Chicken, Eggplant and Basil Stir-Fry
Ground chicken and steam-then-caramelized eggplant in a soy-brown sugar sauce with a pile of fresh basil, all in one pan. Weighed in grams, with rice logged separately.
Ingredients
Eggplant
- 42 g vegetable oil (3 tbsp), divided
- 30 g distilled white vinegar (2 tbsp)
- Salt, a big pinch
- 120 g water (1/2 cup)
- 590 g eggplant (about 1.3 lb), cut into 1-inch chunks
Sauce
- 48 g soy sauce (3 tbsp)
- 5.6 g cornstarch (2 tsp)
- 8 g brown sugar (2 tsp)
Chicken
- 454 g ground chicken, raw (1 lb)
- 2 garlic cloves, chopped (6 g)
- Chili powder, salt, black pepper, MSG, to taste (not measured)
- 30 g fresh basil leaves (about 1 1/2 cups, loosely packed)
Instructions
- In a large pan, combine 28 g (2 tbsp) of the oil, the vinegar, a big pinch of salt, and the water. Bring to a boil over high heat, about 2 minutes.
- Add the eggplant in a single layer, cover tightly, and steam until it has begun to soften, about 5 minutes.
- Meanwhile, stir the soy sauce, cornstarch, and brown sugar together in a small bowl until dissolved. Set aside.
- If you're serving rice, start it now. 300 g dry fills four portions. It is not counted in the macros above, so weigh and log it on its own.
- When the eggplant is just soft, remove the lid and keep cooking until the liquid has evaporated and the bottoms have browned, about 3 minutes. Flip each piece and cook until very soft and caramelized on two sides, about 2 minutes more. Transfer to a plate.
- Return the pan to medium-high heat and add the remaining 14 g (1 tbsp) oil. Add the chicken and press it evenly into the pan. Scatter the garlic on top and cook undisturbed until the bottom has browned, about 5 minutes. Season the meat here - I go heavy with chili powder, salt, pepper, and MSG, seasoned by heart rather than by spoon.
- Stir with a spatula, breaking the meat into small pieces, until only a tiny bit of pink remains, about 2 minutes.
- Briefly stir the reserved soy sauce mixture and pour it into the pan. Stir to coat and cook 1 to 2 minutes, until the sauce is thickened.
- Stir in the basil and cook until wilted, about 1 minute. Return the eggplant to the pan and stir gently just to combine. Spoon over rice and serve immediately.
Nutrition
Per serving — 1/4 of batch, stir-fry only.
What's on my plate
Weigh the whole batch once after cooking, then weigh what you actually serve yourself. The macros below are scaled to your portion, not to a nominal serving.
Cooked batch weights are remembered in this browser. Cooking changes weight but not calories, so the batch numbers below stay fixed no matter how much water cooks off or gets absorbed.
Batch reference numbers
| Component | Raw | Cooked | kcal | Protein | Carbs | Fat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chicken & eggplant stir-fry | 1213.6 g | — | 1265 | 90 g | 52.8 g | 80.4 g |
| Rice | 300 g | 840 g | 1095 | 21.3 g | 240 g | 1.8 g |
Notes
- The nutrition panel is the stir-fry only. Whole batch: 1265 kcal, 90 g protein, 52.8 g carbs, 80.4 g fat. Quarter it for one serving.
- For reference, one serving plus a quarter of the rice comes to roughly 590 kcal, 27.8 g protein, 73.2 g carbs, 20.6 g fat.
- A regular eggplant works fine. The original calls for three Japanese eggplants (about a pound); I used one standard globe eggplant at 590 g because I wanted to use the whole thing. It steams and caramelizes the same way, the chunks are just bigger and the batch runs a little heavier on vegetable.
- The steam-then-sear move is the whole recipe. Boiling the eggplant in the oil-vinegar-water mixture first means it goes soft without drinking a half cup of oil, and the sear afterwards is what gets you the caramelized edges.
- Don't stir the chicken right away. Pressing it into the pan and leaving it alone for five minutes is where the browning comes from. Breaking it up early just steams it grey.
Rice, logged separately
I cook 300 g dry, which yields roughly 840 g cooked. Cooking only adds water, so the calories and macros are identical either way - all that changes is the weight you divide them by. Weigh what lands on your plate and use the row that matches how you measured it.
| Amount | kcal | Protein | Carbs | Fat |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100g dry | 365 | 7.1 g | 80 g | 0.6 g |
| 100g cooked | 130 | 2.5 g | 28.6 g | 0.2 g |
| 150g cooked | 196 | 3.8 g | 42.9 g | 0.3 g |
| 200g cooked | 261 | 5.1 g | 57.2 g | 0.5 g |
| 300g dry / ~840g cooked (full batch) | 1095 | 21.3 g | 240 g | 1.8 g |
Calibrate this once. The cooked column assumes a 2.8x yield, which is typical for white rice but shifts with your water ratio and cooker. To make it exact, weigh the full cooked batch one time, then divide 1095 by that weight and multiply by 100 - that is your own per-100g-cooked calorie figure. Do the same with 21.3, 240, and 1.8 for the macros.
- Chicken is measured raw. Cooked-weight logging needs a lower gram figure (raw-to-cooked shrinkage is typically ~25%). Log by the raw weight used here, or weigh the cooked portion separately if you prefer.
- All 42 g of oil is counted, including the 2 tbsp that starts in the steaming liquid. The water boils off; the oil does not.
- The raw batch weight below excludes the 1/2 cup of water, since it evaporates during step 5.
- The extra seasoning on the chicken (chili powder, salt, pepper, MSG) is excluded from the macro count. Negligible on calories, protein, and fat, but worth noting if you track sodium closely.
- Sodium is deliberately not listed: the soy sauce is weighed but the added salt is not, so any figure would be a guess.
Import to Cronometer
This page carries schema.org Recipe data, so Cronometer can pull it in directly. In Cronometer go to Foods → Recipes → Import Recipe from URL and paste:
https://simmonsbrian.com/recipes/chicken-eggplant-basil-stir-fry/
Cronometer matches each ingredient to its own food database and works the nutrition out from that, so review the matches before saving — the numbers on this page are not the ones it imports. Unmeasured seasonings get flagged; delete them.
Weigh the cooked batch once and put it in the Cooked g column of the recipe's ## Components table, and a per-gram import copy is generated at https://simmonsbrian.com/recipes/chicken-eggplant-basil-stir-fry/cronometer/ for logging by weight.