So, are you a quiche person or a frittata person? Raise your hand if you don’t know the difference…
Quiche vs Frittata
Quiche and frittata are both egg dishes made delicious with the addition of cheese, veggies, meat, seafood or poultry. They’re both great ways to get a meal on the table — they’re not just for breakfast anymore — relatively quickly using just about whatever you have on hand. Now here’s the difference.
Quiche is made by adding ingredients to a custard base, a combination of eggs and heavy cream, which gives it a deliciously creamy consistency when baked. Replace the cream with half and half or milk to cut the fat. Quiche usually has a crust, but it doesn’t have to.
Eggs get top-billing in a frittata. Frittatas have no crust and little, if any, milk or cream. Frittatas are cooked first on the stovetop, then finished in the oven or under the broiler.
TIPS:
Blind bake your quiche’s crust to make sure it’s not soggy.
Cook frittata add-ins before adding eggs to pan to make sure they’re cooked through.
Use half-and-half instead of heavy cream to cut the fat in a quiche.
TOOLS:
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Spinach & Sun-Dried Tomato Quiche
Ingredients
- 1 frozen 9-inch pie crust (buy the kind already in the aluminum pie tin)
- 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
- 1 cup chopped onions
- 3 sun-dried tomatoes, chopped
- 1 cup fresh spinach, chopped
- 1¼ cup milk
- 2 large eggs
- 1½ cups freshly grated Parmesan cheese
- Pinch nutmeg
- Salt and pepper, to taste
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Thaw the pie crust until it’s soft enough to prick the bottom and the sides with a fork. (The tiny holes across the surface of the crust will keep the crust from bubbling up when you bake it.) Bake the crust until it starts to brown, about 15 minutes. Remove it from the oven and set it aside.
- Lower the oven temperature to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Melt the butter in a medium sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add the onions and sprinkle them with a pinch of salt. Cook the onions, stirring occasionally, until they’re soft and translucent.
- Stir in the sun-dried tomatoes and the spinach and cook until the spinach wilts, about a minute. Take the pan off the heat and set it aside to cool.
- Whisk the milk, eggs and cheese together in a medium bowl. Add a tiny pinch of the nutmeg and bigger pinches of the salt and pepper.
- Spread the cooled spinach over the pre-baked pie shell. Pour the milk mixture over the spinach.
- Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, until the quiche is golden brown and firm in the center
Thanks for this post, it clarified and validated what I always had thought was the difference between the two. Now I can rest easy, lol. Thanks!
How can you tell? The article defines Quiche twice and never clearly says what a Fritatta is.
“Eggs get top-billing in a frittata. Frittatas have no crust and little, if any, milk or cream. Frittatas are cooked first on the stovetop, then finished in the oven or under the broiler.”