Strapatsada

Eggs scrambled INTO a reduced tomato rather than cooked beside it, so the whole pan is one colour.

Egg. Not vegetarian — contains feta whose rennet the source does not name.

Ingredients

• 800 g very ripe tomatoes
• 6 eggs
• 150 g feta, crumbled
• 5 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• a few basil or mint leaves
• salt and pepper

Method

1. THE EGGS ARE SCRAMBLED INTO THE TOMATO, NOT COOKED BESIDE IT. This is worth saying plainly because there is a Chinese dish on this site that looks like the same sentence and is made the opposite way: there the eggs are cooked, taken OUT, and folded back at the end so the curds stay gold and separate. Here they go into the hot tomato raw and are stirred through it until the pan is one orange-red mass with no distinct egg in it anywhere. Both are right; they are different dishes.
2. THE TOMATO IS REDUCED FIRST AND HARD. Eggs added to a wet tomato give a watery scramble that will not come together, and there is no fixing it once the egg is in. The pan should be nearly dry before an egg goes near it.
3. Tomatoes grated on a coarse grater, cut face down, until only the skins are left in the hand. Grated rather than chopped because the pulp breaks down in minutes where pieces take twenty.
4. Oil in a wide frying pan over a high heat. Tomato pulp in with the sugar and some salt.
5. Cooked hard 10 to 12 minutes, stirring, until it has darkened, thickened and pulled away from the sides. A spoon drawn through should leave a channel that holds.
6. Heat to MEDIUM-LOW.
7. Eggs broken straight into the pan -- not beaten in a bowl first. Beaten, they go in as a uniform liquid and set as a sheet; broken in and stirred, the whites and yolks catch the tomato at slightly different rates.
8. Stirred slowly and constantly with a wooden spoon, 2 to 3 minutes, scraping the base. It will look wrong and loose for most of that and then come together suddenly.
9. OFF THE HEAT WHILE IT STILL LOOKS SLIGHTLY UNDERDONE -- it carries on setting in the pan for another half minute.
10. Feta crumbled over and folded through twice only, so it stays in lumps rather than melting away.
11. Pepper, herbs torn over, and eaten at once from the pan with bread.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Greece · All recipes