One of the many reasons why I adore my husband is his tendency to become obsessed with a certain ingredient or flavor and stop at nothing till he creates exactly what he wants. For instance, two years ago he declared that cauliflower was to be his vegetable of choice for that fall. I willingly hopped on board his brassica train and started to look for new and interesting ways to eat cauliflower. I would show him recipe after recipe only for him to hem and haw and say “no, that’s not quite it”. At first this would annoy me. It would annoy you too if your perfectly honed Pinterest feed started exclusively to show you cauliflower soup after cauliflower soup. But I’ve learned (after a decade of marriage) that his gut instincts, when it comes to food, always lead us to greener pastures.

This summer he turned his attention to eggplant. This wasn’t too much of a stretch for us since we’ve always been into eggplant, thanks in part to America’s Test Kitchen’s eggplant Parmesan and Ottolenghi’s inspiring obsession with it. We love eggplant in almost any form, grilled, fried, steamed, roasted. But this time Brad was particularly obsessed with perfecting a smoky eggplant spread. He wanted a similar flavor profile to baba ganoush, smoky and lightly acidic but every recipe we tried he would hem and haw and say “no, that’s not quite it”. Then, one fateful day we came across Lutenitsa. We had no idea what it was but on the menu, underneath the name, it had those two magic words ‘smoked eggplant’ so we ordered it without giving it a second thought. What a glorious discovery it was.

Lutenitsa is a vegetable spread common in Bulgarian, Macedonian and Serbian cuisines. It’s loaded with vegetables like peppers, tomatoes and sometimes even carrots. Like all good regional foods it comes in many varieties: smooth; with bits; with small spicy peppers and eggplant; and spicy or mild. If you were to look it up online, you would be hard pressed to find two recipes the same. Since we were after a more eggplant forward dish we inverted the common recipe ratios a bit and added more eggplant and reduced the peppers and tomatoes. 

Guys, I am in love with this spread. I’ve taken to buying way too much eggplant. When Brad sees it and inevitably asks what it’s for, I sheepishly grin, bat my eyelashes and ask if he’ll make me more lutenitsa. How can he say no? It is absolutely wonderful with fresh pita or naan. I’ve taken to spreading it on my toast in the morning to accompany a fried egg. It’s great in a wrap with yogurt, cucumber, and spiced chickpeas. The point is, the applications are endless with this dish and I encourage you to give it a try. 

This recipe has a few time-consuming steps but they are for the most part fairly hands off and, since the goal is to literally burn things, you can’t really mess it up. Roasting the eggplants and peppers takes time but aside from flipping them every 10 -15 minutes you are not chained to the oven. And cooking it on the stove just requires the occasional stir. I hope you like it as much as I do.