July 13, 2020
I published a photo for this dish on my Facebook feed last week and got so much attention that I decided to actually post the recipe.
Sformato di Spinaci (spinach sformato or, if you must, spinach casserole) is a dish that garners great reverence in my husband’s family. A while ago, I published my adaptation of the family recipe.
I make sformati out of lots of different vegetables besides spinach, including Swiss chard, zucchini, and cauliflower, among others.
Sometimes I swap out the ground beef in my husband’s grandmother’s recipe for sausage or Calabrese salame, or mushrooms. This is a heretical act in his family but everyone still eats the sformato. This is compounded by the blasphemy of adding besciamella to the mix.
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Although I make several versions of potato “cakes” I never thought of them as sformati until I stumbled upon the genre while perusing Italian-language food websites.
Although I had mixed meat, such as salame or prosciutto, and cheese into the potato mixture before baking it, I had never made a layer of filling in the middle. Doing so changes the whole character of the dish. It really feels like a main course (or what would be a secondo in an Italian meal) rather than gussied up potatoes that should be served as a side dish (contorno)!
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When serving sformato di patate, I often start with soup and end with a salad… unless it’s a meal for which I developed a new gelato flavor to try! (This happens once, if not twice, per week… the gelato, not the sformato!)
This recipe calls for prosciutto cotto (cooked ham). This is not the cured ham that we simply call “prosciutto” in English. It really is just a cooked ham. Typically, it would not be smoked. I have successfully made this with good quality ham from the deli counter as well a fully-cooked lightly-smoked ham from the meat counter.
Since the cheese is smoked, I find that smoked ham works as well as un-smoked ham though the former is more traditional.
| Prep Time | 30 minutes |
| Cook Time | 90 minutes |
| Passive Time | 15 minutes |
| Servings |
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- 1.1 kilograms russet potatoes
- 2 eggs lightly beaten
- 50 grams Parmigiano Reggiano cheese freshly grated
- 50 grams whole milk
- 200 grams smoked scamorza or provola cheese thinly sliced
- 150 g prosciutto cotto very thinly sliced
- 1 sprig fresh rosemary or two if you prefer
- butter room temperature
- fine dry breadcrumbs unflavored
- salt
- black pepper freshly ground
Ingredients
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- Peel the potatoes. Dice and cook in salted water until they can be easily pierced with a fork but are not falling apart.
- While still hot, pass the potatoes through a ricer and allow to cool until they are comfortable to touch.
- Combine potatoes with eggs, Parmigiano and milk. Mix well. Add salt and pepper to taste.
- Butter a 22 cm springform pan and coat with fine dry breadcrumbs.
- Press about 60% of the potato mixture onto the bottom and up the sides of the pan.
- Layer the prosciutto and scamorza inside, making two alternating layers of each.
- Top with the remaining potato mixture and smooth the top.
- Sprinkle the top with breadcrumbs and dot generously with butter.
- Bake at 350°F for approximately one hour, until golden, adding the rosemary sprig to the top of the sformato after about 20 minutes of baking.
- After an hour, the internal temperature should be close enough to 165°F that it will reach that temperature while it rests.
- Remove from the oven and allow to cool approximately 15 minutes before removing the sides of the pan and serving.
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