Omelette Exploration 7: Home-made Microwave Omelette

This marks the last of my postings about omelettes, that is, until someone writes in with a method to try or I come across one in a newspaper.  You may think that a microwaved omelette goes against much of what I have been saying in these postings.  However, like all of the entries, it does provide an opportunity to do something a little different.  I emphasise the 'home-made' because this is no bought ready meal, it still needs work from you throughout.  Of course, many of the basic rules apply - butter and good, free-range eggs are essential.  There is a risk that the omelette will stick to the bowl, so some pre-buttering of the sides is a good idea to avoid that.

There are some challenges with microwaving an omelette.  One is that it cooks in a ring as the omelette spins, this tends to happen even if you use a square dish or bowl.  Thus, you are likely to move the egg liquid to the side, but be careful not to end up turning it into scrambled egg.  You may actually want to put a smaller, upturned dish in the centre so that the liquid moves to the outside.  Obviously this will create a ring omelette which might be a nice surprise for people.  Perhaps put some coleslaw (I recommend mixing some savoy cabbage in with the white or red cabbage to give a fresh, slightly peppery taste) or something like mixed beans, in the centre.

The microwaved omelette will end up very light in colour.  You do not get the nice browning on the outside that you get with a pan-made omelette,  However, it is very light in texture too and that can also be a pleasant change for eaters.  If I am going to include fillings like ham, then I keep to a shallow bowl, otherwise you can end up with the filling sinking entirely to the bottom.  Cheese will remain in the liquid so is probably the best filling for such an omelette; light herbs will also work.  With cheese, I like to put in a few crumbs of mild blue cheese, like St. Agur,  Stilton can be used sparingly, but if it is true Stilton rather than a mild or smooth version, it can make the whole omelette far too bitter.

The one advantage of the microwave omelette is the convenience, there is less cleaning up to do as you can cook it in the bowl you stirred it in.  Like the 'bliny' omelette, it can also be useful in terms of providing a number of small omelettes for people to help themselves, or with the ring, as I have noted, give a different way of putting the omelette on the plate with other food, rather than the classic, semi-circle envelope.

Omelette Exploration 6: The Masala Omelette

As regular readers will know, I am always interested in seeing and trying out new approaches to omelette making.  Being a regular reader of 'The Guardian' newspaper which has scores of recipes, sometimes every day of the week, but particularly on Saturdays, it is unsurprising that I have drawn inspiration from it.  Today's recipe comes from Vivek Singh and featured in the newspaper in October 2015:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/01/20-best-breakfast-recipes-part-4-nigel-slater-pancakes-omelettes

This was the final part of a four-part series in which celebrity chef Nigel Slater gathered various breakfast recipes.  I will leave you to read the original article; fortunately the masala omelette is the first recipe in that list.  Naturally I put it to the test.  While this was put forward as a breakfast menu as Singh points out, it can be a dish for any time of the day and as with the bliny omelettes considered last month, it can be eaten cold.

The method of cooking is in line with the basics that I have outlined throughout.  What I would caution is keeping the quantity of spice under control and using fresh rather than dried ingredients as much as possible.  I have made this dish and ended up with a rather 'arid' omelette, almost too strong in flavour to eat comfortably.  That may be because I have a British palate and as noted before and not keen on tasting salt in my dishes.

I do think this is not really an omelette to be eaten on its own or unfilled and I would certainly encourage you to present it with a vegetable filling or indeed as an accompaniment outside the omelette.  Singh advises 'asparagus, olives, spinach or artichokes' in this role - are all favourite vegetables of mine and have a moistness which can temper the rather arid nature of this particular omelette.  I think I will come back to this approach to omelettes but in future will scale down the spices and will make sure that I have a lot more greens either to put in the omelette or alongside it.

Omelette Exploration 5: The 'Lyon Housewife' Method

I am no fan of Michael Portillo (born 1953) either as a politician or a television presenter.  However, this approach to omelettes came as a result of me channel surfing and ending up watching the final episode of Series 3 of 'Great Continental Railway Journeys'.  It was first broadcast in late 2014, but has been repeated since.  Portillo, the presenter, was in the French city of Lyon, somewhere I would like to visit, talking about the traditional, homely 'housewife' style of cooking which is apparently favoured in the city, even among chefs.  This is in contrast to much of the restaurant cooking in France these days.  Even in small places in backwaters the cooking is heavily influenced by nouvelle cuisine approaches which is clearly the prime method taught by chefs and catering schools these days.  The Lyon chef Portillo was speaking to used the example of omelette making to outline the Lyon approach and, this being an interest of mine, I took on board what was said and tried it out myself.

Apparently the Lyon approach is to put coarse sea salt into the egg liquid before cooking.  Once the liquid is in the pan rather than moving it so that the liquid is spread evenly, instead you cover the pan and then draw the cooking egg incessantly into the centre, with the gaps left behind filling with remaining uncooked egg liquid until the omelette is cooked right through.  Of course you use butter for the cooking.  As it is, French butter tends to be very salty.  Typically you come across two types of butter - doux meaning 'sweet' which is unsalted; and demi-sel meaning 'half salt' which has 3% salt content, but tastes as if it has much more.  I would only ever use a doux butter if I had to use French butter.

