Parmesan, but better: The magic of frico

I love frico.

Also called — though a much more pedestrian name — “Parmesan crisps,” frico offers the perfect bite: crispy, salty, cheesy and deeply savory. It elevates anything, from a pasta dish to a salad to a soup or sandwich, but it’s arguably the most delicious when eaten (and enjoyed) on its own.

I love the little incidental frico bits that are created when a cheesy, stuffed chicken oozes during the cooking process and the cheese crisps up on the sheet tray. I adore the crispy, cheesy frico-adjacent bits that emerge in the corners of baked pasta like lasagna or baked ziti. I’m also a fan of intentionally included frico, like small crisps interspersed throughout a delicately sauced pasta or a green salad that has crunchy bits of frico all throughout for texture, color and flavor.

No matter how frico comes about — whether intentional or otherwise — it is always welcome and delicious. 

Back in October, after speaking with food content creator and cookbook author Owen Han, I described frico as such: “lacy, gossamer, uber-crispy cooked flats of parmesan cheese.” In Han’s cookbook “Stacked,” he adds the perfect crisps to a stellar turkey sandwich with pesto, red onions, pickled banana pepper and Calabrian mayonnaise. 

Now, it should also be noted, not all frico is created equally. Most equate frico with a tuile made from Parmesan or Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, but I am just as enamored of gruyere frico. Another good visual cue is how akin a frico is to the 'skirt' or lace that usually forms around pan-fried dumplings.

I initially discovered the wonder of gruyere in a frico in a feat of happenstance, when in culinary school during a practical (sort of like a culinary final or midterm), I accidentally let some fennel tossed with gruyere and Parmesan go a little longer in the oven than I had initially intended. 

The dish itself was a bit overwrought and ostentatious, but the fennel frico was unforgettable. The vegetable was bronzed, the cheese melted and browned, perfect curlicues of crisped cheese enveloping each strand of roasted fennel. I remember the chef-instructor saying, “Hmm, this fennel? How did you make it?”

For what it’s worth, that practical dish earned me the highest score among my class — not that I’m one to brag (though, clearly, I am).

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In turn, of course, I then made this fennel-and-cheese dish ad nauseam in the ensuing years. As I phrased it back when I first wrote about the dish, “The cheeses meld together to form the most delicious, frico-laced roasted and blistered fennel imaginable.”

Originally, frico is said to have referred to a dish from Friuli — which Han notes as a “mountainous region in northern Italy” — made with Montasio cheese, often cooked into large, pancake-sized rounds. But nowadays, the term is just likely to describe the often-smaller Parmesan crisps found in salads, pastas or elsewhere.

It should also be noted that for some, like famed chef Lidia Bastianich, frico also applies to a potato, onion and cheese savory cake, which is cooked on the stove in a large pan until it is browned, crisped and aromatic. It is delicious, but when we made this in culinary school, the sheer finesse and difficulty of the dish (flipping it is, to put it lightly, challenging) made it just a bit less enjoyable or imminently cravable for me.

Let's be real: they’re all wonderful. But I find a frico to be most terrific when it’s just the cheese and nothing else. 

In Gabrielle Hamilton’s stunning, encyclopedia-length tome “Prune,” she details the “giant frico” recipe at her magnificent (yet now-shuttered) restaurant at in precise detail, writing “as the cheese melts and gets lacy, watch for golden, toasty edges.” She also advises the cook that “sometimes they aren’t crispy enough because you have over-portioned the cheese, not scattered it evenly into the pan, or not toasted long enough. Conversely, if you put too little cheese in the pan, the frico shattered from lack of structure. Finally, if you cook them too dark, they can turn profoundly bitter." 

She finishes with an important note, that “it’s an expensive ingredient to have to trash.” 

For me, though, I think that’s part of what makes frico so magical.

I like the risk, I guess. Some nights, when I’m sick or tired or not trying to cook, order or pick up food, I’ll make frico. Sometimes, I’ll even use mozzarella, if I have it on hand.

I’ll gussy it up, mixing together cheeses (like the standards, gruyere or Parm), along with some garlic or onion powder or even a touch of salt and making little piles on a silpat-lined sheet tray. 

I’ll cook it in the oven and watch as the little piles melt, softening and withering in the heat, before turning into little puddles of melted cheese as they crisp around the edges. I like to risk danger further and cook them until they’ve browned just a bit more, almost singed or even dancing on the precipice of burnt at the edges, before removing them from the oven and letting them cool entirely, the flattened cheese pools hardening as they cool and becoming almost chip-like. 

Then, I retreat to the living room, devouring them with nothing but a pile of oil-slicked napkins nearby — completely satisfied with my cheese-centric, minimalist dinner.

Parmegiano-Reggiano is one of the world’s perfect foods. But applying some heat and a bit of extra time to a humble pile of grated cheese — and something even more magical happens.

Now that’s something special to truly savor.