In which the perfect omelette is an act of love, and patience (mostly patience)

[zeborah]

My mother used to make us scrambled eggs on toast, which is an act of love and determination to quickly feed five hungry kids while also trying to keep a house in a semblance of order and also the kids from killing each other and/or themselves.

When my father cooked for us, it was with that perfectionism that comes from only having to cook when you really want to, and not having responsibility for the rest of the house or childcare at the same time. He made the perfect omelette.

The perfect omelette requires separating whites and yolks. Beat the whites forever and an age until they form stiff peaks. Carefully fold in the rest of the ingredients. Get the frying pan to the perfect temperature, and cook slowly. You can't be in a hurry to finish, or the bottom will burn while the middle's still raw. The top will stubbornly stay raw anyway, so you can either quarter the omelette and carefully flip each quarter in the pan, or you can put the whole pan under the grill in the oven at a low temperature and cook the top slowly. This latter method feels obscurely like cheating but it does get much tidier results. Finally you serve it with another wodge of butter melting on the top -- and then if you're making them for more than two not-very-hungry people, you go back and do it all again.

Dad's omelettes were thick and fluffy and delicious.

When I was in France and went to visit my penpal in her village near Avignon, I'd just arrived from the train station and she asked if I wanted an omelette. I was daunted by so generous an offer of so much labour, but she seemed keen, so I accepted, and she made... I still don't have a word for it that satisfies me. She beat the eggs whole, yolk and whites together, then added the ingredients: no thick white peaks. No fluffiness. To my mind it was scrambled eggs without actually scrambling them (which you do with a fork, in a saucepan with butter, to get large grains of egg while avoiding the bottom burning. I never said scrambled eggs were an unskilled act).

It was still delicious, of course. I ate it gratefully and put the episode down to cultural differences. Clearly this was the one thing the French did not know how to cook. (Well, that and hokey pokey.)

I still can't imagine asking someone to cook me an omelette unless there were exigent circumstances, like I was on my deathbed and it was my dying wish. For someone to offer to make me one -- now that I'm adult I have to imagine this in the third person, because romance and me does not compute, but I imagine it as a declaration of love, and a scene of perfect domestic felicity.



Today's omelette was not the perfect omelette, because I was impatient in the prep work. For one thing I managed to get some yolk in the white, though miraculously it still whipped up fairly well. Also I forgot to actually fry up the ingredients beforehand, and also to stir the yolk in with the other ingredients. Little things like that.

But my cooking was perfect. I heated the frying pan to hot-hot, and sizzled some butter around, and poured the proto-omelette in, and turned off the heat, and did some washing up and some grating of cheese. I have a solid cast-iron pan, which holds the heat nicely. When I could lift the edges away from the side and see the bottom was a nice golden brown, I put the frying pan under the grill at 125C. I was taking a guess at this, but it seemed to work. When the top was just about to start darkening, I took it out to spread cheese over, then put it back in while I used the yolks which should have been in the omelette to make custard.

(Custard is also an act of patience because you have to mix the cornflour-yolk paste into the milk slowly in order to avoid lumps (for best results, mix the milk little by little into the paste), and then you have to stir forever, and then you have to let it cool for an age, and then chances are it's still too runny because the recipe should have more cornflour or less milk.)

When the omelette was ready - this is the part I'm proudest of - I lifted/slid it out of the pan whole onto my plate.

One day I'll be patient enough to do the prep work right, and also to replicate this cooking methodology, and I truly will have the perfect omelette.

Comments

[green_knight]

caper_est makes omelettes by beating them fine with spices, cooking the bottom perfectly, then flipping over the top so it cooks itself. (We've done the under-the grill method, too.)

A good omelette is a thing of beauty. Congrats on achieving it.

[brooksmoses]

That sounds amazingly good.

And also, wow, cultural differences, yes. In the U.S., a critical feature of omelettes is that they are folded in half, with a fair bit of melty cheese in the middle, rather like a quesadilla made of egg instead of tortilla. Other ingredients (ham, onions, peppers, etc) may optionally be cooked into the egg or placed on top of the egg (along with the cheese) before folding.

What sorts of other ingredients do you usually put in an omelette?

Amusingly, I made something that came out rather like your style of omelette for dinner the other night, although less fluffy because I was thinking of it as something like a crustless quiche, so I didn't separate the eggs (which I shall have to try next time!) and added a good splash of cream ... but still lots of eggs to the amount of cream, so it came out more omelette-like than quiche-like; the cream mainly just added a little fluffiness. And also it was about 40cm in diameter and 3cm deep, and mostly baked rather than mostly cooked on the stovetop and finished in the oven. So, not quite the same, but close enough that I am collecting ideas from yours on how to make it better!

And, to share ideas the other way: I used a stalk of fresh green garlic, some scallions, some leeks, and some spinach, added in that order and in volumes that were approximately 1:2:4:8 before cooking. Oh, and some sun-dried tomatoes in oil, quantity similar to the garlic. People seemed very fond of the combination.

Also, I do scrambled eggs a little differently, too -- a shallow frying pan (such as either one of us might use for an omelette, though rather smaller) and a wooden spoon. I imagine the results are reasonably similar, though. For me, the critical skill there is doing it slowly enough, and carefully enough, that the egg uniformly gets to a stage where about half of it is still soft gel (like marmalade in consistency) and the other half is curds, rather than being all dry curds.

[zeborah]

I think Dad's done the folded-in-half kind too. I certainly do when I don't get them fluffy enough. (If they're fluffy enough they can't be folded, though you can put one quarter on top of another quarter.)

