Onion, Potato and Montasio Frico | Frico con Patate e Cipolla
Adding onion to a frico changes it completely, and anyone in Carnia will tell you so at length. The cake comes out darker, sweeter and softer in the middle, the crust arrives sooner and browns harder. This is the version made with raw sliced potatoes cooked down into slowly stewed onion, and it is the one you are most likely to be given in a mountain osteria with a slab of polenta beside it.
Nothing here is boiled. The onions go into butter and oil first and stay there until their water has gone and their own sugars have surfaced, then the raw potato slices cook in that sweet fat. The Montasio goes in last, off the heat. The whole dish is built in one pan and never leaves it until the turn.
The result is more fragile than a plain potato frico and needs a cooler pan, because onion sugar browns faster than potato starch does. Get that one thing right and the rest of the recipe is patience.
Yield: 4 to 6 servings as a side dish. Prep: 15 minutes. Cook: 1 hour 10 minutes. Rest: 5 minutes. Total: about 1 hour 30 minutes. Difficulty: intermediate. Course: contorno. Region: Friuli Venezia Giulia, Carnia and the Val Cosa.
The Story
This frico belongs to the malghe, the summer dairies of the high Carnic pastures, where herds were driven up in June and brought down in September. A malga produced cheese and very little else, so what was eaten there came from what was on hand: cheese that could not be sold, potatoes from the plot below the hut, and onions, which keep for months in a cold loft. Those three things in one pan fed the herdsmen for the season.
The onion that gives the dish its character has a name of its own in Friuli. The Cipolla di Cavasso Nuovo, grown in the Val Cosa on the southern edge of the Carnic foothills, is a flat coppery onion with unusually high sugar and very little of the sulphurous bite of a common yellow onion. It nearly disappeared in the 1990s and survives today as a Slow Food Presidium kept going by a handful of growers. Cooked slowly it goes to jam rather than to acrid brown, which is exactly what this recipe asks of it.
The argument between the onion frico and the plain potato one runs down every valley in the region and is not really about taste. The plain version is the lowland one, quicker and cheaper; the onion version is the mountain one, made where the growing season was too short for much else and where sweetness was worth the extra hour at the fire. Both are served the same way, cut in wedges against soft white polenta, and both are eaten hot with nothing else on the plate.
Ingredients
For the onions
Yellow onions, ideally Cipolla di Cavasso Nuovo, 12 oz (340 g)
Unsalted butter, 2 tbsp (28 g)
Extra virgin olive oil, 1 tbsp (15 ml)
Fine sea salt, 1/4 tsp (1.5 g)
For the potatoes
Waxy yellow potatoes, peeled, 1 1/2 lb (680 g)
Fine sea salt, 1/4 tsp (1.5 g)
For the cheese
Montasio DOP mezzano, aged 5 to 10 months, 12 oz (340 g)
For finishing
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Fine sea salt, to taste
Preparation
Stewing the onions until their water is gone
Halve the onions through the root and slice them into thin half moons, no thicker than 1/8 inch (3 mm). Put them in a 10 inch (25 cm) heavy skillet with the butter, the olive oil and the salt, cover, and set over low heat for 10 minutes so they sweat and collapse. Uncover and continue for another 12 to 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until they are amber, glossy and reduced to about a third of their original bulk. They must not take any hard brown colour at the edges.
Slicing the potatoes and leaving the starch alone
While the onions cook, peel the potatoes and slice them 1/8 inch (3 mm) thick on a mandolin or with a steady knife. Do not put them in water and do not rinse them. The starch clinging to each slice is what will bind the finished cake, and rinsing it away leaves you with a pan of loose potato chips. If they must wait, lay them in a single layer on a dry cloth and cover them with another.
Cooking the potatoes into the onion
Add the potato slices to the onions with the second measure of salt and turn them through until every slice is coated in the fat. Raise the heat to medium low, cover, and cook for 15 to 18 minutes, lifting and turning gently with a spatula about every 5 minutes. The slices should turn translucent at the edges and yield completely to a knife tip. They are cooking in onion moisture and fat, not in water, so nothing should be bubbling hard at any point.
Driving off the last steam and crushing lightly
Take the lid off and cook for a further 4 to 5 minutes so the steam that has collected escapes. Then press the mixture two or three times with the back of a wooden spoon, just enough to break perhaps a quarter of the slices and release their starch. Do not mash it. You want most slices intact and a small amount of starchy paste between them, which is the glue that holds the cake together once the cheese melts.
