3 Italian Potato Recipes Americans Forgot

Today we're going to make three easy and inexpensive Italian recipes with a bag of potatoes and just a few other ingredients. Coming up right now. Okay, so the first one we're making is an Italian potato casserole. This one is probably the most common one that my grandmother made, and she made it almost exactly like this. So we have five potatoes, and these potatoes are about medium size, but two pounds potatoes is pretty much what you need. Two onions, those are about two medium onions. One and a half pounds of plum tomatoes. We're going to use a good amount of olive oil for this, and that beeper is just my oven getting to 375 degrees Fahrenheit, so you can set your oven now too. And then all we're going to do is we're going to layer this. We're going to layer the potatoes, the onions, and the tomatoes with cheese. So I have a quarter cup of Pecorino Romano, and I have Sicilian oregano here. So you can do a lot of layers. You can also do two layers. If you do less layers, and I'll show you in a bit, it will cook quicker. But it's really up to you. And then for the topping, we're going to make a nice seasoned breadcrumbs that has one cup of Italian seasoned breadcrumbs. You can use plain breadcrumbs if you want to, because we are adding more seasoning. We're going to add three cloves of minced garlic, another teaspoon of Sicilian oregano, half a teaspoon hot red pepper flakes, three tablespoons Pecorino Romano, and then I have five anchovies here that we're going to turn into a paste. Now if you don't like anchovies, you can remove them from this. I don't think my grandmother used them. She probably wanted to most of the time, but my mother didn't really like them. So I could see why she took anchovies out of a lot of these recipes. That's going to add more of a punch to it. And then we're going to add olive oil to this to get really moist breadcrumbs. Essentially, if you don't want to use anchovies, say you don't want hot red pepper, you could just mix just the garlic, the cheese, and the seasoned breadcrumbs together, and it will be great too. All right. So first thing we have to do is slice up all the vegetables. All right. So we're going to use a mandolin. You don't have to use a mandolin here. If you have a sharp knife, it'll be fine too. If you use a mandolin, just be very careful. I'm just adjusting this bottom here to make my blade probably maybe an eighth inch, I would say. So this just screws, and then I just push down on it. This is not the most sophisticated of mandolins, but I like it. And I like that it's fairly wide, so you can fit a lot of stuff in it. Comes with this guard here so that you can use. And then I always, just for double insurance, I always just put a glove on because if you slip, it's not going to be good. You're not going to be able to really continue with the rest of your food. So it has these pokers, and then you just can just kind of stab what you're doing. And then it has this rubber so it doesn't move so much. That's pretty good. You can go even a little bit thinner than that if you want, but I think that's good. All right. We're going to do the rest of them. Going to do the tomatoes in the same way. Tomatoes might be a little hard if your mandolin is not super sharp. And we're also going to do the onions at that same width too. I don't have to show you all of them, but yeah, if your tomatoes are maybe on a little bit on the soft side, it will be more difficult to slice them with the mandolin. So you can just take your tomato and just like so. That's good. These are going to shrink a lot. They're going to release a lot. For a casserole like this, there's a lot of liquid in the potatoes, in the onions, and in the tomatoes. What you can do if you want to avoid having a ton of liquid in the dish, you can take all your tomatoes, you can even do this with the onions, and you can salt them. Just sprinkle a little bit of salt on them. And I would just put them on a wire rack, put paper towels on a wire rack, and then just salt them that way. So all the water is going to go through to the bottom. You'll save yourself a little bit of time, but it's nothing that cooking it for a little bit longer can't solve. All right. I'm going to finish the rest of these. All right. So this is essentially what you're going to have. You're going to have all this fairly thinly sliced. And I was able to run the tomatoes through the mandolin because they're not the ripest. The ones, especially now, this video is being made in May 2nd. So you're not going to have garden tomatoes yet. In fact, the date, the plant date here on Long Island is May 17th, but it's been warm enough that you could definitely, about three weeks ago, I got to about 80. So people might've planted at that point. Still not a good idea because then you could get a freeze and you could ruin