I do not really see the benefits of this approach.  You end up with very much a 'gathered in' omelette almost looking like a rosette.  Without the flat surfaces you do not get the golden brown coating that I personally favour.  There is also a risk as when you over fill an omelette, that it will break up and you get something resembling scrambled egg rather than an omelette, not bad in itself, but not what you are seeking in this case.  There is a challenge with fillings if they are put in at the cooking stage because they have a different consistency than the egg liquid and can get 'left behind' in the gathering in so leading to a maldistribution of filling in the finished omelette.

I know it is a question of taste, but the sea salt was overbearing, despite me only grinding a pinch of it into the egg liquid, giving the omelette a dry, thirst instilling taste.  I suppose that counters the moistness of omelettes.  However, if using the Lyon approach be aware of the impact that it will have on your fillings; the flavour of a mild cheese or ham will disappear, you would have to use a blue cheese and a strong-flavoured ham to appear beyond the salt, ending up with an 'arid' omelette with a forceful flavour which might make an interesting change but probably too much for the ordinary British consumer.

Perhaps I need to practice more with this approach.  However, for me it produced an omelette very different from one with the attributes I aim for.  I would be interested to hear from others who have given this method a shot or use it habitually to hear more about the benefits of it.  Maybe it simply stems from a dislike of strongly salted dishes in contrast to some people I know.

Omelette Exploration 4: The 'Bliny' Omelette

If you are not familiar with 'bliny', they are pancakes, with savoury or sweet fillings, originating in Eastern Europe.  The singular is 'blin'.  They are also popular in the USA, largely as a result of their use in Jewish cooking.  A bliny pan is a frying pan about the size of your palm.  Naturally it can also be used for making omelettes.  All the rules I have outlined in previous Omelette Exploration postings, i.e. that you need butter for the cooking, good free-range eggs and should avoid an excessive amount of filling, still apply.  The question of the filling is even more important with the 'bliny' omelette than the standard, larger omelettes that I have written about so far.

Heat is also a vital factor.  This is something that people often get wrong and there is nothing wondering about clouds of butter smoke pouring from your pan and yet, you tend to want a golden colour to your omelette.  People tend to forget that the pan itself gets hot, it is not simply about the flame or electrical glow beneath it.  Indeed if making a number of omelettes as you will tend to do with the 'bliny' approach, by the end you will find you can do quite a bit of cooking actually lifting the pan away from the heat source and using the heat retained in the metal of the pan to finish them.

Cooking bliny omelettes is a fast process and you will need to make sure everything is in place, including the people who are going to eat them.  The quantity of egg liquid you pour into the pan each time will probably be equivalent to the contents of a third to half an egg.  Be sure that you can pour your egg liquid in with care and not just dollop in too much that will prove difficult with the small plan usually ending up with egg liquid wasted all over your cooker.  Keep the filling to no more than what you might hold between three fingers.  It tends to go into the centre of the omelette rather than being evenly distributed as with standard omelettes.  Indeed you may fold the bliny omelette over in half to effectively make an omelette 'sandwich' of the contents.

The bliny approach allows you to vary the fillings from omelette to omelette so catering to a range of tastes at your table.  I did this approach with four people none of whom liked the fillings favoured by the others.  As before, cheese is a good ingredient for sticking together; herbs are not problem, but make sure that heavier fillings like ham or bacon are cut into small pieces, smaller even than with a standard omelette, otherwise they will break the structure.  You can then easily end up rather than a perfect sunshine disc of omelette with simply lumps of omelette adhering to bits of filling.

As with the mille-feuille omelette, there is something aesthetic about the bliny omelette.  With the former you are looking for the layers when you cut through it.  The bliny omelette is about a row of discs of omelette.  I suggest a minimum of four per person's plate, lined up, slightly overlapping each other; perhaps with a different filling in each.  Unlike with a standard omelette, however, they are not at the centre of the dish, they are the accompaniment.  Thus, you might want to keep to vegetable fillings, e.g. finally chopped onions, especially red onions or spring onions, or mushrooms, maybe even fresh chunks of tomato, rather than meat.  Your main item on the plate may be slices or ham or even cold fish, a piece of peppered mackerel will go well with a set of bliny omelettes.  I tend to do this approach with my diners ready to eat straight from the pan.  However, there is nothing to say that you cannot produce a range of bliny omelettes and then store them to eat later, especially at a picnic.

Cooking four to sixteen bliny omelettes in the same pan is going to mean it is hot.  By the end you will find that the egg liquid will cook on contact with the pan surface.  For this reason you may want to leave plain/unfilled bliny omelettes in your set to last.  Of course, there is something elegant about a whole set of unfilled omelettes anyway, well, in my view.  What you will find unless they are being coloured by blackened butter in your pan, is that you will not get to the golden brown shade on the outside that you will find with standard omelettes.  They will be the yellow or (hopefully if you are using good eggs) orange shade of the egg liquid.  This is fine.  As they are thin and small, they are certain to be cooked right through, a great phobia still of British people eating omelettes.  In addition, the trick with some olive oil, that I have mentioned before, can help give them a golden tinge.