Folding in the Montasio off the heat
Grate the Montasio on the large holes of a box grater while it is still cold from the refrigerator. Slide the pan off the heat, scatter the cheese over the surface, wait 1 minute for the residual heat to soften it, then fold it through with about six passes of a fork and stop. Press the whole mixture into a flat even layer that reaches the pan wall, about 1 inch (2.5 cm) deep, and grind black pepper over the top.
Browning both faces and resting the cake
Return the pan to low heat, not medium low, because onion sugar browns faster than potato starch. Cook undisturbed for 12 to 15 minutes, until the edges pull back and the cake slides as one piece when you shake the handle. Slide it onto a flat plate wider than the pan, cover with the pan, invert, and cook the second face for 8 to 10 minutes. Rest it 5 minutes on a warm plate before cutting.
Plating
Turn the rested cake onto a warm wooden board and cut it into six wedges with a serrated knife, sawing rather than pressing. This frico is softer than the plain potato version because of the onion, so the cut face will show a slightly open interior with visible potato slices in it. That is correct and is the reason the dish is worth making this way.
Serve it at about 150°F (65°C) on warm plates, with soft white polenta spooned beside the wedge and never underneath it. Add nothing else. A little more black pepper at the table is traditional; a scattering of herbs is not, and it will fight the onion. If there is a salad, it belongs in a separate bowl with a sharp vinaigrette that the eater can use as a contrast rather than a garnish.
Professional Technique
The whole dish is decided in the first twenty five minutes, when the onion is stewed. Onions store their carbohydrate as fructans, long chains that taste of almost nothing, and slow heat hydrolyses them into free fructose and glucose. That is where the sweetness comes from: not from caramelising added sugar but from unlocking sugar the onion already had. Rush the pan and the chains never break down, the onion simply browns outside, and you get bitterness where sweetness should be.
The potatoes then cook by a different route from the plain version of this dish, which uses potatoes boiled and chilled the day before. Here they go in raw and cook in onion moisture and rendered fat, which is a confit rather than a boil. Starch gelatinises perfectly well in that environment, but because the free water is low the slices hold their edges instead of swelling and falling apart, and the surface starch stays on the slice where it is wanted. It also means the potato picks up onion flavour from the inside out.
Browning has to be managed downward. The free fructose and glucose released by the onion are reducing sugars and they enter Maillard reactions at a lower temperature than potato starch does, so a pan set for a plain frico will darken this one well before the interior has set. Low heat, a longer time on the first face, and no lifting to check. The finished crust should be mahogany rather than black, and it should smell of toasted cheese and sweet onion together.
Texture and Moisture Control
Raw onion is close to ninety percent water, and all of it has to leave the pan before anything else happens. That is the reason for the covered ten minutes followed by the uncovered fifteen: the lid pulls the water out of the cells quickly, then the open pan lets it evaporate. If the potatoes go in while the onion is still wet, the whole mixture simmers instead of frying, the slices waterlog, and no amount of time on the heat afterwards will produce a crust.
Slicing rather than grating the potato is what gives this frico its layered interior. Grated potato produces a homogeneous mass; slices lie against one another with thin films of starch and melted cheese between them, and the finished wedge separates slightly along those planes when you cut it. The light crushing at the end of step four is a controlled release of starch, and the limit is about a quarter of the slices. Beyond that you are making a potato cake.
Montasio at five to ten months has enough moisture to melt into threads and enough fat to lubricate the whole structure, and it is folded in off the heat so it never boils. Cheese that boils in a pan splits, and split cheese releases free oil that pools under the cake and fries it. If a clear rim appears around the edge during the first face, tilt the pan and blot it out before you turn. The interior should finish soft and molten, never runny.
Professional Mise en Place
One pan, one hour, and no point at which the cook can leave the stove for long. The onions can be stewed well in advance, which is the only part worth doing ahead.
Equipment and tools
Heavy 10 inch (25 cm) skillet with a lid, cast iron or thick aluminium
Mandolin or a sharp knife for even 1/8 inch (3 mm) slices
Box grater, large holes
Flat plate wider than the pan, for the turn
Wooden spoon and a wide flexible spatula
Prepared ahead
Onions stewed and cooled, up to 2 days ahead, refrigerated in their fat
Montasio grated, up to 4 hours ahead, kept cold and covered
Serving board and plates warmed
Polenta cooked soft and held warm over a bain marie
Service setup
Potatoes sliced last, never held in water, laid between dry cloths
Pan on low heat throughout the browning, never medium
Turning plate set beside the stove before the first face is done
Paper towel within reach to blot rendered fat after the turn
Pepper mill and serrated knife on the table
Chef Tips
Stew the onions the day before if you can. They are better for the rest, the sweetness deepens, and it turns an awkward ninety minute recipe into a thirty five minute one. Keep them refrigerated in their own fat and bring them back to the pan cold, adding two extra minutes before the potatoes go in.
