French or country style? Light and buttery, or sturdy yet fluffy? What makes a perfect
omelet is as varied as those who enjoy them.
If you want your eggs to be as fluffy as possible,
mix a little water in while you're beating them. It's recommended that you add a teaspoon
of water per egg. As the omelet cooks, the water in the beaten egg mixture evaporates,
leaving behind tiny bubbles that lighten the texture of the finished product.
However, while the water does indeed make the omelet fluffy and light,
you may also find that it dilutes the rich taste of the eggs. So you might have to choose between
a fluffy omelet or the intense flavor of an eggs-only omelet with no extra liquid mixed in.
Regardless of whether or not you add water to your eggs,
you should definitely season them with salt and pepper before cooking. Salting
eggs before cooking not only adds flavor but can actually make your eggs softer and more tender.
Unless you're making a soufflé omelet, you're not whipping eggs to stiff peaks
for your breakfast meal. It can be tempting to take things to the opposite extreme though and
just barely beat the eggs before adding them to the pan. While it might not seem like a big deal,
your omelets will come out better if you thoroughly whip the eggs.
"Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!"
No, no. You can put away your bullwhip. All you'll
need is a trusty whisk and some good wrist dexterity for this job.
Now, there are two distinct reasons why you'll want to whip your eggs. The first
is mostly aesthetic: If you under-beat your eggs, you'll have streaks of unmixed white
and yolk running through your omelet. That might not bother you, but if you're trying
to make a beautiful French omelet with finesse, visual imperfections can ruin the experience.
The second reason to not skimp on whisking has to do with the omelet's texture. If you prefer an
intense flavor of an eggs-only omelet without milk or water added but still want it to be fluffy,
the solution is to thoroughly whip the eggs to incorporate air into them. You're looking for
the color of your egg mixture to lighten. Once you've achieved this, you can stop beating.
Of course, for pure utility, as long as it prevents the eggs from sticking to your pan,
you could use any type of fat you want to cook your omelet. However,
butter is the classic choice, and it's not just because French chefs put butter in everything.
Butter is delicious, so that's an obvious benefit. There's nothing quite like the rich,
slightly nutty flavor of good butter when paired with creamy eggs. But besides the flavor,
butter has another advantage over other fats for omelet cookery: It's effectively a built-in
thermometer that lets you know when your pan is the perfect temperature for adding your eggs.
When you warm butter in a skillet, it will initially start to bubble up and make crackling
sounds. For a classic French-style omelet with a runny center and a pale golden exterior,
the pan is at the right temperature once the bubbling subsides. If you overshoot this mark,
your butter will begin to brown. You can still cook tasty eggs at this point, but rather than
a perfect French omelet, you'll be making a more rustic variety with a slightly browned exterior.
It's natural when you're cooking to want to manipulate the food with an
implement of some sort. For an omelet, most people would reach for some kind of
heat-proof rubber spatula. While a spatula will certainly give you a helping hand when making
omelets, you can invert your usual thinking: Instead of moving the spatula, move the pan.
"C'mon, shake it up, shake it up. Shake it up!"
Shaking the contents around the pan helps to evenly distribute the uncooked
eggs throughout the skillet. If you're a true omelet master,
you can even ditch the spatula entirely. Julia Child memorably demonstrates this in the
omelet episode of her show "The French Chef." Before the opening credits roll,
she cooks and plates a perfect omelet in 30 seconds using one hand and zero spatulas.
For those of us who can't leave utensils behind completely, Child does demonstrate
a slightly easier method later on in the episode where she stirs the eggs with a
fork while shaking the pan. Just note that if you're cooking in a nonstick skillet,
you should use some kind of heat-proof plastic, silicone, or rubber utensil instead of a metal
fork. Never use metal utensils with nonstick pans, as the metal will scratch the coating.
Not only will this ruin the pan, but it might also lead to you eating Teflon.
"Yuck!"
"Yuck, indeed!"
We can all envy the professional omelet cook who has convenient trays of pre-prepped ingredients
at their disposal, ready to throw into an omelet at a moment's notice. But if
you're cooking at home, is it fine to just skip the prep and throw your
omelet fillings in raw? We'd love to tell you that you could take advantage of this easy hack,
but we can't recommend adding raw ingredients to an omelet.
The reason you shouldn't fill your omelet with raw ingredients is that
omelets cook fast — like really fast. Ideally, you should be able to prepare an
omelet in approximately 30 seconds. With that in mind, there aren't many toppings that cook
in such a short time. Unless you enjoy eggs filled with crunchy raw onions and cold ham,
you're going to need to pre-cook most omelet fillings. Even cold cheese might
not melt completely by the time the eggs are cooked, so if you want that perfect ooey-gooey
cheese pull, consider starting with room temperature or slightly-warmed cheese.
There are few foods less appetizing than tough, overcooked eggs. It's very important to avoid
overcooking if you're trying to crack the formula for a classic French omelet.