everything. All right. I'm going to mix up these breadcrumbs. All I'm going to do here is just combine everything. Okay. One cup of seasoned Italian breadcrumbs. One teaspoon of Sicilian oregano. That might be a little light. And half a teaspoon of hot red pepper flakes. Three tablespoons of grated Pecorino Romano cheese. And then these, I got to make a paste of, which I do it right into the nice cutting board tower. Make a nice anchovy smell on the cutting board. It's fine. Would it be the cutting board I would use? No, a wood cutting, look, and especially now people are a lot more conscious of this. Like, you know, everybody's into like microplastics are going to, you know, destroy the planet. They might be right, but they don't want to use plastic for anything now. So I've even adapted a little bit in these cooking videos, but you know, using plastic board for stuff like this, you throw it right in the dishwasher. All right. So all I did is I just chopped them a little bit and now I'm just going to turn these into a paste with the back of my knife. So how are you going to get the anchovy smell out of your, your nice wood cutting board? I have my, um, I'm putting a little salt for, um, to give friction. How am I going to get it out? I'm going to do it with my vinegar and water mixture. But what I would do first from anything that's really bad, say you do a lot of meat on here, say you're cutting pork chops, chicken, and you're almost like embedding them into the wood. Use soap and water first. The thing with a lot of soap and water, you got to get the soap out or you're just going to make your cutting board all soapy. Then after you do that, you've rinse it, then you go back with your vinegar and water mixture. And I just do one part vinegar to two parts water. I keep it in a spray bottle and I write on there. So I don't forget that it's two parts to one part. And that eliminates the smell. It eliminates a lot of the smell. It's like, it like neutralizes it. And I looked up because a lot of people like we're saying after I use it all the time, they're like, that's not going to get rid of, you know, salmonella and stuff like that. In fact, it does. That's what the Google AI overview told me. Okay. So that's a paste now. And I'm just going to put that delicious paste. And I know you love it, Tara. In there. I don't have a problem with anchovy. I won't eat like a whole anchovy on its own like you do, but I like the flavor of it when it's in a dish. The thing that I like about these potato dishes is, you know, whenever there's like a winter storm coming and people are like, Oh, I got to go to the store. I got to get the bread. The bread. What are you going to do with like the bread? Like, why don't you go to the store and get like the five pound bag of potatoes? True. You know, there's far more that you can do with that than with bread. True. And listen, we're trying to solve a problem here. All of these dishes today, I'm not counting the money aspect, but you will be able to see after I make all these, we're talking not $20 per meal. We're talking probably 20 to $25 for all three meals that are being made today. All right. I'm going to put some oil in here. Hey, how much oil? That much oil, right? I just want to get it to its moist and I would use a bigger bowl here so you could distribute those anchovies better. So I'm just going to keep mixing this up until the anchovies are well distributed and I'll probably moisten it up with a little bit more oil or we can just put more oil on top. We're going to start assembling. What I'm going to do is just pat all these potatoes dry as much as I can. Just try to remove any excess moisture on them, flip them over, do even more. Okay. And then the same thing for the tomatoes. I already did it one time, but I'm going to do it again. The tomatoes are going to have a lot of liquid, even not so ripe ones like this. I would use plum tomatoes in this recipe, like a paste tomato. It has less liquid than say like a beefsteak tomato. You can use beefsteak tomatoes from the garden, but I would definitely salt those first to remove a lot of the excess liquid. Paste tomatoes is why these tomatoes are better for making sauce, for the same reason. This recipe is for a nine by 13 baking dish, but this is smaller, so I'll probably have to use two baking dishes. Another nice type of dish would be something like this. You might recognize this dish. This dish is what I used for the zucchini tomato casserole that's in our cookbook. That was another one of my grandmother's recipes and there's infinite variations of this, but she would make both of these. They were two different ones that she would make. But yeah, anyway, the zucchini one I did in the cookbook, and very similar flavors in everything. Cookbook's here, here, if you want to buy it. So what I'm going to do is put a little bit of oil at the