Lekker Brekker Monday: How to turn leftover risotto into breakfast

Glaring at the leftover risotto in a bakkie in the fridge the other day, I thought: what am I going to do with you? I’d done arancini, not long ago. So I glanced up, and my eye fell upon the egg basket on top of the fridge. You know, up there where you keep the Cremora, as per the Eighties TV commercial? And whenever I look up there (at the eggs, not the Cremora), my mind goes straight to breakfast.

A risotto dish is so filling that there is often some left over. I cook risotto many ways — with bacon and tomato, butternut, green beans and peas and other ways too — and there is always just too much. Or you can just cook too much on purpose, with breakfast in mind.

The most famous way of using leftover risotto is to make arancini, which are risotto balls, coated in crumbs and fried or baked. Or you can turn the leftovers into risotto patties, much the same as arancini but flattened to be shaped like burger patties.

But, I thought, surely cooked risotto rice (chunkier and firmer than most other rice varieties) would work as the carrier, as it were, of an Italian-style omelette? So, as I often do, I committed the thought to Uncle Google, who responded with a slew of examples of exactly that. It was a thing: recipes existed for risotto frittata. That was all I needed to know.

Read more in Daily Maverick: 

• Broccoli and Cheddar cheese risotto


• Tomato and bacon risotto


• Saffron prawn risotto