Chopped onions, tomato, ham, and/or mushrooms are fairly canonical for us. But it's largely what you have. Last night I had onion, tomato, and zucchini, because zucchinis are starting to happen in the garden. Your combination sounds delicious!

[rushthatspeaks]

Your style of omelet is also the canonical omelet to me-- do you ever do the sweet version, where you fold in a bit of sugar and a dash of cinnamon and then eat it with butter and a little maple syrup? Or leave out the cinnamon and spread it with jam.

However, I often don't have time to do a Real Actual Omelet, so sometimes I do a French omelet, which is where you beat the hell out of the whole egg, until it's fluffy and way way paler-- this isn't a short recipe, just shorter-- heat the pan very hot, slap some butter on it, pour the egg in after the butter sizzles but before it browns, and then holding the handle of the pan firmly jerk it toward you until the top folds over, and then until it all rolls on itself, and then tip it out of the pan and it should be exactly the perfect consistency. This is probably what your friend in France did. It's hard because if you take too long in the cooking it tastes exactly like scrambled eggs and if you don't cook it enough it stays runny. If you get the timing right it's ethereal.

But sometimes I'm too tired for that, and I do Japanese omelet, which is forgiving but fiddly. That one's beat the egg lightly with a dash of soy sauce and a dash of mirin, and put the pan on very low with a very little butter or oil, then coat half the bottom of the pan with a thin layer of egg, wait until it sets, pour a thin layer of egg onto the second half of the pan and flip the first half on top of it, wait until it sets, pour another layer, flip back... with two eggs it's about twelve layers. I don't know how to describe the texture except that it's not scrambled eggs and it's not ordinary omelet and it's kind of like flan except way way lighter but not airy? It's really good, anyway.

When I discovered Japanese omelets somehow it became all right in my head for different countries to have different Canonical Omelets, as long as they're perceptibly different from one another and from scrambled eggs. But I side-eye anything that's just scrambled eggs under a different name (a French omelet really isn't scrambled eggs if cooked correctly). I'd love to find more Canonical National Omelets, but I only know those three so far.

[zeborah]

A sweet omelette. How... novel. :-) No, if we want sweet pan-things we make pancakes, and if we want sweet fluffy-eggs we make pavlova. (Pavlova also requires very patient cooking, but in the oven.)

That description of a French omelette does sound similar to what my penpal made (though she may not have done all the flipping). The Japanese omelette sounds amazing, and like something that would certainly turn almost immediately into scrambled eggs if I attempted it. I'd love to try eating it one day though.

[hairmonger]

Cultural differences, yes. My family believes that eggs must be cooked quickly at high heat. What your pen pal made sounds somewhat like my parents' version of an omelet, except that they would cook it on the hottest possible heat that wouldn't burn the bottom. They both spent several years in New Orleans, and it influenced their cooking. The only ingredients required for an omelette are eggs and milk and salt and perhaps some other seasonings. Additional ingredients makes it a "Spanish omelette" or some other kind of omelette.

Scrambled eggs are produced in the same way, except without more than a tiny bit of milk, and instead of being folded carefully in half have their edges pulled to the middle until there is no more uncooked middle. The idea of putting eggs into the skillet without beating them to death first is very strange indeed.

Mary Anne in Kentucky

[zeborah]

It does sound similar. There's just something inside me that doesn't quite understand the point of an eggs-and-milk omelette. :-) Do you at least get to cover it in grated cheese when it's done, or is it literally just eggs-and-milk(-and-seasonings)?

[hairmonger]

You could put grated cheese on it, but if you put cheese IN it, then it becomes a Cheese Omelette, not a plain omelette.

Mary Anne in Kentucky

[zeborah]

That's fair. And whew, it'd be terrible if you couldn't put cheese on it.

Cheeeeeese.

I think I'm going to make cheese on toast now...

[tree_and_leaf]

I've never heard of that method of cooking an omelette - I would make it the way your penpal did. What you're cooking is in - European, I guess? - a soufflé, albeit one cooked with a slightly unconventional stovetop method. Sounds delicious, though.

[zeborah]

I had the impression that a soufflé was made with beaten egg white folded with puréed non-egg ingredients, so that it ended up smooth homogeneous fluff rather than fluff with chunks; and also that it was a dessert; and moreover that it flourished in the 1970s.

I don't think I've ever eaten... <googles> Oh no, I have. My friend made it; it included flour, and as it wasn't a cake I'd classify it as a pudding.

Further googling clarifies that it needn't always be dessert, nor involve flour, but it does seem to be mostly smooth rather than chunky; where not homogeneous it has sauce which omelettes never have. I find it extremely difficult to classify any of those soufflés as a kind of my-omelette, or my omelette as a kind of soufflé. I mean I suppose classification all depends on your point of view but then you may as well say that pavlova is a kind of soufflé: this is a Highly Disturbing line of inquiry is what I'm saying!

[christopherfain]

I stopped eating eggs as a teenager when I developed an aversion, but I spent my early childhood being fed what my uncle referred to as 'western omelettes' which was, in its essence, whipped eggs cooked like a pancake with toppings added and then the whole thing folded over and pressed closed. my entire family makes them this way. meat, veggies, cheese, etc. as much as you can get into that folded shell of fried-flat egg. I haven't had an omelette since I was about 12. however, when my children were very young, things were tough enough that I had to learn how to cook cheap and fast and eggs were a guaranteed success--even if I had no idea how they tasted. lol. the kids seemed to like it well enough.