bottom of this. That's olive oil. Just wipe the sides, everything. Okay, and then just start layering the potatoes. So I'm just kind of overlapping them. This casserole's good cold, too. I mean, all these kind of casseroles, all these al forno, so it's like, there'll be a million recipes for this type of stuff. Just like potato and zucchini al forno with breadcrumb topping. They're all better at room temperature. It allows the whole casserole to settle, too. It reabsorbs a lot of the moisture. And it's good for either breakfast or dinner. Definitely. Like if you have it for breakfast, fry up an egg over easy and put it on top. So good. Absolutely. This is definitely, this is a meal. I would say all three of the things we're making today can be meals. Putting a little bit of salt on the potatoes, a little bit of black pepper, and then I'm going to layer these onions in. So I'm kind of like breaking them up a little bit as I do it. But the onions really mellow, too, in this when they're, when this whole entire thing is baked in the oven for a long period of time. And timing is going to be different depending on how many layers you make. So if you're doing like two overlapping layers, which essentially is three things per layer, that could take up to about 70 minutes. And if you're doing a thinner one, like this will probably just be, we'll just do one potato, onion, and tomato. It'll take about half the time. Get some tomatoes in here. Okay. A little bit of olive oil on everything. Some of this Sicilian oregano. So I just kind of rub it here and then see how it's all in my hands now. Put it on it. This type of oregano is excellent with potatoes. This would be my herb of choice and dried like this. It's very pungent. It has a very unique flavor. I mean, when you smell this, you're going to smell a New York pizzeria. That's like the, that's the flavor you're going to get. But if you don't have this and you know, you can't get it, just use, you know, like dried oregano and then some of the pecorino. Use about half of that because I'm going to do another layer. All right. So I went through all the potatoes and the onions for these two dishes. So I would say this is about the equivalent of a nine by 13. All this is equal to a nine by 13. I have a lot of tomatoes left. So I made the recipe numerous times. And I would say, yeah, if you're doing a nine by 13, you'd be able to spread them out more. You could spread out more tomatoes on that first layer. But I like to save a little bit more tomatoes for the top. This is two whole batches and this is only one, one batch. All right. So we're just going to spread these breadcrumbs all over. All right. That's good. I don't, I don't have to use all those, but that's close. Save the rest for another use, you know, in the fridge. Okay. I'm just going to throw a couple more tomatoes on top because everything's going to cook down a lot. It's going to look nice to have some tomatoes on top at the end, a little bit more oil, moisten everything up. All right. So these are going to go in the oven. Now this one's going to take longer than this one, but the easiest way to tell, and we're going to cook it all at 375 degrees Fahrenheit uncovered the whole entire time. Easiest way to tell is we're going to poke a knife through and we want to make sure that those potatoes are tender on the bottom. Like we don't want the potatoes to be hard. All right. That's, that's our only concern here. Grab these, the onion and tomato. You can eat raw. All right. But we need those potatoes to be cooked all the way through. And this is going to give us the perfect amount of time to start on our next dish. Okay. So the next recipe we're making is pasta e patate. Now in Sopranos, Vito refers to it as pasta bidon. Okay. So I think it originates from pasta patan in Naples. Then it got transferred to pasta bidon here, but the easiest and safest way, especially when you're looking up this recipe is pasta e patate. And it means pasta with potatoes, which obviously it's self-explanatory. So the ingredients are very simple here and I'm making it a little bit more elaborate than my grandmother would have made it. And you know, most of the recipes she'd make would be more on the simplified side and like she wouldn't have used pancetta or guanciale in it. Okay. I'm using that here. So you can remove this and just use more olive oil if you want, but I have a quarter pound of it. Roughly. I have a palm rind. That's just going to add a little bit more flavor to it. I have three ounces of tomato paste. I have four cloves of garlic that are sliced. I have one medium onion that is diced. Well, my attempt at a dice anyway. I have extra virgin olive oil. I have a small pasta. You can use lots of small pastas for this. I like tubetti. Okay. That's the Czechos version of ditalini and small shells would work great for it. But farfallini, I