Grandma's Baked Eggplant Parmesan - The Seasoned Mom (2024)

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. I may earn a small commission for my endorsem*nt, recommendation, testimonial, and/or link to any products or services from this website.

My grandmother’s easy baked eggplant Parmesan recipe is a delicious vegetarian dinner with just 15 minutes of prep! This recipe simplifies the classic Italian dish for a quick-prep, family-friendly weeknight meal. Serve it with a side of spaghetti, a simple green salad, and a basket of garlic bread.

How to Make Baked Eggplant Parmesan | 1-Minute Video

Certain recipes just taste like home, and this simple eggplant parmesan is definitely one of those dinners. It’s an instant transport back to my childhood table. When my aunt recently passed along my grandmother’s old recipe box, I spent hours pouring over all of her recipes. One that instantly jumped out at me was the handwritten baked eggplant parmesan recipe on a weathered piece of yellow legal paper. It’s a dish that I grew up on, and I’ve continued to serve the flavorful meal to my own family as well!

What is Eggplant Parmesan?

Eggplant Parmesan is a traditional Italian meal comprised of shallow- or deep-fried slices of eggplant, layered with cheese and tomato sauce, and then baked in the oven. Called parmigiana, parmigiana di melanzane, or melanzane alla parmigiana in Italian, the dish is thought to have originated in the Southern regions of Campania and Sicily.

You might be familiar with other variations that include veal or chicken (like our favorite Chicken Parm). Either way, the popular dinner has been adapted over generations, and Americanized by families like ours. This particular quick and easy eggplant parmesan recipe is a meal that busy moms can prepare without too much fuss. Instead of frying the eggplant in a skillet, we let the oven do the work. It’s baked — not fried — but you don’t lose any of that delicious flavor!

Preparing the Eggplant for Eggplant Parm

To peel, or not to peel? To salt, or not to salt? Before you get started, let’s discuss the best way to prepare the eggplant for this dish.

First, when shopping for an eggplant, look for a vegetable with smooth, shiny skin that’s uniform in color and heavy for its size. To test for ripeness, lightly press a finger against the skin. If it leaves an imprint, the eggplant is ripe. Smallereggplants tend to be sweeter, less bitter, and have thinner skin and fewer seeds.

Do you peel eggplant before cooking?

The vegetable’s skin is completely edible and tends to soften as it cooks, so in many recipes it’s fine to leave the skin on. That said, I recommend peeling the eggplant for eggplant parmesan. As an eggplant grows larger, the skin can become tough and bitter — something that I prefer to avoid.

Do you need to salt eggplant before making Eggplant Parmesan?

No, as I said — we’re keeping this recipe quick and easy! Salting the raw eggplant is a helpful tool to achieve smooth and creamy eggplant. If you’d like to do so here, that’s totally fine — it won’t hurt. By not salting the vegetable, it retains its shape more and has a slightly firmer texture. That works for me, so I skip the step of salting.

What to Serve with Quick and Easy Eggplant Parmesan

This Italian-inspired dish is best when served with a side of pasta and extra marinara sauce. Don’t forget the garlic bread, breadsticks, or focaccia, too!

Looking to add some more veggies to the meal? Try a simple green salad with red wine vinaigrette, a Caesar salad, fennel salad with apples and creamy cider dressing, sauteed spinach with garlic, Garlic and Parmesan Cauliflower Mash or 2-ingredient Italian sugar snap peas.

This recipe was originally published in June, 2017. The photos were updated in December, 2021.