Oven Breakfast Skillet Scramble

There is rarely a Friday night that we don’t cook pizza…entertaining (there is no shortage of willing participants for pizza night) or just for our little family of three. One of the benefits of having a well insulated oven with good thermal mass is the ability to use that retained heat with little extra fuel to make additional meals.

In the early days, we would cook pizza on a Friday night and then just let the fire burn out. But we wanted to cook MORE than pizza in our amazing oven. Could we keep the oven hot and make breakfast or dinner in the next day or two? The answer is yes! Now on weekends that aren’t insanely busy, we use the oven as much as possible after the initial firing. On a recent weekend we made pizza Friday, dinner Saturday, AND breakfast and dinner on Sunday. That breakfast is the highlight of this post.

The vent on our Forno Piombo oven is outside the door. This allows for more flexibility in controlling heat after the initial firing. For example, if the door is closed completely after our Friday night pizza party, little heat will escape because it can’t go up the chimney. However, there is no oxygen circulating so this will also snuff out the fire eventually turning to charcoal. The door can also be left partially open or off entirely. This will help to cool the oven down if lower temperatures are needed for the next dish on the menu.

For our breakfast skillet scramble, we were working about 36 hours post pizza. The oven had been used 12 hours prior for cooking chicken but this was at a lower temperature than pizza would be cooked. After cooking dinner the previous evening, the flame was allowed to extinguish, the hot coals were left banked and the door was closed tight. In the morning, the door was removed and the coals stirred. One log was added and the fire was back very quickly.

While the oven heated, I chopped the vegetables. Spring in Arizona means beautiful peppers and asparagus, so they were the base of our skillet along with some zucchini.

We like our food spicy, so a little Fresno pepper snuck into the skillet as well. You can use any vegetables that appeal to you (on a subsequent Sunday we added spinach to the mix but just before the eggs went into the skillet). I started with some olive oil in a cold cast iron skillet, added the veggies and seasoned with salt and pepper. We slid the skillet into the oven to roast the vegetables. The skillet was placed near the fire initially and moved farther from the flame as it got hot.

The smell of roasting vegetables was divine! Precooked and chopped bacon was added.

Six eggs were beaten with a little bit of milk and poured over the vegetables when they were tender. The skillet went back into the oven and eggs were stirred occasionally to scramble and combine evenly with other ingredients.

While the eggs were cooking, I sliced a loaf of Noble country bread from the local farmers’ market for oven fired toast. This was a first!

The slices were lightly drizzled with olive oil on both sides and placed on a quarter sheet pan. There was plenty of room to put the toast in the oven with the egg skillet.

When it seemed that the toast was not cooking quickly enough on the top surface, it was lifted up near the dome as you would a pizza that’s toppings are not cooking quickly enough. The bread was flipped in the pan and came out with the perfect amount of crunch and chew.

When the eggs were almost done grated cheddar was sprinkled on top and melted in the oven. A little cilantro was added for a fresh element before serving.

This was an easy breakfast to put together while sipping a mimosa outside on a beautiful spring morning.

For more great food and fire, please like us on Facebook and follow us on Instagram!