think it is the little one, elbow. But I will tell you the majority of the time when my grandmother would make these dishes and she would have a repertoire of many of them, okay. You know, pasta piselli, pasta cecchi, pasta fazool. Every one of them would often be done with what pasta she had left over. So it would be like a combination of like some shells and maybe some ditalini. And then maybe it would be just breaking up some spaghetti or linguine for it. Okay. Just anything to make the dishes as inexpensive as possible. It's symbolic of these dishes. I have two pounds of potatoes that I diced and put in water. I did this just so they're not brown by the time I show you them. You could do this the night before if you want to and they'll be fine. I'm just going to drain it. I mean, you know, you're talking under $10 for the whole family. Okay. So right away, there's two ways to make any pasta dish like this. The better way is to cook the pasta in your liquid, in your sauce. It will absorb the flavor more, but you can also do it the way I'm doing it, which I'm going to boil the water separately. Pasta it's going to be a little quicker this way. And it's also good if you want to do leftovers. You can make your whole potato base, liquid base, and you keep your pasta separate. Okay. You can put it in the fridge. And then when you heat up a bowl of this in the microwave or whatever, you can add your pasta to it and it won't be mushy. That's the one advantage to that. Little less than medium heat. I'm going to add, again, I'm using guanciale, but I would go with pancetta with this, or I would just go with more olive oil and I am adding some olive oil too, even though we're going to get all the fat from there and we'll probably end up adding more olive oil. All right. We want to let this cook until it renders all that fat and that it's crispy. This is a four-quart or five-quart T-fal high-walled pan. It's not ideal for this dish. We're just going to be able to fit everything. I'm just doing it so you could see better with the camera, but this is a recipe that you want to break out your six-quart Dutch oven for. All right. That's been going for about five minutes. I just had this to prevent splashing. That's nice and rendered. Now, I'm going to put in the onion. I'm just going to leave this in here. What's going to happen is it's not going to be crispy anymore, but we got all the fat out of it. If you want to serve this as crispy little pieces on top, you can, but it's not really how this dish is done. All right. I'm putting that onion in and I'm going to let this cook for a few minutes, get that onion soft. Talia, you asked if the guanciale is burnt. It looks a little brown to me. It's getting very brown, this one. So this is a Lucia brand, I think, or Luciano. Luchini. Thank you. That's my third attempt. I don't know if there's a little bit of sugar in it or whatnot, but this, and same thing with their pancetta, gets very dark when you cook it. This brand is very much on the inexpensive side. I think guanciale is only $17 a pound, which, you know, if you go on Amazon, it'll be like 50 or 60 and I just wouldn't buy it. Like, there's no reason. You don't even need it in this dish. Just use olive oil. Okay. And it'll be less expensive too. And you can also use bacon if you want instead of the pancetta. Bacon and pancetta are the same thing. Okay. They come from the belly. All right. It's just Italians, you know, want to make it completely different. Now, if you take a belly and you roll it yourself and you season it, you have pancetta. Most American bacon is smoked. Okay. And then it'll be seasoned with some other ingredients, but they both come from the belly. Guanciale comes from the cheek. So it has a different flavor profile. It's more funky, which I know Tara and the kids don't like it as much. I think James does, but Tara and my daughter, they would always prefer pancetta in a dish over guanciale. The onions are getting nice and soft. So now I'm going to add the garlic and I'm going to let this go for a few minutes. My heat is relatively low. I'm like, I'm probably at a three out of 10 on the heat scale. Okay. So now I'm going to add my potatoes in. So I just drained them. I didn't rinse them. If you rinse them, you know, you keep soaking them, you'll remove more of the starch, but you don't need to. Yeah. I don't know if I'm going to fit everything in here with the pasta. It's going to be tight. I'm going to turn the heat up a little bit. I'm going to add a little bit more olive oil. So no matter what a recipe says, like my recipe, anybody's recipe, if you think you need more oil, you add more oil. All right. Like simple as that. If you start with pancetta or the guanciale, guanciale has more fat, but sometimes pancetta will have just a lot of meat. It won't render too much fat. So if the recipe says start