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crispy frico caesar salad
Why serve your salad on regular plates when you can serve it on plates made of cheese? Introducing crispy, cheesy frico (“FREE-ko”)—it’s fun to say and even more fun to eat!
Prepare Ingredients
Gather Cooking Equipment
Trace bowl or plate on parchment paper and shape 4 frico.
Preparing Frico
Place bowl upside-down on left side of 1 sheet of parchment paper. Trace around edge of bowl to create circle with 7-inch diameter. Repeat on right side of parchment. Repeat again on second sheet of parchment.
Flip each sheet of parchment marked side down and place 1 in each rimmed baking sheet. Spray both sheets of parchment paper with vegetable oil spray.
Place ½ cup cheese in center of each circle. Spread cheese to edge of circle in thin, even layer.
Use oven mitts to remove baking sheets from oven (ask an adult for help). Place baking sheets on cooling racks and let cool for 10 minutes.
Use thin metal spatula to carefully lift frico off parchment paper and transfer each frico to serving plate.
In large bowl, whisk together mayonnaise, lemon juice, mustard, oil, Worcestershire, anchovies (if using), garlic, pepper, and salt.
Food for Thought
Frico: The One-Ingredient Wonder
It takes only one ingredient to create crisp, golden frico: cheese! But you can’t use just any cheese to make frico. It has to be a hard, aged cheese, such as Asiago or Parmesan. Not “aged” like your grandparents or cheese that’s been sitting in your refrigerator for months: In the cheese world, “aged” means that the cheese has spent time—from a few months to more than a year—sitting in a climate-controlled room before it’s sold. As a cheese ages, it loses water through evaporation and becomes harder. Aged cheeses are also more flavorful—bonus!
When you melt an aged cheese like Asiago, it dries out quickly (because it has less water to start with) and then becomes crispy and golden brown. If you tried to make frico with a young cheese, like Monterey Jack, which contains more water, it wouldn’t work. Monterey Jack gets soft and gooey when you heat it, rather than brown and crispy.
Flavorful frico hails from the northeast corner of Italy. It’s traditionally made with a cheese called Montasio, which can be hard to find in the United States, so salty, nutty Asiago (“Ah-see-AH-go”) is a good substitute.
