I’ve been buying Three Bridges Egg Bites from Costco for some time now. Having run out, I homemade a dozen on Wednesday. My wife and I each had one, and the rest got wrapped and frozen. I had two for breakfast yesterday and today (2/day).
They taste good, but they’re a little ‘light’. They’re not as dense as the store-bought ones. This is how I made them:
7 jumbo eggs
Half & Half (we’re out of cream)
6 rashers bacon, cut up and cooked
Shredded medium cheddar cheese
Salt & pepper
I used a hand mixer to mix up the eggs, half & half, salt, and pepper. Normally I’d use a fork, but it was a lot of eggs. I divided the bacon and cheese into the 12 holes in the muffin tin, which I had sprayed with non-stick spray (Pam). 20 minutes at 350ºF, and they were done. They puffed up like a quiche, and then ‘deflated’. As I said, they were ‘light’.
I hadn’t, either, but I’ve never even seen a frittata recipe until just now. If you Google “frittata flour,” you should see a few. I’m not recommending or defending this; just pointing out that it’s not unheard of.
You could also try potato starch, although that’s another one that I have absolutely no experience with. I’d try nuking a potato, mashing it up and mixing it into the egg.
Mix the eggs by hand to only the extent necessary to break up the yolks but not fully mix them, minimize the salt you add and don’t add it to the mix until right before you are ready to pure into the pan, and use cream or full fat kefir instead of half-and-half.
Flour will give a more tenacious or chewy texture owing to the glutenins but I don’t know that it will make it that much more dense unless you add enough to basically make these muffins. The egg mixture by itself should be pretty dense provided it isn’t aerated by overmixing or through reactions with the lactose in the milk.
I love them too, and just looked at one of the packages. The Three Bridges ones use cottage cheese, Monterey Jack cheese and cheddar cheese. No flour, and just milk. Maybe the lack of cottage cheese is the issue?
Could be; I’ve never cooked with cottage cheese but I do use full fat plain yoghurt, which surprisingly has only slightly more fats (5.6 g per 100 calories) than cottage cheese (4.3 g per 100 calories) and about the same carbohydrates which are predominately milk sugars. Both are rich in long chain proteins that don’t tend to break down in cooking unless there are a lot of polar solvents (e.g. salty liquids, most sugars). These tend to make for more dense baked mixtures and omelets because the proteins in the egg white (predominately ovalbumin) form crosslinked polypeptides that tend to coil up, so unless aerated they are quite dense.
I made another batch last night, and I’ve just had a couple for breakfast. I used whipping cream, and I combined the cream and eggs with a fork. They turned out better.