with it and you're like, I really don't have much rendered fat in the pan, you know, use this and then you add more oil. All right. We'll let these go for about five minutes like this. Okay. I'm going to season these up with a little bit of salt and pepper. I'm going to use hot pepper, but in my recipe, I don't have any hot pepper, but I want to add it today. So I'm calling it audible. I believe you don't watch the Sopranos anymore, except for I always watch the Pine Barrens episode. That's the only episode that I really love. But I believe in this one with Vito and Johnny Cakes, he puts hot peppers in it too, which you can do as well. Like he put cherry peppers in it, I think. Or I know he used cherry peppers for the pork chops, but I think he said peppers in here too. Trying to find a clip today. I couldn't even find it. All right. I'm going to add the tomato paste in now. That's three ounces or roughly 80 grams, 85 grams. We want to fry this paste in here with everything else. So let's get it mixed in. Trying to get everything coated with the paste. I'm going to let this go for about five minutes. I'm going to turn the heat up just a touch. All I'm going to do here now is put about two cups of water, you can put even a little bit more. I'm putting that parm rind in there. That's not a part of my recipe either, so I'm just adding another flavor component here. But if you have parm rinds left over, use them for dishes like this. Turn the heat up. I want to bring this to a boil. So this is the part how we're softening the potatoes. Now, there's other ways to do this. You could have parboiled them first, which will speed up a little bit. We're actually going to parboil potatoes for the next recipe that we're doing. And the next recipe we're doing is probably the most iconic of all Italian potato dishes, I would say. Definitely Italian-American. The first two I'm making are Italian. The one that's in the oven, that hails from Bassa La Gatta. That's from my grandmother. That's the part that she's from. All right, so this is boiling, finally. And I'm going to cover it, and I'm going to lower it a little bit. Maybe about a six out of ten. I just want these potatoes to soften now. Okay, so while we have this cooking along, you're going to check your potatoes every so often for fork tenderness. They still need a few minutes. This has been 40 minutes on our casserole. Now this one, the potatoes are, they're getting close. I would say maybe another 10 minutes for this one. And then for this one right here, they're still on the hard side. So this is probably going to take the full 70 minutes because it's thicker, which is fine. But that's all you have to do. You just have to check it. All right, so I'm going to put them both back in the oven. Okay, I'm just going to turn that off for a sec. Check my potatoes. Take like the biggest piece you can find and just see. They're getting close. Yeah, they're getting close. So at this time, I'll just keep cooking it like on a moderate simmer and we can cook our pasta now in that water that we already have set up. Salted water and then just cook your pasta to al dente to exactly how you like it. This is just going to go right in here and then it's going to be pretty much ready to eat. All right, we're about four minutes away from that pasta, maybe five. Check these again. I just took a bite of one. It can go a few more minutes, but pretty soft. In the event that they're not soft enough and like you say, maybe you put your pasta on too long, just drain your pasta. It'll be fine. But you normally want to have like your sauce, everything waiting for your pasta. The other thing that you can consider here is this dish is served a couple different ways. Some people like it on the dry side. So essentially what I have here, the leftover water and the tomato paste, mix the pasta in here. It'll get quite dry, especially if you mix some grated cheese in it. And then other people like it more on the soupy side. So the pasta is about a minute away. Let's taste this right now and adjust salt and pepper. We could do it again when the pasta goes in, but this will give us a good, we want to know, I mean, if these potatoes aren't flavorful enough right now, they're just going to get less flavorful when we add the pasta in. Definitely need more salt. So I'm putting a good amount. I didn't go into it, but these are all, all three of these recipes today use Yukon gold potatoes. They're my favorite potato to use, like universal potato. Like there's really no dish you can't, they just hold together. They hold their shape better. All right. So I'm just bringing it over here with all the pasta water. You can also drain this, but if you do make sure that you save a lot of the pasta water. Like I would save like four cups. This isn't the easiest pasta to drain with something like this, but I'll get most of it. So