It has been, I realise now, 10 years since I last wrote about omelette cooking: https://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2016/10/omelette-exploration-7-home-made.html Naturally that does not mean that I have ceased making omelettes, though we no longer have our own chickens. It was more that I had not come across different designs of omelette to try out. A couple of months back, though, I was naturally intrigued to see the omelette for the Japanese omurice dish. This omelette is effectively an omelette casing of what we would see as scrambled egg. The idea is that you then slit it open and the more fluid egg contents then run down into the rice bed you have placed it on. The difficulty of this for even skilled cooks is renowned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tjO3QpxQ-I Here is a text recipe: https://www.justonecookbook.com/omurice-japanese-omelette-rice/
The challenge is that you are trying to cook two different parts of the omelette to different extents. You can see multiple videos of people trying and while the centre looks still moist in face it has gone too far and ends up like a normal omelette with a moist core. The main challenge is that you need good high heat and a very non-stick pan, and as with stir-fries, to shift it around, on and off the heat a lot. Many of these aspects are not available in a domestic kitchen. In addition, given the aversion to uncooked or partially cooked eggs in English-speaking kitchens (my mother would even grill her omelettes after cooking them in the pan) this might seem incomplete.
Knowing what kit and domestic hob I had, I did not even try to make an omurice omelette. However, while looking into it, I came across the tamagoyaki sweet layered omelette and given that I have proven competent in making layered omelettes, this is one I will come back to. However, in the meantime, I came across Tornado Omelettes or simply Tornado Eggs. These are upright circles of omelettes. Perhaps the most interesting one, I found on Facebook, but I know you cannot all access it, so I include a basic one of YouTube too.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/S7CY6SY-wXs
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=4605754782980631
Again it needs a very good non-stick pan and fast movement. It was this that I tried. However, knowing even my non-stick pan is not as non-stick as the ones shown in all these videos, I put a hot butter base in first, though I would really have needed to make it thicker or supplement it throughout more than I would for a standard omelette. My main problem then is that I 'left behind' bits of the omelette as it was cooking. As I was aiming from the video I initially saw (neither of these two) I felt getting a circular shape was most important and so I kept rotating the omelette around the rim of the pan, not tilting as much as I should have been doing.
Interestingly, I did not end up with the light waves of omelette seen in these videos, but because I had been revolving it around the centre of the pan, I ended up with a conical omelette with the point facing into the centre and the wider part at the rim. What is interesting is that the movement brings air into the heart of the omelette, so it ends up a great deal lighter than if the layers are stacked vertically. It is difficult to carry ingredients within such an approach, so they need to be light and small or added on afterwards. Some might concern about the centre of the this omelette not cooking, but in fact the heat from the outside layer continues to cook. What the eaters noted was the lightness of this omelette which they felt really brought the flavours out.
I will go back and have a go and something more like the tornado omelette in a week or two and will let you know how that turns out.
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