Cheese Eggs and Potatoes Skillet

Ingredient Notes

Traditionally, a large pan was prepared for the whole family, and it could include the following ingredients:

• Oil, Margarine or Butter — the farmers would prepare butter, which was for sale only, and they would use margarine instead at home. I, however, recommend preparing this with butter instead of margarine because of the trans fats in margarine.
• Onion — mostly white onions as these were most commonly grown in the garden
• Garlic — because you can't possibly make anything without garlic, even in central Europe
• Potatoes — mostly a semi-hard variety of larger potatoes or, at times, red potatoes
• Speck — The local equivalent to the English bacon, but it's mostly smoked and cured. For those who prepared their own, although it was a luxury during certain times, especially during the wars. Bacon was not a thing in central Europe; that's American or British.
• Eggs
• Salt
• Black Pepper
• Cheese — The main star is cheese, and yes, not all of them would include cheese molten over the skillet dish. Some would just have cheese pieces at the side with black bread and a glass of milk. The cheese used is always a local cheese from the Alms. Each farmer would have something called an Alm, a summer mountain hut, where the cows would graze for a few months in the year and the farmers would live there as well and prepare cheese.
• Chives — freshly sliced or fresh parsley are often while used to garnish the fried potato and egg skillet.

For my fried eggs and potatoes recipe further below, I use all these ingredients except the Speck/bacon because I prepare it most of the time without it anyway. However, you may want to add some.

When farmer families would prepare this potato skillet, they would prepare it in a big skillet and serve it in the same skillet by placing it in the center of the table. Most of the time, the potatoes would be overly fried, crispy, and almost black in color.

Every member of the family would then take a soup spoon and enjoy the pan meal together. This kind of serving and eating a meal practice is still commonplace in some parts of the world, such as the Maghreb (Marocco etc).

Skillet Options

To make this delicious, satisfying potato meal at home, you will need a good skillet.

In older times they would use something like a cast iron skillet (and today these pans are popular again!), and it does make sense to use and have one because they are sturdy and they give you the option to slide the pan into the oven to cook food further.

Yet, cast iron skillets are heavy, and you will need more oils and fats to keep the food from sticking to them. In that case, a lighter PFOA-free non-stick skillet can be helpful.

Sliced potatoes have a tendency to stick, so if you would rather not deal with that, then the non-stick pan is your friend. In that case, with a non-stick pan, always use a wooden spatula to not scratch the pan.

Your third pan option would be to use a stainless skillet. Those are sturdy, not too heavy, and are a great compromise between cast iron and non-stick pans.

So if you want something solid where you don't want to worry about harmful non-stick surfaces, then stainless steel is your thing to cook the sliced potatoes crispy.