Turkish Eggplant Dinner Casserole (Imam Bayildi)

This simple baked eggplant casserole is an easy idea for dinner. Known as “Imam bayildi” in Turkey, thinly sliced eggplant combines with canned diced tomatoes, yellow onion, garlic and herbs into a lasagna-like slab. Made using a combination of the stovetop and oven, it’s a deliciously simple, flavorful meal that is also vegan, paleo, gluten-free and dairy-free.

I talk a lot about how to add healthy fat to your meals in my cookbook. Fat’s gotten a bad rap for a long time in the wellness world. It’s not hard to understand why, given that its own name has become synonymous with muffin tops and cankles. But this Turkish eggplant casserole recipe proves why olive oil makes the world go round.

Having been raised on olive oil fried eggs and the philosophy that an avocado a day keeps the doctor away, I’m glad that people are finally putting down the fat-free SnackWells cookies and starting to reevaluate their healthy choices according to a different barometer.

Despite this progress, I still get criticized all the time for slapping the word “healthy” on my recipes alongside a few tablespoons of butter. And I still have to tinker with the amount of oil I use when developing recipes for fitness magazines like SELF, who live and die by the fat grams reported on their nutrition calculators.

Since I believe in real, unprocessed food, even if it contains pure fat, it’s hard for me to not feel like a hypocrite when I turn in a recipe for cheesecake with low fat sour cream and fat-free cream cheese, and just one measly tablespoon (if I’m lucky) of butter in the gluten-free crust. But mama couldn’t afford her own olive oil budget without these jobs, and sometimes you have to just bite your fat-forward tongue in order to please a client.

Why is imam bayildi healthy?

This Turkish eggplant casserole hits all the notes of a heavy lasagna or eggplant parmesan, but is completely devoid of flour and cheese, making it gluten-free, dairy-free, paleo and vegan–a lot of bases that are hard to cover in one dish! But what makes this vegetarian entree particularly wholesome, and firmly within Mediterranean diet traditions–is all the heart-healthy olive oil.

If you haven’t noticed by now, or gotten the picture from the above, I view fat as an essential nutrient, and I actively add it to my diet in healthy amounts and diverse forms. Like any food, too much of a good thing is, for lack of more technical nutritional jargon, bad. So I do try to switch up my oils from day to day, usually between olive, coconut, sunflower, flax seed, and canola.

But olive oil will always have my heart. Growing up, my mother had at least 5 large bottles of it on hand, and I would watch her blow through them in a matter of weeks. There’s a story in my book about the way she would spoon-feed herself frozen peas in a bath of olive oil so deep, from far away, you’d think she was eating soup. Despite these questionable habits, my mother remains to this day, the most health-conscious woman I know. And she’s always ten years ahead of a trend, if her pre-millennial love of millet is any indication.

Like many recipes with eggplant, if there’s one fad that my mother’s life-long love of olive oil fits under it’s the “Mediterranean Diet”—otherwise known throughout eternity as the way Greek, Turkish and Sicilian people eat. When I explore new cuisines, I love generically asking at restaurants for a side of “sauce” to see what they bring. In Greece, when I did this, what I got was a sauce boat of pure chartreuse-tinged olive oil. And I was more than fine with that outcome.

One of my favorite dishes from my trip to Greece was Imam Bayildi from a little Taverna in Hydra. The pan-fried eggplant casserole is technically a Turkish dish, but I saw it on plenty of menus throughout Greece. It’s baked with tomatoes, garlic, and herbs and served room temperature in a lasagna-like slab.

One slice is so decadent and delicious in its simplicity, you might almost forget about your old friend from across the Aegean, Eggplant Parmesan. And in terms of eggplant dinner ideas, she was a terrible influence anyway.

There are far worse dishes on the axis of food evil than a plate full of eggplant, olive oil and tomatoes. So for those of you who would rather eat fat than inject it into your face, here’s to a delicious (and healthy!!!) way to get your olive oil transfusion with a side of vegetables.

A lot of low FODMAP folks look for recipes with eggplant, since it is one of the few vegetables that aren’t off limits. For low FODMAP folks, this eggplant casserole recipe can easily be adapted by omitting the garlic and onions. For more low FODMAP recipes, check out my new book SIBO Made Simple. And click here for the best baked eggplant recipe.

More eggplant dinner ideas:

Read on for how to make this delicious, all time favorite Feed Me Phoebe eggplant recipe!

With health and hedonism,

Phoebe