Recipe Results: Portobello Mushrooms Stuffed with Eggplant and Gorgonzola

I was looking for a satisfying meatless entrée since I was making dinner for a vegetarian.  I am not terribly fond of eggplant, but this Epicurious recipe for Portobello Mushrooms Stuffed with Eggplant and Gorgonzola has other ingredients that I love a lot (mushrooms, gorgonzola, sundried tomatoes, basil) so I thought it had potential.

I followed the advice of one of the reviewers of the recipe, and sort of blind-baked the Portobello cap by itself for ten minutes prior to stuffing and baking (and subtracted that ten minutes from the stuffed baking time).

I really enjoyed this format and look forward to making more Portobello “pizzas” and other Italian flavor-profile stuffed cap dishes, but this particular one was not for me.

For one, the eggplant, which I cooked according to the instructions precisely (for once) could not stand up against the strong flavor of the cheese, so its role in the dish was just, it seemed, flavorless texture. 

As I complained about to my guest Sarah, this is my issue with a lot of vegetarian recipes that are piles of cooked vegetables: the flavors are often so mild as to see absent and so it seems like just a bunch of varying textures of some kind of weird not-frozen water solid. 

So the eggplant just seemed like a blank texture with the gorgonzola flavor sitting on top of it, no tasty melding.

I think also this might be the kind of recipe where you want to use the good cheese.  I used Trader Joe’s crumbled gorgonzola, and while it’s not bad by any means, it’s pretty one-dimensional, which also created a more one-dimensionally flavored final result.

Giving this one a two because while I didn’t like it, maybe someone more skilled at eggplant seasoning can make it into something, and at least it gave me a good format for a future revision for a nice meatless entrée that isn’t a ton of work.  I am interested in tracking down some more stuffing possibilities for a Portobello cap; I’m thinking some kind of grain or maybe a tomato + breadcrumb mixture?

Picture here.