It’s been years since I’ve made a sformato. Hard to say why. A sformato is one of the most versatile dishes imaginable. You can make it out of just about any vegetable (and not only vegetables) and serve it for just about any course, on just about any occasion, from the most casual of meals to the fanciest of dinners. And to top it off, aside from a little prep work, a sformato super easy to make.

If you’re not aware, a sformato is something like a savory flan. Or perhaps a soufflé without the puff. The basic recipe could hardly be simpler—you make a batter of puréed or finely minced or diced main ingredient, typically but not always a vegetable, mixed with béchamel and eggs, then bake it until set.

Practically any vegetable you fancy is fair game for sformato making, so you can serve it all year round: peas or asparagus in the spring, zucchini or green beans in the summer, pumpkin or mushrooms in the autumn or winter, and so on. For this week’s post I decided I’d make a sformato di spinaci. Spinach makes an especially fine sformato, as its flavor lends itself beautifully to pairing with cheese and béchamel. These days you can find spinach all year long, but with fresh young spinach is in the markets—but not for long—now’s the perfect time for sformato di spinaci.

Serve it simple or fancy, your choice…

Classically, a sformato is baked in a loaf or ring pan and served unmolded, then sliced and sometimes napped with a sauce. (Hence the name, which means ‘unmolded’.) Served like this, it makes an elegant antipasto fit for the fanciest dinner party. Back in the day, in fact, it was often served this way as an intermezzo between the first and second courses during extravagant multicourse banquets. These days it could also be a light vegetable-centric main course.

But for everyday cooking, it’s not uncommon to bake a sformato in baking dish or cassrole and then serve it by the spoonful directly from its cooking vessel. In this homey incarnation, a sformato can serve also as a side dish, though admittedly a rather rich one, best reserved for accompanying simply roasted or gilled meats or fish.

Ingredients

500g (1 lb) young spinach, trimmed of its stems
One half recipe of béchamel sauce
3 eggs
100g (3-1/2 oz) of grated Parmesan cheese
Salt and pepper
butter, as needed

Directions

Prep the spinach

Wash the spinach leaves well in a large mixing bowl and pour out the water. If you find any grit at the bottom of the bowl, repeat. Otherwise, transfer the still wet spinach leaves to a large sauté pan or rondeau. Cook, covered, over moderate heat, just until they wilt. This should take no more than a couple of minutes.

Transfer the spinach to a colander and run them under cold water. Then let them drain.

When the spinach has thoroughly drained, take them by the handful and squeeze it dry. Mince them rather finely.

Prepare the béchamel

Following the directions in this recipe, prepare a half batch of béchamel sauce.

Let cool.

Mix and bake the batter

In a large mixing bowl, stir together the spinach and bechamel. Then add the cheese, salt and pepper. Taste and adjust for seasoning, then add the eggs.

Pour the batter into a well buttered baking dish. Dot the top with bits of butter.

Place the baking dish on a large roasting pan or baking sheet and add water all around.

Bake in a moderate (180C/350F) oven for 30-45 minutes, or until cooked through and lightly browned on top. Test doneness by inserting a small knife into the sformato. If the knife comes out clean, it should be done.

If not browned on top to your liking, you can run the sformato under the broiler for a minute or two.

Let cool for a few minutes before serving.

Notes on sformato di spinaci

As mentioned at the top, the recipe involves a bit of work to prep the spinach and the béchamel, but other than that it’s about as straightforward as it gets. Just mix the batter and bake. Normally the trickiest part of a sformato making is the unmolding, and this homey way of serving it eliminates even that bother.

Prepping the spinach

It used to be that spinach was sold very mature. That kind of spinach, with crinkly dark green leaves and thick stems, required pulling the leaves off their stems. And lots of washing to eliminate its massive amounts of grit. Nowadays, we are lucky. Spinach is usually sold young and pre-washed. Sometimes even pre-trimmed of their stems.

So adjust your approach accordingly. Trim off any stems, unless they’re very slender. And I would still give the spinach a rinse regardless just to be on the safe side. Young spinach only needs a quick wilting as described in the recipe above. Older spinach is tougher, and should be boiled in lots of water.

And if you want to eliminate this prep work, you could use frozen, already chopped spinach. Just defrost it before adding it to the batter.

Preparing the béchamel

In Italy they sell premade, shelf-stable béchamel sauce, something I haven’t seen in North American markets except online at rather unreasonable prices. So it’s best to make your own. It can be a bit tricky to achieve a lumpfree béchamel, but if you use Wondra flour (or its equivalent) it’s very simple indeed. See our post on béchamel sauce for details.

You can dispense with the béchamel and use ricotta instead. For this recipe, you could use as little as 250g (1/2 lb) or as much as 500g (1 lb) the eqvuilvent of a small tub, depending on your taste. Most recipes, however, land on the lower end of this scale. Your sformato won’t be quite as creamy as it would be if you use béchamel, but it will be a bit lighter and plenty tasty. Spinach and ricotta get along famously and appear frequently in Italian cookery.

Variations

Recipes for sformati are all over the map when it comes to the number of eggs and how thick the bechamel should be.

For this recipe, which is meant to produce a soft and spoonable sformato for serving straight from the casserole as a side dish, I’ve gone light(ish) on the eggs and made a bechamel of standard thickness. If you really want to lean into the veg for a rather lighter dish, you can double the amount of spinach (or half the amount of bechamel).

Sformato di spinaci as an antipasto

If you want to serve your sformato di spinaci in the classic way as an antipasto or even a light main course, then add another egg or even two, and/or double the amount of flour in the béchamel. That should produce a sformato stiff enough to retain its shape when it’s unmolded.

As mentioned at the top, you bake the batter in a loaf pan or ring mold rather than a baking dish (without dotting the top with butter) for 30-45 minutes. There’s no need for the top to brown, as it will wind up on the bottom of your unmolded sformato, but the batter needs to be fully cooked. For an extra fancy presentation, you can bake sformatini (little sformatos) in individual ramekins, They only take 15-20 minutes baking. (See this post for details.)

When it’s done, unmold your sformato onto a serving platter and slice it up. Or turn your sformatini onto individual plates.

And if you really want to gild the lily, nap your sformato or sformatini with a sauce made from parmigiano-reggiano or another meltable cheese like perhaps taleggio melted with heavy cream. You can find the recipe here.

Other variations

For a richer, more substantial sformato di spinaci, you can add other melting cheeses to the batter like a cubed gruyere or Emmanthal. And for carnivores, a handful of cubed cooked ham would turn this into a very substantial antipasto or a light main course.

Finally, if you enjoy a bit of crunch, you can line the baking dish with breadcrumbs and top it with breadcrumbs as well.

Making sformato di spinaci ahead and leftovers

This recipe leands itself well to making ahead. Just reheat it gently in a low oven for about 10-15 minutes, just long enough to warm it up a bit. It is also not bad at room temperature. Do the same with leftovers.

Print Recipe

No ratings yet