Betcha Can Eat Just One - Potato Chip Tortilla

Potato Chip Tortilla

When it comes to potato chips, I am the consumer Young & Rubicam had in mind when creating the iconic slogan for Lay’s Potato Chips:  “Betcha can’t eat just one.”  And I can’t.  It doesn’t matter whether the potato chips are traditional, baked, Hawaiian style, flavored or my favorite, Rusty’s Potato Chips from Balboa Island.  I eat them by the handful if they are proffered.  But while potato chips may be haute cuisine within the snack foods category, I don’t think of them as a primary ingredient in French cooking.  So I was intrigued that Jean-Francois Piege, former chef at Les Ambassadeurs—the Michelin-starred restaurant at Le Crillon--would pair one of my favorite snacks with eggs to create what the French call a “clin d’oeil.”  In this case, a “wink” at the original Basque Tortilla that is essentially a frittata made with cubed potatoes. 

I am from Montana originally and a tortilla meant a small, flat disk of cooked flour or corn that you slathered with butter or refried beans or wrapped around chicken, beef, fish or cheese.  But some time ago, my intrepid sous chef told about his dining experience in Madrid where “tortilla” meant something like a frittata.  So I was not surprised by the nature or manifestation of this recipe. 

Simple pantry ingredients - nothing special required

The Potato Chip Tortilla is very simple to make, with only a few items to prep and minimal cooking time.   Potato chips are crushed by hand and put into a separate bowl.  Then in another bowl the eggs are added to chopped onions or scallions, or a combination of both, along with fresh herbs (parsley, basil and cilantro) and a little piment d’espelette (Basque red pepper) or cayenne pepper.  The wet mixture is poured over the potato chips and they are mixed together.   A cast iron pan is heated on the stove with olive oil over medium high heat, and when hot the egg and potato chip mixture is cooked for approximately 2 ½ minutes before transferring to the broiler for one minute to firm up the top of the mixture.  Lunch or brunch in less than 15 minutes.

Eggs, Onion, Scallion, & Fresh Herbs

Egg mixture is combined with crushed potato chips

2 1/2 minutes on stovetop before broiling for 1 minute to set top

The result was aesthetically pleasing, certainly edible, but, to our taste, rather bland.  It was like a Mexican tortilla that serves as the base for flavorful ingredients, except here there were no real flavors to support.  So we marked the dish “not bad, not great, and certainly not memorable.” 

Finished product with a little garnishment of fresh herbs and tomato

We debated about making it again, thinking something had gone wrong in the preparation or that the curly parsley we used instead of the mysteriously unavailable Italian flat parsley was the culprit.  Iwanted to add bacon, cheese and salsa, but my sous chef pointed out we would not be “winking” at the Basque Tortilla, merely recreating it.  So we dumped the remainder in the trash and moved on.  In this case, we certainly had no problem “eating just one.”

This recipe can be found in Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan, page 141.  

To read about other French Friday with Dorie experiences with the Potato Chip Tortilla:

www.frenchfridayswithdorie.com