I'm just going to start by taking some of that pasta water. Start with about a cup. Okay, I'm turning off the heat now because my pasta is done, so I'll pull it off the burner here. I'm just going to mix everything together. I do like making these dishes more by mixing the dry pasta straight into the liquid. You would just add a lot of water to start, like start with like, you know, maybe six cups. As it absorbs, you just add more water as you need it. The pasta will absorb the flavor better. This way, the pasta doesn't change color as much, but it's still good. All right, let's give it a little taste. Delicious. This liquid that's remaining here, it's all going to evaporate. It's going to be quite dry. So I'll add a little bit more now, and I'm going to save all this pasta water to rejuvenate it when the taste tester tries this one along with the other two dishes. All right. All right, so that's pasta patat or pasta badon. Pasta badon. I'm just leaving that cheese in there. And this is definitely a dish you want to serve with a lot of grated Parmesan cheese or pecorino. That looks so good. It's so just representative of what you can do with very little amount of ingredients. You know, you take the guanciale out of here, then you're dealing with olive oil, three ounces of tomato paste, potatoes, and pasta, and water. When you remove the guanciale or the pancetta, it becomes vegetarian, and then it's something that's a popular dish for Fridays and Lent. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Any of these dishes, once you remove that. All right, so we're going to make the last one. This is the most iconic one, definitely. It's a potato egg sandwich. This one and the pepper and egg are very much a part of Italian-American culture. You know, you take these sandwiches to the beach, you take them for lunch. Many people took these to school. So essentially, this is a frittata that has been translated into Italian-American cooking and put on a roll or a gyro. I'm going to use these rolls, nice big rolls. And Jim, when are you coming out with your recipe for the deli rolls? For the deli rolls, these have been proving very hard to make, extremely hard to make. There's nobody online anywhere ever that can make these. Every time they make them, they'll have a weight less than this, and it will be half the size. There's only like two bakeries that make these for the whole entire New York metro region. Two or three. They're commercial bakeries. And then they bring them to all the different bakeries. That's why they all look the same. I've tried many times and I can't get it yet. But I continue to work on it. This has been 70 minutes. We'll just show you this before I go into the other one. Now, it's a little hard still, those potatoes. So it has to cook longer. What do you want on the timer? I'm going to say another 15 minutes or so. No harm here. If it dries out a little bit, just add a little bit more olive oil, which is what I'm going to do to moisten things up. See, if it's too brown, you think it's like burning, just cover it. Okay, so I have six eggs here. All I'm doing is splitting my recipe that is on the website in half. That's for four sandwiches. We're just going to make two sandwiches today. So I've got six eggs. I think it was 10 eggs, which will be fine for four sandwiches. I'll use six. I'm going to use just two medium potatoes that are diced. Two tablespoons Pecorino Romano, two rolls, and then I have some provolone cheese here. Mozzarella would be great too. The cheese is optional. Most of the time, it's not served with cheese. A lot of delis, Italian delis, will make these, and the way they do them there is in a massive sheet pan that they put in the oven. So essentially, they're making very large frittata, which again, that's what this recipe is. It's a frittata that's on a roll. And they will just cut a chunk, put it on either a roll or a gyro for you. Some of them will top it with some cherry tomatoes. I personally love it with some cherry peppers on top and some cheese. All right, so all we're going to do is just parboil these potatoes. So in salted water, and I have, what is this, like a four-quart pot? I just want to cook these until they get almost fork tender. This is going to speed up the process a lot, so we only have to fry them for a few minutes. Okay, and for our egg mixture, you're just going to crack some eggs into a bowl. I'm doing six eggs, which probably a little bit more than we need for two sandwiches. But nothing wrong if these sandwiches are a little bit on the big side. Okay, two tablespoons of Pecorino Romano, good pinch of salt too, black pepper, and that's it. Just beat these together. I'm going to just put this off to the side because we're going to wait for our potatoes, and then we're going to fry them. All right, so I'm going to pull my potatoes off. They're almost fork