Turkish Karnıyarık: Stuffed Eggplant with Spiced Beef

Karnıyarık means split belly, which is exactly what happens here: whole eggplants are roasted until they slump, torn open, and packed with spiced beef, sweet onion and pine nuts. A second short bake in tomato lets the juices soak back into the silky flesh. It looks like a project and cooks like a weeknight.

The trick is roasting the eggplants whole first instead of scooping them raw. The flesh goes creamy and collapses into a natural pocket, so the filling settles in rather than sitting on top. Turkish red pepper paste does the heavy lifting on flavour, but tomato paste with an extra pinch of paprika gets you most of the way there.

Step-by-step instructions

Peel the eggplants in wide stripes so they look zebra striped, leaving alternating bands of skin on. Rub them all over with 1 tablespoon of the olive oil and a good pinch of salt, then roast at 425F for 20 minutes until slumped and tender.

Meanwhile, heat the remaining oil in a wide skillet and cook the onion for 5 minutes until soft. Add the beef, garlic and pine nuts and fry hard for 6 to 8 minutes, breaking up the meat, until deeply browned in patches.

Stir in the pepper paste, chopped tomato, allspice and paprika and simmer for 5 minutes until jammy and no longer watery. Pull it off the heat and fold through half the parsley.

Split each roasted eggplant lengthways without cutting all the way through and press the flesh open into a pocket with a spoon. Heap the filling in, mounding it generously, then lay tomato rounds and a halved green pepper on top.

Pour a splash of water into the base of the dish and bake for 15 minutes until the tomatoes blister and the edges bubble. Rest for 5 minutes, then scatter with the remaining parsley.

Serve straight from the dish with a spoonful of the tomato juices from the bottom, plus plain rice pilaf or warm flatbread to mop up. Leftovers reheat beautifully and, like most eggplant dishes, taste even better the next day.