Food Notes: 10/28
Frittata, broccoli rabe, giant zucchini, giant pumpkins, regular-sized hot dogs and more
We had some leftover broccoli rabe, so obviously that meant we had to make a frittata.
Broccoli rabe is a dinner staple around our house. I’d say conservatively it shows up once a week, about as often as regular old broccoli. The bitter green has lots of uses, like Italian Wedding Soup and Philadelphia Roast Pork sandwiches, but the way I like to cook it most often is sautéed in a frying pan with lots of garlic, a dash of red pepper, and olive oil.
Broccoli rabe pretty much goes with anything: pasta, chicken cutlets, barbecue—anywhere you need a little more leafy greens. I’m always modeling my broccoli on side dishes served up at authentic red sauce joints where its served with extra olive oil and chunks of garlic you can see.
But the trouble I have is that the supermarket only sells pre-bundled bunches. Since our four-year-old won’t even look at anything green, that leaves just two of us to chow down on a pile of spicy, bitter greens. So we often end up with leftovers.
I’d be lying if I claimed to always use up that day-old broccoli rabe. As versatile as it is, it’s easy to forget about the little Tupperware of garlicky greens.
Then my wife suggested we make a frittata.
If you aren’t familiar with a frittata by now, you simply aren’t watching enough Food Network. Just in case I do need to explain it: frittata are Italian-style crustless quiche, or an omelette that isn’t folded over. I like to think Julia Child introduced the idea of quiche for dinner to Americans, but it was the the Italian-ish Food Network stars like Mario Batali, Giada de Laurentiis, and Michael Chiarello who made frittata trendy.
The Italian language Wikipedia on Frittata features a list of crazy oversized omelettes, like one made in 1535 from over 1,000 eggs honoring Charles V of Spain. He was visiting the Padula Charterhouse, a monastery and the omelette was cooked up in his honor. An even larger frittata with 5,000 eggs was cooked up by Antonio Rivera Casal in 1987, and there is a mention of a few others made from a hundreds of eggs.
As for frittata in America, it’s not that the dish is entirely unknown until the 2000s. But my rather cursory search of newspaper archives suggests few people knew what they were until the late 1970s and early 1980s. One of my favorite food writers, Cecily Brownstone, was on the case of the frittata as early as 1963, but as always, she remains an outlier ahead of her time.
The first-wave frittata craze really takes hold in the mid-1980s. Most newspaper writers are shocked that Italians invented an omelette, and treat readers like its the first time cooking an egg. Many of the articles applaud the lack of piecrust, along with claims that because ingredients can be cooked right inside the eggs, these are easier to make them traditional omelettes. It helps too that frittatas were relatively inexpensive (less so now that eggs are luxury item).
With the launch of the Food Network, Italian food—and I don’t mean Italian American cuisine, but recipes genuinely cooked up in Italy in the present time—became extremely popular. Mario Batali helped ignite a desire by chefs to unearth traditional domestic kitchen recipes. It’s an era when all sorts of “old” Italian recipes started showing up in American restaurants as an attempt to create a sense of authenticity. Ever wonder why you never ate cacio e pepe before the 2000s, but now its a flavor that’s everywhere? It was the endless need for finding new, but old, recipes from Italy.
Bill Buford, writing in his memoir Heat, offers a great account of his own adventure mimicking Batali’s trek through rural Italian kitchens. Buford noted in the 2007 book that the desire for American chefs to learn old world techniques from Italians had saturated the labor market in Italian kitchens making it difficult for locals. But the need to foster a sense of having discovered some rare gem of a recipe really drove a lot of recipes in the time period.
The frittata was an ideal example. It was a simple omelette that people were familiar with, similar to a quiche, but that been othered. It was Italian exoticism. You weren’t eating the quiche Lorraine Julia Child taught your mother to bake. It was a frittata! The word is even fun to say, especially after a few glasses of bottomless mimosa.
Anyway, I was talking about the broccoli rabe frittata we had for dinner. I had cooked up the broccoli over the weekend to accompany some meatballs, but who wants another story about meatballs? Seriously. We had about about 2 cups leftover stashed in a Chinese wonton soup take away container. The broccoli was seasoned with garlic and red pepper, chopped into small pieces and begging for us to eat it.
My wife suggested making the frittata, a dish she cooked herself so often before we met that she whipped it up without even consulting the internet. She instructed that there were two important things to note about cooking frittata. First, she doesn’t like to flip the frittata because its heavy and usually just flips onto itself. You can get around this problem by finishing it in the oven.
The other important technique is to not mix the cheese into the egg. In this case we were using soft goat cheese, but other soft cheese would probably work, especially ricotta. The intention is to dollop the cheese into the mixture so there is a small clump rather than a cheese mess.
We didn’t adulterate the egg with milk, although there are plenty of recipes that call for doing just that. We served the frittata with Tuscan style beans.
Frittata with Leftover Broccoli Rabe
Ingredients
6 Eggs
2 cups leftover broccoli rabe with garlic
3 to 4 oz of goat cheese
Salt and pepper to taste
Olive oil for the pan
Instructions
Whip the eggs
Add the broccoli rabe, stirring to combine
Season with salt and pepper, whip it
Whip it good
Heat the olive
Get the pan hot. The eggs that touch the pan should be cooked quickly with a light browning
When the bottom half of the frittata is cooked, place in the oven to finish cooking (or flip the frittata, and finish in the pan, if you’re brave)
Bake 400F until the top is cooked, about 10 minutes
Some people like the top to brown, but this can lead to the actual eggs to be overcooked. Flavor over style.
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