tender right now, but not quite. I'm just going to lay them out here and dry. You can let them to steam evaporate, or just pat them dry pretty well before we start frying them. And like almost fork tender. Okay, maybe I did it a little bit longer than I should have. No, that's good. Because I'm doing two sandwiches, I'm using a 10-inch nonstick pan. If you're following the full recipe for four, a 12-inch pan would work fine, but this will be good. Okay, I'm going to put some olive oil, maybe a little bit more. All right, so we're just going to put those potatoes in. So basically, whatever amount of potatoes you wanted to kind of get that one layer. So if you're doubling the recipe and you're using a 12, you should be fine. We don't have to get a lot of color on these, we just want to get a little bit lightly golden and cook them. So they're nice and soft when we have it with the egg. If you just want frittata recipes, we have a few of those on our site. And you can make frittatas with anything you want. Anything you have in the fridge, throw it together. Anything that you think will go together, put it in there. And then when you do a regular frittata, I would use just a cast iron pan. I would just use 12 eggs, get your cheese, everything in there, and then just bake it. Bake it until two pick is just a little bit wet still in the middle of it. That's it. Yeah, you don't want to overcook it. Yeah, but we're doing it in a pan today, so we're going to use a little bit different technique. All right, I'm just going to try to move them around, flip them over a little bit if you can. That's pretty much the color that we're looking for there. I mean, there'll be like a little brown on that side, but not much. Just keep the heat around the same, about medium. I'm going to season with salt, pepper, and the cheese one more time. And then just pour it all in. You can mix it together if you want, like a scrambled egg. It's fine to do it that way, but I just like to cover it. It's almost kind of like an omelet almost. Let it go for about three minutes here, and then we're going to flip it. You just don't want to overcook it. You don't want it to be super dry. That's, I mean, that's really the bottom line here. So, you know, maybe check it two minutes. Because there's a lot of eggs in here for the pan, I'm just going to pull, okay, just try to get most of it off there. So it'll hit that side, and just let it keep going. It's probably like two minutes, so it probably will take about four. Okay, so it's been about four minutes. Still quite wet on top, but what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to just put it on this plate, okay, like that. Just get a glove on when you do this so you don't burn yourself, like that. And then flip it. And then now I'm just going to cook this for like a minute. I turned off the heat. Just like another minute. Just take like a toothpick, just go through it, okay, and it should just be like a little bit wet, but not much. This is a lot here. It's definitely more than two sandwiches worth. All right, so you have this side here like this, and then the other side like that. All right, so we got a nice roll. That's a big sandwich. And I like to put foil and paper for the taste tester. So just take a piece of paper like so. More olive oil on it, even on the bottom of the roll and on the top of the roll. You want it to be kind of oily. And then James, I think, is going to like the cheese. Maybe three. I mean, can you put one in between the layers? You definitely can. Yeah. I mean, it's going to melt because I'm wrapping it now anyway. Okay, we're just going to do a wrap on this. Then again, I don't know if I can fit it, yeah, barely. Just got it. So there's your potato egg. I know it's not the most impressive thing, Tara, but it really hits the spot. I was thinking that it needs some cherry peppers. Cherry peppers. You know, I said that, you know, for people, people that are into that sort of thing. I mean, I personally would put it on. And then what's good is when you put it in the foil here, it's going to steam that cheese and keep the egg moist and everything for when the taste tester comes down. So just turning like this, like this, like this. All right, right before we bring the taste tester down, sandwich that we just made. Okay, this is the first one we made, took the longest. Nice casserole. It smells delicious. Finally, pasta pita. This one's going to need a little bit more liquid. You can see how much it dried out, but we'll ask him. Some people like this more on the dry side with just the cheese and some people like it swimming. So I have all that pasta water I saved. We're going to bring them down right now. Okay, James, three dishes all made with majority potato. What is this? That is a potato casserole. Casserole is just that. Casseroles are just that? Okay. Why don't you