Frittata or Tortilla - what's in a name? - Smoked Fine Food (2024)

We could spend ages debating if this dish is a frittata or a tortilla – but that would miss the point of the dish! I think of it as a frittata – but do have a look at the footnote! We had been baking the last of our supply of small (1951) potatoes from Carroll’s Heritage potatoesthat were going a little soft. To avoid wasting them we were using them to make both a potato skin starter and cooked potatoes to use as a mashed potato.

This is one of the uses that we put the cooked potato to – Frittata!! The Frittata (Italian) and the Tortilla (Spanish) are very similar.The main difference between them seems to behow the eggs are finished. Both begin with the filling and the eggs, cooked on a hobin a frying pan.

The frittata is traditionally finished in the oven and thetortillas are flipped and finished on the hob. As the BGE is both a ‘hob’ and an ‘oven’ this dish is either a Frittata or a Tortilla – depending on the mood you are in at the time!!

These dishes are great for ‘clearing the fridge’ as all sorts of mixtures can work well. We started by dry frying some slightly tired mushrooms.
Once the mushrooms had taken on a little colour we added a little chopped pepper (about half) and some diced shallots and just a splash of oil. Once they had reasonably softened, they were removed from the pan and set to oneside.

As always when cooking with the BGE whenever you are not doing anything in the EGG, it was kept closed. The potato that had been scooped out of the potato skins was dropped into the pan and gently sautéd.

Once it was getting warm, a large handful of spinach was stirred into the potato and allowed to wilt down.

At this stage the hot potato and spinach was added to the mushrooms and peppers that had been put to one side. The 3 eggs were beaten and then stirred through this mixture. All that was left to do was to finish off the cooking of the egg.

The whole mix was stirred into the frying pan and the lid of the BGE was closed leaving the egg to set.

Once the liquid egg on top of the frittata was just about set the frittata was slipped out of the pan onto a cutting board. It was then flipped back into the pan ‘upside-down’ – allowing the top to colour slightly. For a traditional frittata rather than flip it over, this would be coloured under the grill, but this works beautifully in the BGE.

The frittata was then flipped back over for serving. We served the first 2 portions straight from the pan with some fresh bread. It was every bit as good the following day, served cold with a salad. Which everway you chose, this is a great dish for breakfasts, lunches or light suppers.

………………… do give it a go!!

Footnote:

The Italian word frittata derives from friggere and roughly means “fried”. This was originally a general term for cooking eggs in a skillet, anywhere on the spectrum from fried egg, through conventional omelette, to an Italian version of the Spanish omelette, made with fried potato. Outside Italy, frittata was seen as equivalent to “omelette” until at least the mid-1950s.^[1]

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