Para-Regal

I’ve been meaning to try out the Low FODMAP Tortilla & Baked Eggs recipe from A Little Bit Yummy for a while now, and figured today’s as good a day as any.

Modifications:

• I used a flour tortilla, which, according to the Fig app is a “yellow” food (meaning it “may fit” LoFo requirements in single servings), but as always, go by what YOU can safely eat.
• I kind of went a bit nutty on adding shredded Mexican cheese. I love cheese, and I can tolerate it in fairly decent quantities as long as it’s not a soft cheese. YMMV.
• I left off tomatoes because, well, I didn’t have any on hand. Instead, I sprinkled the serving with Crystal Hot Sauce to give it a little oomph. The Spoonful database says there’s some potential problematic ingredients in Crystal, mainly corn and nightshades, so if you’re sensitive to either of those, steer clear.
• I may regret it, but I did line the bottom of the tortilla with baby spinach. Baby spinach and I sometimes do not get along. We shall see how it goes today.

Thoughts:

• Overall, good! I liked the outcome enough to eat it again. It does come out a tad bland, however, so I would increase seasoning with salt & pepper for sure. Maybe next time I’ll also throw on some ground cumin.
• Next time, tomatoes for sure. And cilantro. It needs more flavor, imho.
• I used an 8″ cast iron pan to bake it in the oven, which worked well with my 10″ flour tortilla, giving it just enough of a “lip” to keep the eggs contained and not escape underneath the tortilla.
• Baking eggs continues to be hit or miss for me, technique-wise. I set the oven to 375 F, because my oven tends to run a little lower, and I think I got the temp right, but 15 minutes may have been too long. I like a jammy yolk, not super runny but also not firmly set, and this attempt resulted in eggs that were more on the set side than the jammy side.

All in all, not bad, and a good recipe to use as a base for riffing on. I think next time, I’ll give it a try with a corn tortilla just to see whether that adds anything noteworthy.

Edit: I came back this morning and decided to try the recipe again.

• This time I used my smallest 4″ cast iron pan, because I was out of the 10″ tortillas and had only street taco-sized corn tortillas on hand.
• After yesterday’s first attempt with the flour tortilla, I experienced some mild gas and discomfort and a slight bathroom emergency about an hour after eating. Omitting the flour tortilla and using the corn tortillas is part of yet another experiment in LoFo triggers. Corn should theoretically be safer than flour.
• I also omitted the spinach layer, because that also could have been the issue yesterday. Historically, spinach and I have had a tentative understanding, but sometimes it chooses violence.

• The small cast iron pan was still too big for just 1 street taco tortilla so I layered 3 tortillas to create enough of a “dish” so the ingredients wouldn’t spill over or leak under the tortilla base.
• I laid down a layer of shredded cheese first then cracked my eggs on it and added another layer of cheese on top. I then added green onion, salt, pepper, and cumin.
• Everything got baked in a 375 F oven like before, but for some reason, the egg whites weren’t setting at the same rate as yesterday’s attempt. The oven rack was probably too low for the smaller sized pan. It took me close to 20 minutes before the whites had set enough, but by that time, the yolks had also set… sigh.

• The finished dish! Flavor was better than yesterday, thanks to the cumin. I still had to add some hot sauce to the mix in order to bump it up a little bit more, though.
• The corn tortillas did actually bring something interesting to the palette. The one drawback was having to layer them in the pan meant that they never did get all that crispy except around the edges. I think I prefer the corn flavor over the flour, so next time I try this I’m going to get larger corn tortillas so I don’t have to layer so many.