For this style of omelet, the ideal you're seeking to achieve is a thin sheath of cooked egg enrobing
an interior of creamy, soft scrambled eggs. In order to pull this off, you need to stop cooking
the omelet a little bit before it actually looks done. The eggs should be mostly set,
but with a tiny little bit of runniness left. The residual heat from the pan will cook the eggs the
rest of the way. Finishing the omelet gently like this will ensure that you get that amazing
yellow exterior without a hint of browning that is characteristic of this preparation.
You can have all of your
omelet techniques down perfectly, but nothing will save you if you don't use
the right pan. If your eggs stick to your pan, then you'll have to content yourself
with eating scrambled eggs instead of a beautifully-folded omelet for breakfast.
"Okay! But it's not what I wanted."
"Well maybe next time you won't be such a dumb piece of s—."
You might want to choose a nonstick pan if you're not a very experienced
omelet chef. If you don't go with nonstick, then you’ll want to find a pan made of a material that
you can season to make it partially stick-resistant, such as cast iron,
carbon steel, or aluminum. If you go this route, heat the pan with some oil in it and
let it sit for a while so it's seasoned before you use it for the first time.
The shape is also important to consider. You want a pan without sharp corners unless you're
choosing a square tamagoyaki pan for Japanese rolled omelets. But for Western-style omelets,
something with gently sloped sides is best. A moderately high edge will help with turning your
omelet over, and a heavy bottom will ensure even heat distribution. Finally,
choose the size that fits your lifestyle: An 8-inch pan is perfect for solo cooks,
but if you're cooking for a family you might want a 10 or even 12-inch omelet pan.
Once your eggs are perfectly cooked, you now have to complete a perilous step:
Getting the cooked eggs out of the pan and onto a plate without turning them into a Jackson
Pollock-esque splatter. This isn't as much of a problem with country or American-style
omelets that have a little more structural integrity, but French
omelets are more challenging to de-pan. Not only are the eggs in a French omelet somewhat
soft and runny, but you're also trying to make a neatly-rolled oval or cylinder on the plate.
As with so much French culinary knowledge, Julia Child is a good resource for this technique. In
her omelet episode, she demonstrates that once the eggs are mostly cooked, you need to angle
your pan and knock or push the curds into a mass right at the edge of the skillet. Then you pick
up your plate and invert the omelet onto it, using the lip of the pan to roll it into shape.
Culinary icon Jacques Pépin shows how you can switch your grip on the skillet to make
the pan flip a little bit easier. We're not going to lie to you: This maneuver is still
going to take some practice to get right. However, the good news is that if your omelet
belly-flops onto the plate, you can use your hands to push it into shape before serving it.
Almost all of the tips in this video are for omelets made with whole eggs. But of course,
you can make omelets with separated eggs as well. Egg white omelets are a common choice for
health-conscious diners since they are low in fat and cholesterol but very high in protein. However,
they're also bland, and they don't hold together in the pan as well as whole eggs. You're going
to want to add a lot of seasonings and healthy toppings in order to inject some
flavor into your egg whites. And to solve egg whites' structural integrity problems,
wait until the whites are completely set and cooked through before attempting to flip them
out of the pan. You're simply not going to get luscious, creamy curds with this type of omelet.
On the other end of the spectrum is the egg yolk omelet. The problem with this unorthodox dish,
as pointed out by The Washington Post, is that pure egg yolks have a dense texture with none
of the fluff of a classic omelet. The solution to this issue is to add a significant amount
of water to the yolks when you beat them: one tablespoon for every two egg yolks.
This tip only applies if you like a certain type of omelet — specifically, the sturdy-yet-fluffy,
slightly browned diner-style omelets served at IHOP. The secret to IHOP's unique
omelets is that a small amount of pancake mix is added to the eggs.
The pancake mix changes the texture of the omelet. You might find that it makes your omelets
fluffier, or you might describe the texture as springy. It also makes the egg mixture sturdier,
so it's a little bit easier to manipulate in the pan. Pancake mix subtly alters the
flavor of the eggs, lending a bit of mild sweetness and toastiness to the omelet.
To try this out, simply add a small amount of dry boxed pancake mix to your eggs and
whisk until you can't see any lumps. We feel like this technique would be weird
if you applied it to a classic French omelet instead of a diner-style one,
but if any brave kitchen scientists want to run that experiment, let us know how it goes.
As Jacques Pépin so astutely observes, there is no one perfect omelet:
"A classic French omelet as I do is not better than the country one, it's just
different in technique, in texture, and in taste a little bit, so you choose one or the other."
"Decisions, decisions."
Do you want a country omelet with big curds and a slightly crisp,
browned exterior, or are you chasing the dream of an Instagram-perfect,
cylindrical French specimen? There's no point in mastering the difficult French technique
if you don't even like runny eggs. The various omelet styles are completely different dishes,
and as such, there's not a lot of overlap in how they're prepared.
That's particularly true once you expand beyond Western culinary traditions. Japanese
omelets, known as tamagoyaki, require a very different set of skills than the
omelets from your average hotel buffet. You need a special square pan, and the eggs are
pre-seasoned with Japanese ingredients like mirin and dashi. Most interestingly,
instead of cooking the omelet all at once, you build it slowly by pouring thin sheets of egg
into the pan over and over again, rolling each new layer around the previous ones once it's cooked.