Five Frittatas
My mother has long loved to cook. Our basement holds a binder filled with ribbons she won at bake-offs and county fairs. Our garage holds her box of hand-glittered star ornaments made over 20 years ago to adorn a Feast of St. Nicholas dinner party.
The ornaments are hand glittered because my mom had become enamored with a particular large-grain glitter; my mother’s passion for entertaining manifests itself in an uncompromising attention to detail. I turned twenty before I saw a pre-baked pie shell enter my house. When it comes to dinner parties, mom goes big or goes home.
Later in life mom upgraded from dinner parties to church banquets. Her desire to wow her guests remained intact. I learned to cook because my mom perpetually needed a sous-chef to help her deliver high-concept, high-volume food on schedule. From the earliest age that I could hold a spoon, I was conscripted. I will never forget the day I came home from high school only to have my mom announce that I was in charge of grilling 60 chicken breasts that night. It was late autumn, and we own a single Webber kettle grill. I cooked in batches, and leaned the joys of grilling by flood lamp.
During any given nail-biting banquet-to-be, when the stress hangs in the air like the aerosolized grease rising from the three simulations skillets I operate, I am frustrated with my mother. But once the kitchen has cooled and dishes are the only remaining responsibility, I am thankful. There is no better way to learn to cook than under Mom’s crazy deadlines.
Lucky for me the process continues to this day. A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to prepare five frittatas for a church banquet. I went into the experience with limited frittata experience. Two mushroom and three spinach frittatas later, I was fairly comfortable.
Frittatas come together quickly – when the egg sets, the frittata needs to leave the heat. (Overcooked eggs seize up and wrench their own moisture out onto the plate.) So mom and I handled all the prep work before we put the heat to the eggs. Preventing crunch-time heartache is especially important when cooking in volume.
Mom and I started off by sautéing all our onions at once, followed by all our mushrooms. Pre-cooked frozen spinach required defrosting and draining. Green onions and parsley just needed a quick chop. All prepped ingredients were set aside. When cooking in larger volume, the logic of dirtying extra plates in order to have ingredients at your fingertips starts to make sense; the time saved over five frittatas by a ready source of pre-sautéed onions more than makes up for an extra session of dishwashing.
Proper prep work saves time in volume cooking
Once the vegetables were ready, we focused on the egg mixture. Our largest mixing bowl holds about a dozen eggs, so that was what we first mixed up. We added one tablespoon of whole milk for each egg – ¾ of a cup for a dozen. An immersion blender made short work of the eggs. Hand whisking a full dozen eggs at once can really strain your wrist.
Once the eggs were beaten, we added a quarter cup of parmesan cheese.
It will blend
With everything in place, it was frittata time.
I turned on my oven’s broiler.
I started out with my Lodge 12-inch cast-iron skillet. I love that skillet. The density of iron ensures a more even heat transfer into the contents of the pan. I wanted heat to evenly enter my egg mixture so that it would set up at the same time throughout.
I started out with a mushroom frittata. I melted a tablespoon of butter in my skillet. I threw in a cup of sautéed mushrooms and half a cup of sautéed onions. Since they were already cooked, I just used my wooden spoon to even them out in the pan. Then I poured egg mixture in the pan to over.
My first fritatta
A word on frittata technique –
The trickiest part of frittata cooking is encouraging the eggs to set without moving the eggs around so much that you wind up with scrambled eggs. You want the eggs to set up as much as possible before you put them under the broiler; the exposure to direct flame can easily burn the top of your frittata. So your stovetop cooking needs to get you within four minutes from set. But if you just let the pan sit atop the stove until the eggs are ready to go into the oven, you will scorch the bottom long before heat penetrates into the middle of the pan. If you just stir the mixture constantly you just scramble the eggs.
What you need to do is encourage the liquid egg mixture in the middle of the frittata to migrate to the outside of the pan. When you first add the egg to the hot pan, you wind up with an outer ring of cooked egg with a liquid center. When you are just dealing with a thin ring of cooked egg, you can slide a spatula underneath the cooked portion and shove it aside with a simple twist of your wrist. Raw egg will flood to the rim of the pan to replace the cooked egg you displaced. The raw egg will now be on the outside, preventing the already cooked egg from scorching. To ensure even cooking, you should work your way around the frittata in a circle, displacing the cooked rim every few inches. As the cooked rim thickens, it will be harder for the uncooked egg to flow to the outside of the pan – at that point, you will need to tilt the pan towards your spatula to enlist gravity’s help. When the majority of the liquid has firmed up, you are ready for the broiler.
Using the above egg-displacing methodology, I coaxed my frittata to the near-doneness. I grated some extra parmesean atop the egg mixture and sprinkled it with some chopped parsley. I threw it under the broiler with my timer set to four minutes. But I first checked it after two minutes. There are too many variables involved to accurately predict when a frittata will set and when it will burn, so even though I lost oven heat each time I checked, I played it safe. My first frittata was done after three minutes.
Disaster struck when I tried to de-pan my frittata. The tablespoon of butter I melted into the pan at the start didn’t prevent the egg from sticking. I gave up on my beloved lodge skillet and switched to a non-stick pan.
Fritattas prefer non-stick
Because it stuck to the bottom of the skilled, the frittata broke into three pieces. I put the frittata pieces together like a jigsaw. I then beat an egg and poured it over the ruined pieces. I nuked the whole platter for a minute in the microwave, and then set it aside. Overtime the residual heat encouraged the raw egg to cook, binding the fractured frittata into a whole. (I love cooking. You actually get to put Humpty Dumpty’s beaten remains back together again.)
Subsequent frittatas de-paned smoothly. Replacing mushrooms with spinach and parsley with green onions presented no additional challenges.
However, due to a topographical quirk of one of spinach frittatas, the broiler was cooking the outer rim faster than the middle. Checking on the frittata while it was under the broiler revealed the unevenness in time. I constructed a rim of aluminum foil to cover the portions that had cooked already. Two more minutes in the oven finished it off without burning the edges.
A underdone center calls for aluminum foil and an extra stay under the broiler
Making five frittatas in a row, I honed technique, learned pitfalls, constructed solutions, and just generally got comfortable with cooking a new food. Thanks, Mom. I love you.
