Super easy recipe for real Italian frittata you’ll love

Make Italian frittata with this super simple frittata recipe and ideas for serving frittata plain or stuffed.

Frittata is one of the easiest and quickest Italian dishes to make and a favorite with kids and adults alike.

Made with just eggs or additional ingredients for variety, it is usually served as a starter, inside a sandwich (panino con la frittata) as a side dish and, for kids, often as a second course instead of meat or fish.

As well as an easy, quick meal idea, frittata is also amazing to use up leftovers as you can make it with almost anything!

This is how you make frittata!

Need to know: the correct spelling is FRITTATA with a double T, not FRITATA as you often see. It comes from ‘Fritto’ which means ‘fried’

Ingredients for Italian frittata

• Eggs: 1 or 2 per person
• Salt, a pinch
• Olive oil, for shallow frying
• Black pepper (optional)

How to make Italian frittata

Crack your eggs into a large bowl, then use a fork to whisk them until yolks and whites mix. Add seasoning (salt, pepper if using) and mix well.

Pour a thin layer of olive oil into a non stick pan and heat it up.

Top tip! Italian frittata is thin, so you want to use a pan that is large enough for the eggs you are using. For one egg. I use a 15cm pan.

Pour your eggs in and let cook for a couple of minutes so that the bottom side gets well cooked. Then use a wooden spoon to flip it and repeat on the other side.

Your frittata is ready!

What to serve frittata with

Frittata is a protein dish so it is usually served with complementary food groups such as salad or grains/pulses such as orzo (barley), ceci (chickpeas), lenticchie (lentils).

What else you can you make frittata with

Fittata in its simplest form is a favorite food for kids however, if you cook for friends or you want to make a meal out of it, you can add vegetables or other ingredients to make it more satisfying and varied.

Nice frittata dishes are:

Frittata di zucchine – frittata with onions and zucchini

Frittata di pasta – frittata with leftover pasta (very popular!)

Frittata con salsiccia e formaggio – just what you think, frittata with Italian sausage and cheese, good ones are caciotta or scamorza

Frittata con le cipolle – frittata with onions (particularly nice if made withred onions from Tropea)

Frittata ai funghi – mushroom frittata

Frittata di Spinaci e formaggio di capra – Spinach and goat cheese frittata

Veggie frittata – any cooked vegetable you have! Red peppers, mushrooms, leeks, onions, potatoes all work well

Asparagi e feta – Asparagus and feta frittata

Salmone e aneto – smoked salmon and dill frittata

Good to know: to make vegetable frittata, you want to cook your other ingredients first. So to make frittata with zucchini, you want to cook zucchini and onions first, take the off the heath, drain, mix with your eggs and then cooked as a frittata. Same with all other ingredients. If you cook them together, the eggs will burn before the vegetables cook and it will be a disaster.

Frittata fun fact!

Since making Italian frittata pretty much only requires cracking eggs, we have a saying.

If you ‘make a mess’, in Italian you can say ‘ho fatto la frittata’, meaning you have broken or messed something up in such a way, there is no way back!

Is frittata the same as Spanish tortilla?

Frittata is different from Spanish tortilla and the key to the difference is in the name.

Frittata contains the Italian word ‘fritto’ with means fried: frittata is thin, pan friend and a little crispy, as a result of the very quick cooking it takes.

Spanish tortilla on the other hand is thick and cooked much more slowly, the result being much more hydrated and smooth. The inside of a well made tortilla melts in your mouth while thin frittata won’t!

Can I make frittata in the oven?

As mentioned above, traditional frittata is pan fried but you can also make it in the oven.

In that case, it is usually much thicker and rarely made of just eggs but more like an omelet, with whatever ingredients you may have available.  

Pin this traditional Italian frittata recipe using the image below!