove the seeds along with the fibrous inner part. Cut the rest of the pulp into appropriate pieces.
- Fry the vegetables over medium heat, stirring occasionally until soft, golden, and golden brown.
- While frying the vegetables, wash the tomatoes with cold water, dry them with a cotton swab, and cut them into cubes. Send them to the pan and add the tomato puree immediately. If you have more tomatoes in stock, for example, 3-4 pieces, you can use them instead of tomato paste.
Take the tomatoes softer for the recipe so that they turn into puree and become part of the sauce. If the goal is to cook vegetable caviar in pieces (ie without subsequent cleaning), then, on the contrary, take tomatoes with dense pulp so that they do not turn into a homogeneous mass in the finished dish.
- Peel the garlic, chop finely and send to the pan. Season with salt, pepper, and sugar. Add herbs and spices to taste. I added sweet and strong ground peppers. Instead of ground pepper, you can add chopped fresh hot peppers. Ground nutmeg, dried ginger root, or vegetable seasoning work well. You can add chopped herbs (basil, coriander, parsley) if you like.
- Stir everything and heat the stove over medium heat. Continue to cook for another 5 minutes to soften the tomatoes.
- Basically, the vegetable caviar at this stage is already ready and can be served in the form that many housewives do. But I prefer to grind it with a puree mixer. For that, you need a mixer. If you have it handmade, like mine, you can lower it into a pan and turn the vegetables into a homogeneous mass in it, so that it does not stain excess dishes. If you have a stationary mixer, transfer the vegetable mass to the bowl of the appliance, chop it, and put it back in the pan.
- Put the pan and vegetable puree back on the stove and bring to a boil over medium heat. Keep the temperature as low as possible and boil the mixture under the lid for 2-3 minutes. If the caviar turns out to be thin, boil it to the desired density. If you store caviar for some time, then it needs a preservative – table vinegar. Pour it into 1 tsp. and stir. Caviar can then be stored in a refrigerator in a glass container for 3-4 days.
Allow the finished dish to cool to room temperature and then send it to the refrigerator to cool well. Put prepared vegetable caviar on a slice of fresh bread or serve it with fresh young potatoes.
If you want to keep this caviar for the winter, bring it to a boil again and boil it over low heat, stirring occasionally for 15 minutes. 10 minutes before the end of cooking is poured into table vinegar (1 tablespoon). Stir and pour hot into sterile jars and roll them up with sterile lids.