start with that one first? It's pretty good. I won't say anything about anything yet. What is this? Like pasta vassal? It's pasta pita. So it's pasta with potatoes. So pasta vassal with potatoes, basically. Yeah, just no beans, no vassal. Yeah. The potatoes replace the beans. That looks good. Yeah. I'm not like the biggest fan of this one specifically. I think it's like, it's good, but like, it's not that good. You know, like I'd rather like, it seems like an appetizer. Like I'd rather eat like, like honestly, something else. It's not bad. Like, what do you think could make that better? I'm a little biased because I'm not the biggest fan of breadcrumbs. Like I don't like, I don't like, I don't like baked clams. I don't like breadcrumbs on my mac and cheese. I just don't think breadcrumbs are that good, honestly. I'm not a big fan. These two are good. Like the thing about these two though, is that like, they're like, they're both like very like solid, very good, but they're kind of inferior to other dishes in my opinion. And don't get me wrong, like this and this are great, but pasta fazool is just like better than this. Like, and honestly, like it's not any like more money. It's probably less actually because it's just beans instead of potatoes. They taste exactly the same though. It's literally just like the consistency, like I'd rather eat like a bean than a potato. That's about it. And then potato and egg, like it's great. Like I would get this from like a deli or something, or like I would ask, like I would ask you to make it for me, but like pepper and egg is just better. Like I mean, this, this has more like calories though, I guess. Like with a different cheese. Or cherry peppers. I like cherry peppers. Or roasted red peppers. Oh yeah, cherry peppers on this would be really good. Like I would say right now that this is like a eight and a half out of ten. I don't think it's a nine because I think pepper and egg is like a nine out of ten. Pepper and egg a little wetter. That's what it is, right? I think provolone's good. With some cherry peppers on this though, it'll probably be like a close to like a ten. Roasted red peppers. Some places put like cherry tomatoes on it. Some like vinegar peppers. So that's an eight and a half solid. This honestly, I said it's inferior to pasta visual, but in my opinion, it's like basically the same exact thing. So I would say pasta visual is like a nine. If you make it good, it's a ten. I would say this is a nine. This, I'm not the biggest fan. Like I said, I don't like breadcrumbs really. I'm not going to say it's bad though because I do like the onion to like potato. I feel like potatoes and onions are always good when you eat home fries with some onions in there. So it kind of reminded me of that. So I think that's like solid, but the breadcrumbs kind of just like ruin it for me, but I know you need breadcrumbs. Yeah, without breadcrumbs, it would be very like one dimensional, I think. I'm biased, so I'm going to give it a seven. Okay. All right. So seven, eight and a half and a nine or? Seven, nine, eight and a half. Oh, this gets more than this, huh? Yeah. Okay. All right. Listen, I hope you enjoyed this episode. The thing about this that it's like good, but it's dry. Like I feel like because you're eating like bread, then potato, then egg. The thing about the peppers is that like with the pepper and egg is that it makes it wet. You're right. And that's why on this one I put more oil, but you need even more oil. Yeah. I mean, I don't even think oil will do it. I think you need like, I think you need peppers for this. Or a topping of cherry tomatoes, something like that's really juicy. Honestly, I think pepper, potato and egg would be good. Like the same peppers. Definitely. That's probably the best one, honestly. Yeah. But yeah, that's just my opinion. All right. Well, we appreciate your opinion and we appreciate you watching this type of video. If you want us to make more of these videos where we take a very inexpensive ingredient and we show you how to make three dinners, I mean, because even though James thinks this is an appetizer, you make a really large dish of it and you serve it with a salad, it would be a dinner. And clearly the other two, both served with salads too, are dinners. But there's so many other ingredients that we could do the same thing. Like we could do a video like this with peppers. We could do a video like this with tomatoes. We could definitely do a video with eggplant. I think all three of these dishes total were under $25, maybe $30. But that's talking total. So you get three full dinners from it. Yeah. Make these for like, like just like four of these, like for a family of four. Like it'll fill you up. Like I'm already like almost full from just half of this. And you can make heroes too. Make them even bigger. All right. We'll see you next time.