Transcript:
If I had to judge how technically good a chef is, I would probably ask him to make an omelet.
It is difficult to make a really good omelet, and there are different types of omelets.
I’m going to show you two types: a kind of country French omelet, which is basically the way we do it in America, and then a classic French omelet.
One is not better than the other; it’s just a different technique, a different taste, and a different look.
In the first one—I’m doing an omelet with four eggs here—in the first one, I add salt, a dash of pepper, and all I’m going to do is stir it well first and cook it so that I have fairly large curds of egg, slightly browned all around, achieving the look and taste that we want for a country-style omelet.
I put a little piece of butter there, and I have here a beautiful pan because that pan doesn’t have any corners.
You see, it has a beautiful curve.
It is a non-stick pan, so it’s ideal—it’s an omelet pan, actually.
Now notice that my eggs, to start with, have no pieces of egg white hanging, so it’s not like you just stir the eggs back and forth—you have to go from one hand to the other to really break them so that you don’t have any long pieces of egg white; otherwise, those become white streaks in the skillet as it cooks.
So what we do here in the country omelet is let it brown a little bit. See, the butter here will brown a little bit, which in the classic omelet I don’t want to do.
So clean up your pan well, and here you don’t have to worry too much.
You move it occasionally to create the large curds like this, and those large curds are replaced by liquid.
This will be totally different in the classic French omelet, where I move the mixture very, very fast—as fast as I can—to have the smallest possible curds.
No browning at all, because browning will toughen the albumin, and I want something very tender and very soft in a classic French omelet.
In the country style, it’s different.
Now, how long do you cook it?
It’s entirely up to you.
You can have it slightly wet in the center.
I like it a bit wet.
I would say that here my omelet is still a little bit wet in the center, which is the way I like it personally, but I would probably also brown it just a minute more.
Then kind of fold it in half like this.
I would, at that point, put maybe a little piece of extra butter, if I want, in the bottom here to brown the bottom of my omelet.
And now I’m ready to invert the omelet.
This way here—you change hands, you grab the handle this way.
You bang it a little bit to make it slide, and you curl it upside down.
You have a nice, beautifully browned omelet—this is a country omelet, but you can see fairly large curds and all that.
One way of doing it.
Now for the classic French omelet.
The technique is different.
First, clean up your skillet.
Put a great amount of heat on that pan, and this is what I want for an omelet.
And as you see, it is a gas stove, and of course the gas is going to be much better than electric because you want to have the flame go around, and a good stove should give you a great amount of heat for an omelet as well as a very low setting—a simmer or something.
So here again I have four eggs. In that omelet this time, I put a little bit of chives—truly a classic omelet fines herbes. In France, a fines herbes omelet has chives, parsley, tarragon, and chervil for the classic, but this is just a chive omelet.
So you can see here that my pan is hot, but I don’t want it as hot as the other one.
So again we put it in there, and now, contrary to what I did before—just letting the eggs get into large curds—here with the bowl of the fork I want to bring this around and stir it up as fast as I can.
The smallest possible curds, and at the end of it—about now—I want to bring all of the mixture to this side, as you can see; basically everything is here. That is, instead of having one layer which I roll like a carpet, everything is there.
Run my knife around, bring back the lip, and you can see here I want to have a nice half-moon shape.
Run this behind to bring back that lip.
Hit it there, which as you can see brings it up, then push it down.
You want a nice corner, and you don’t even want to brown it further.
This is the time, between the lips now, that you would want to stuff it if you have some type of stuffing.
We change hands again, bring that this way.
Next, bang it to have it to the edge of the pan, then invert it to have an omelet.
A classic omelet which should be white like this or pale yellow, pointed at the ends like this, smooth without any pleats.
This is what a classic French omelet is.
And you can see, it’s quite different from that one, and as I said before, one is not really necessarily better than the other.
It’s a different technique and a different taste.
The curds are going to be much larger here, and if I cut this one open to show it to you, then you will see that the center of that omelet is very creamy and very soft and very nice, which is the way the classic omelet should be.
