Eggplant Napoleon – Grilled, Simple, and Delicious!

This simple eggplant napoleon recipe features fresh ingredients with minimal prep work for a healthy treat! No deep frying required! Add any seasonal vegetables you’d like to enhance this dish, or double the recipe for more helpings.

This dish should be naturally gluten-free, but if you have a sensitivity, just double check all your ingredients.

Grilled vegetables make this dish a heartier version of a caprese salad. The fresh flavors of your produce are enhanced by the balsamic vinegar garnish, which goes nicely with the fresh basil and mozzarella.

What is a Napoleon?

Any dish like eggplant napoleon or vegetable napoleon takes its inspiration from the dessert, a napoleon, which features layers of delicate, flaky puff pastry and pastry cream.

A napoleon is quite similar to a mille-feuille, although there is some scholarly debate on this subject. (Mireille Guiliano says in her book French Women Don’t Get Fat that the same dessert is called a mille-feuille in France and a napoleon everywhere else.)

For this reason, any layered dish can rightly be called a napoleon.

While eggplant napoleons or vegetable napoleons are often served as an appetizer, you could consider them a main dish and bulk them out by adding a sauce like marinara and serving them on a bed of grain or with some other substantial food so you won’t be hungry again an hour later.

Do I need a grill?

Not at all. You could bake your veggies on a cookie sheet, saute them in a skillet, put them in an air fryer if you have one, or bread and fry them.

Breading and frying seems to be the most commonly used method. However, this takes a lot of steps, can get messy, and the breading can take over the flavor from your fresh produce. Also, eggplant can soak up a lot of oil, so this is generally not an especially healthy way to eat it.

Depending on the size of the vegetables you find, you may need to double the vegetables in this recipe. I used a very large zucchini, a large eggplant, and a large tomato, which yielded five photo worthy napoleons and some smaller pieces of leftover veggies. If you can spend some time at the grill and grill up two of everything, you can have plenty of ingredients to work with.

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Why is the olive oil just drizzled on top and not cooked in?

First, flavor. If you have nice quality extra-virgin olive oil, it may taste spicy, herbal, fruity, grassy, or peppery, depending on where it’s from. These flavors cook out so you can’t really tell that you used nice oil.

Second, laziness. I’ve tried brushing eggplant with olive oil and salting it before cooking it in the past, and to me it didn’t make much difference in the flavor. It just made the eggplant a little soggy and less likely to get grill marks browned into it. Not worth the time in my opinion. If you keep track of your calories, you may be happy to hear this!

Finally, health. Olive oil is one of the best oils to cook with as it undergoes less oxidative damage when exposed to heat than other oils due to its high smoke point. That being said, the polyphenols in olive oil do degrade during cooking. Those are the antioxidants that we hear so much about in relation to olive oil, which can help promote brain function, lower blood sugar levels, and even lower the risk of heart disease. I’d rather eat these antioxidants than cook them out.

For more info on the health benefits of olive oil, check out this article from healthline.

Eggplant Napoleon ingredients

Before you begin, you will need:

• 1 large eggplant
• 1 large zucchini
• 2 small balls of fresh mozzarella cheese
• 1 large tomato
• Fresh basil to garnish
• Balsamic vinegar to garnish
• Olive oil to garnish
• Salt, to taste
• A knife and cutting board
• A grill or something to cook the eggplant and zucchini
• A grill basket (optional but saves small pieces from falling through the grates)
• Something to turn the grilled veggies with

How to make Eggplant Napoleon

1. First, wash your vegetables.
2. Then, slice them into approximately 1/4″ slices. For the eggplant and tomato, you can slice normally into the biggest rounds you can get. For the zucchini, diagonal cuts should yield slightly longer slices that are less likely to fall through the grates of your grill. They also fit the napoleons better.
3. Once your vegetables are ready, turn on your grill to medium heat, around 400° and let it heat up.
4. If you have a grill basket, you can spray the bottom with cooking oil. Otherwise, you can lay your sliced eggplant and zucchini directly on the grill grates when the grill is ready. (If desired, brush the vegetables with oil and salt them. I did not find this necessary.)
5. Cook for a few minutes on each side, until you see grill marks or the veggies are starting to brown. Grill your next batch, if necessary.
6. Once all the eggplant and zucchini has been grilled, you can start assembling the napoleons. Any order is fine. I did, from the bottom: eggplant, tomato, zucchini, then eggplant, zucchini, mozzarella.
7. After that, garnish each napoleon with fresh basil leaves.
8. Finally, drizzle extra-virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar over the eggplant napoleons. If desired, sprinkle with salt. (I didn’t find this necessary with the salt in the cheese.) Serve and enjoy!

Make it vegan

Skip the mozzarella and sprinkle sea salt on the top, or try a vegan cashew mozzarella. You could also marinate and grill tofu if you’d like for some protein.

Variations on Eggplant Napoleon

Add any vegetables you think would be good: red bell peppers, portobello mushrooms, onions, etc.

You can layer sauce in between your veggies: marinara, pesto, aoli, or anything else you’d like.

As mentioned earlier, instead of grilling the eggplant and zucchini, you could bake them or pan fry them, with or without breading. The traditional breading is egg and breadcrumbs. Once I used ground flax meal, in keeping with the gluten-free theme of this meal.

You could also try grilling the tomato. This might be a little messy, but would give it an interesting taste, although I do enjoy the acidity of the raw tomatoes.

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Important: This post is for informational and educational purposes only. This post should not be taken as medical or nutritional advice or used as a substitute for such. You should always speak to your own doctor or nutritionist before implementing this information on your own. Thank you!

I hope you enjoyed this eggplant Napoleon recipe!