FOOD | RECIPES | MOUSSAKA | EGGPLANTS | DELICIOUS

How to Make Greek Moussaka the Easy Way

Recipe for a Greek moussaka variant

Greek moussaka and Greek salad, Vouliagmeni, CC BY-SA 4.0

Moussaka is an Eastern Mediterranean delicacy that is time-consuming and difficult to prepare in the traditional manner; particularly if you follow the original Greek recipe of Nikolaos Tselementes, which requires a lot of frying.

Frying the potatoes, the eggplants and the -optional- zucchini makes them absorb plenty of oil, even if they are lightly fried. It also means up to one extra hour for preparation and cleaning afterwards.

Then, when you add the other ingredients, moussaka gets overloaded with oil and other juices, which makes it somewhat indigestible. Therefore I am going to suggest a recipe for a quite simpler and quicker moussaka variant.

I was not able to find a free picture for this variant (the header image shows the classic layered variant), called ‘Melitzanes Papoutsakia’ -literally ‘Eggplants Little Shoes’- but you can see how they look here. They are, basically, stuffed eggplants.

Total time: 60–90 minutes

Ingredients for four persons (eggplants):

5 to 6 large eggplants (round and thick, not long)
500 gr / 1.1 pounds of minced meat (or vegan…