If Cipolla di Cavasso Nuovo is out of reach, use any flat sweet yellow onion and add three or four extra minutes to the stewing. Avoid red onions, which turn a dull grey in a covered pan, and avoid very pungent storage onions, whose sulphur compounds stay harsh no matter how long you cook them.
Cut the potatoes with a mandolin if you own one. Even thickness matters more here than in almost any other potato dish, because thin slices dissolve into the onion while thick ones are still firm, and the two failures happen in the same pan at the same time. Set it at 1/8 inch (3 mm) and check the first three slices against each other.
If the cake breaks during the turn, do not try to repair it in the pan. Press the pieces back together while they are still hot and pliable, let the second face brown undisturbed for the full time, and it will knit. Poking at a broken frico releases fat and makes the damage permanent.
Common Mistakes
Browning the onions instead of stewing them. High heat colours the outside of the slices long before the fructans inside have broken down into sugar, so you end up with bitterness rather than sweetness and the dish has no way back. Low heat, lid on for ten minutes, then uncovered until the volume has dropped by two thirds.
Soaking or rinsing the potato slices. Every cookery habit says to rinse sliced potatoes and here it is exactly wrong. The starch on the slice is the binder for the whole cake, and washed slices sit loose in the pan and fall apart at the turn. Slice them straight into the onions.
Running the pan at the same heat as a plain potato frico. The reducing sugars released by the onion brown at a lower temperature than potato starch, so a medium low pan that suits the version without onion will give you a dark crust over an unset centre. Drop to low for the browning and give it the extra minutes.
Adding the cheese over direct heat. Montasio folded into a pan still on the flame will boil, split and release free oil, which pools under the cake and fries the crust hard and greasy. Slide the pan off the heat, let the residual warmth soften the cheese, and fold no more than six times.
Wine Pairing
Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso Friuli DOC: The Friulian red built for exactly this plate. Refosco keeps a high natural acidity behind its dark plum and bramble fruit, and that acidity is what handles the sweetness the stewed onion brings, where a softer red tastes flat against it. Its tannin is fine grained, enough to stand up to melted Montasio without drying the mouth. Serve it at about 61°F (16°C).
Alto Adige Santa Maddalena DOC: Schiava from the hills above Bolzano, pale in the glass and almost weightless, with a scent of violets and bitter almond. Pour it when the frico is a side dish rather than the centre of the meal: it refreshes without taking over, and its low tannin leaves the onion sweetness intact. Drink it cool, around 55°F (13°C).
Lugana DOC: The white choice, from Turbiana grown on the clay of the southern shore of Garda. It has more texture than most Italian whites and a saline almost mineral finish, so it meets the fat of the cheese with body rather than with acid alone. The faint citrus lift on the end lands on the onion sweetness and keeps the palate from tiring halfway through a wedge.
Teroldego Rotaliano DOC: A dark Trentino red with unusually brisk acidity for its colour, grown on the gravel plain north of Trento. Its blackberry fruit and slightly bitter finish answer the browned crust, and it has the structure to sit beside polenta as well as frico. Choose a young unoaked bottling, since wood would bury the onion under vanilla.
Storage & Reheating
Cool the frico on a rack so the steam underneath escapes rather than softening the crust from below. Wrap portions in parchment and then foil and refrigerate for up to 3 days in an airtight container. This version keeps slightly better than the plain potato one, because the onion holds moisture in the interior and the cake stays tender rather than drying out.
Reheat in a dry skillet over low heat for 5 to 6 minutes a side, with no added fat, or on a rack in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 8 minutes. Keep the skillet lower than you would for a plain frico, since the onion sugars will darken again quickly. Never use a microwave, which steams the crust away. Freezing works for up to 2 months in individually wrapped portions: thaw overnight in the refrigerator and reheat in the dry skillet with 2 extra minutes a side.
Nutrition
Per serving, based on 6 side dish portions:
Calories: 370 kcal
Total Fat: 23 g
Saturated Fat: 13 g
Trans Fat: 0.5 g
Unsaturated Fat: 8 g
Cholesterol: 65 mg
Sodium: 560 mg
Total Carbohydrates: 25 g
Fiber: 3 g
Total Sugars: 4 g
Added Sugars: 0 g
Protein: 19 g
Lactose: 0.4 g
Principal micronutrients: calcium, phosphorus, vitamin A, vitamin B12, vitamin C, potassium, selenium
These figures are estimates. The sugars come entirely from the onion and the potato, with nothing added, and the sodium varies with how salty the particular wheel of Montasio is.
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