Simon Shine's omelette page

One of my favourite cuisines of all time is a good cheese omelette. In 2001, I was in London for the first time, and I went to a place where you can buy breakfast. I ordered an omelette made of three eggs with cheese, and what I in turn got surprised me. It looked like nothing of the burnt thing between scrambled eggs and a fried egg I would usually serve myself, and when I cut it open, melted cheese sizzled out of it. I instantly wanted to be able to make such good omelettes. Making a good omelette is hard, but there are no secrets to it. At least none that I know. ;-)

Some suggestions

• Be patient – practice makes master.
• Use a good, non-stick pan that you are comfortable with.
• Don't use too many eggs. The more, the harder, and each pan has its own capacity. Try with two to three.
• Always use butter or margarine instead of oil. Oil is harder to determine the temperature of and it doesn't taste as good.

Basic technique

• Whisk the eggs. I saw on a show on Discovery, Science of Cooking, that adding salt by this point is not preferrable because of the chemical effects induced by salt. I don't know whether this is a real worry considering it only takes thirty seconds to whisk the eggs.
• Heat the butter. The eggs should preferrably sizzle a bit when they hit the pan, but the butter doesn't have to go all brown.
• Make sure that it gets cooked not only in the centre of the pan. Some suggest that you, for example with a fork, stir it together so that the mass hits the centre and thus gets cooked evenly, however, doing this without simply making it into scrambled eggs is truly an artform. I attempt not at this. Instead, I choose a pan that gets heated evenly. It is important that the sides of the omelette is cooked since you are going to invert it. If too much of the omelette isn't cooked because you used too many eggs, or because the pan is too small, you can lift the side of the omelette and let the non-cooked egg flow to the spot.
• Flip it over as soon as you can. Let it only cook on the other side until you think the non-cooked egg has been cookd.
• Then add contents such as cheese, finely chopped onion, chopped spring onion, chives, chili or other fresh but not too dominating vegetables and/or seasoning. Add it on one half of it, and when you've done that, flip the other half of it over and give it a little time to melt the cheese. Possibly, turn it once on the pan to avoid one side getting too cooked.
• Put it on a plate and add salt, or add it on top of rye bread first.

Written Sat Dec 17 06:47:19 CET 2005 while partially dreaming of eating an omelette. Back to my homepage.