‘A powerful weapon in your cooking arsenal’: Adam Liaw cracks the formula for the perfect roasted veg frittata

Name: ‘A powerful weapon in your cooking arsenal’: Adam Liaw cracks the formula for the perfect roasted veg frittata
Cook time: 1 h 30 min
Yield: 6
Cuisine: Italian
Ingredients: 2 brown onions, cut into 2cm pieces; 2 cups hard vegetables, cut into 2cm cubes (e.g. butternut pumpkin, carrot, cauliflower); 2 cups soft vegetables, cut into 2cm pieces (e.g. capsicum, eggplant, zucchini, tomato); 1 cup thin vegetables, cut into 5cm lengths (asparagus, green beans); 135ml (½ cup) olive oil; salt and pepper, to season; 12 eggs; ½ cup milk; ¼ cup finely shredded mixed herbs (parsley, thyme, chives, basil etc); ½ cup grated parmesan cheese (optional)

Adam Liaw

May 17, 2023

easyTime:1-2 hoursServes:6

From picnics and brunch to an elegant dinner at home, a simple frittata can be served warm, at room temperature or cold. It’s a powerful weapon in your cooking arsenal. Here’s how to make a great one.

Ingredients

2 brown onions, cut into 2cm pieces
2 cups hard vegetables, cut into 2cm cubes (e.g. butternut pumpkin, carrot, cauliflower)
2 cups soft vegetables, cut into 2cm pieces (e.g. capsicum, eggplant, zucchini, tomato)
1 cup thin vegetables, cut into 5cm lengths (asparagus, green beans)
135ml (½ cup) olive oil
salt and pepper, to season
12 eggs
½ cup milk
¼ cup finely shredded mixed herbs (parsley, thyme, chives, basil etc)
½ cup grated parmesan cheese (optional)

Method

Step 1
Heat your oven to 220C fan-forced (240C conventional)). Combine the onions, hard vegetables and soft vegetables and toss with about two-thirds of the olive oil. Season well with salt and pepper and spread out on a lined baking sheet in a single layer with space between each piece of vegetable. Roast for about 45 minutes, or until charred on the outside and tender. Add the thin vegetables about halfway through.
Step 2
Whisk together the eggs, milk, herbs and parmesan (if using). Season well with salt and pepper.
Step 3
Place a deep oven-proof frying pan on medium heat and add the remaining olive oil. Add the vegetables, then pour over the egg mixture. Stir very gently once or twice to ensure the egg mixture gets in between all the vegetables and fry for about 5 minutes until the eggs start to set around the edges. Transfer to an oven for about 10-15 minutes until the eggs are just barely set. Remove from the oven and allow to stand for 10 minutes. Invert onto a serving plate and serve.

Tips

Cooking eggs

The most important thing you need to know about cooking eggs – and which is true for scrambled eggs, omelettes, frittatas, chawanmushi and anything else that is mainly eggs – is that eggs cook at a lower temperature than the heat from our stoves and ovens, and that they conduct heat very, very well.

When we talk about “cooking” in relation to eggs, it’s about the coagulation of protein. In eggs, the different proteins that are distributed between the whites and yolks will coagulate between about 61C and 84C. The temperature of boiling water is 100C, the surface heat of a frying pan is usually between 150C and 260C depending on how you’re heating it, and most ovens max out at about 240C.

This is important because the temperature you’re trying to get your eggs to is well below the things we use to cook them. Of course, this is true for lots of foods. Nobody roasts a leg of lamb until its internal temperature is the same as the oven it’s cooked in.

With eggs, though, they conduct heat very well and very quickly, so when your eggs are nearly set – as in, not quite set enough for you to eat – you want to stop cooking them and allow the residual heat to continue to cook the eggs to the right level of doneness. This is sometimes known as carry-over cooking, and it applies to fillets of fish, steaks and lamb roasts as well as eggs, but with eggs it’s far more noticeable because it happens so quickly and efficiently.

Remove the pan from the oven before the eggs are completely set because they will continue cooking in the residual heat.William Meppem

Cutting for texture

When I’m writing a recipe and deciding how to cut something I think about two things. First and foremost is how I want to eat that thing, and then second is cooking time.

Good cooking can be narrowed down to a combination of three things: taste, aroma and texture.

Taste is seasoning, where we adjust the saltiness, sweetness, sourness, bitterness and umami of our food by adding seasonings to it.
Aroma is mainly the choice of ingredients – a dish of cauliflower and nutmeg should have a different aroma from a dish of carrot and cumin, even if seasoned exactly the same.
Texture, however, is basically everything that we call “cooking”. It’s how we cut with a knife, it’s how long we cook something. Think of a piece of meat. It can be minced, sliced or cut into chunks. And eaten raw, medium-rare, well-done or stewed for hours. The same ingredient, seasoned the same way, can have so many different textures that change how we experience it.

When you’re wondering how to cut an ingredient, like any of the vegetables for this frittata, think about how you’d like to eat them.

Roasting vegetables

The application of heat to vegetables is very different from meat, as their chemistry is so different. Roast a piece of meat until it’s black and it will be tough and unpleasant. Do the same to a cauliflower and it will be rich, savoury and tender. That’s because the longer a vegetable cooks, the softer it will become as there are no muscle fibres to contract and turn it tough.

For this reason, I like to roast vegetables as hot as I can. Getting colour on the vegetable from high heat will develop a lot of flavour before the vegetable softens too much. In a dish like this frittata, the more flavour the better, and if the vegetables become soft, that’s fine because you don’t want vegetables to be too firm to offset the soft texture of the eggs, or to release moisture that could affect the way the eggs set.