The bliny approach is different to the typical one of going in with big omelettes jammed full of stuff.  They allow you to produce omelettes for a range of tastes around a single table and to provide what I feel are an attractive food especially for going with summer dishes.

Omelette Exploration 3: The Mille-Feuille Approach

'Mille-feuille' literally means 'thousand leaves' and is a type of cake, sometimes known as a custard slice, though these days you can see a variety of flavours.  On the savoury side there is also the salmon millefeuille which consists of layers of smoked salmon between bread, crackers or pastry with cream and other ingredients involved.  The leaves refer to multiple layers though there will always be much fewer than a thousand.

Mille-feuille is also an approach to making an omelette and one that received attention at the time of the salmonella in UK eggs scare of 1988, when people were warned that 'runny' eggs could contain the contamination and the British took to cooking all their eggs very thoroughly.  My mother adopted the approach of grilling her omelettes after cooking them in a pan and continues to do so today even 28 years later.  Grilling an omelette can help crisp out the outer layer and give it the golden brown colour.  However, if you are using decent quality eggs as outlined in my previous omelette posting and you put a splash of olive oil in with your cooking butter in the pan, then you should get this anyway.

The concern to cook every egg thoroughly and not have uncooked beaten egg liquid in the centre of your omelette leads to mille-feuille.  It also works well if you are cooking an omelette for a lot of people who want the same filling or no filling.  You are replacing breadth for depth.  You make one large omelette and then simply slice it.  This will look odd to some people but is the easiest way when cooking using this approach.  I have done it with nine eggs in the liquid (I saw 'liquid' rather than 'mixture' because as I noted in the first posting of this series there should be nothing in there that was not in the egg, i.e. milk), without difficulty.

Rather than drawing the egg into the middle as it cooks and filling the emptied space of the pan with more egg mixture or using a large pan simply allowing the omelette to rise, instead you keep folding.  Once you have covered the whole pan once, you fold a half of the cooked egg over and then fill the remaining half with egg liquid.  Once this new half is well on the way to cooking you fold over the first half into it.  This exposes the other half of the pan and you fill this with more egg mixture.  Once this is on its way to cooking, you bring the now fatter half back over on to it.

You can repeat this halving and turning for as long as you have egg liquid.  Typically I will do the process three or four times.  When you cut into the omelette you will see that there are a number of layers, perhaps six or eight, maybe more.  Thus, it tastes different on the tongue to a 'standard omelette'.  In fact you are eating a series of nested omelettes.  The important thing for the British is that each layer is thin, not thick as if you had poured all the egg liquid in at once.  This means it will be cooked through.  There is an additional benefit if you are looking to include fillings.

One of the greatest errors with omelette fillings is to put too much in.  I heard on Radio 1 recently a DJ had tweeted to the world to ask what he was doing wrong with his omelettes.  The renowned chef Tom Kerridge tweeted back that his filling to egg liquid mixture was too high.  People stuff their omelettes and then break up the structure far too much.  They wonder why they end up with a 'mess' but this is always going to be the case if they overload.  The thing to remember is that whilst the omelette looks big and robust, in fact it is the weakest element.  Ham and mushrooms, even some herbs are heavier than even the cooked omelette and can easily tear through the omelette structure.  Cheese, as I have noted before, is different and can work as a bond between components of the omelette.

Now, when using the mille-feuille approach to omelettes this is no warrant to go mad with your fillings.  However, because of the layering, if you get them in early in the folding process, even if they fragment the inner layers, there will be the outer ones coming along to seal over any gaps and package up the whole thing.  With mille-feuille do not leave fillings until too late, start getting them in on the first or second layer.  You can put cheese into the outer layers without risk and if you are making a particularly thick omelette then this can help you.

The main challenge with the mille-feuille approach to omelettes is getting the halves over neatly without breaking up the omelette structure.  You need good tools for this and something which is firm not a flimsy plastic turner but something rigid and broad enough to carry the bulk of the omelette even when it has grown.  I have done it with a flat knife and a fork, but something broader is better, even a fish slice!  The other thing is to watch the heat.  People forget that even if the electricity or gas is kept at a steady level, the pan you are using is getting hotter and hotter.  Thus, as you get into the middle and outer layers, take the heat down; gas is better for this than electricity, but remember even lifting the pan off the heat, the omelette will keep cooking from the heat that is already in the metal.  There is nothing worse than a burnt outer layer.  For the reason also keep butter standing by in case there is a need to stop the liquid adhering to the pan as you continue.

This is a straight forward approach to large omelettes or ones with a good deal of fillings to be contained in them or for people who are squeamish about getting any drop of uncooked egg in their omelette.

Omelette Exploration 2: Good Eggs

You can make omelettes out of almost everything that is a liquid.  I have known people who have made coffee omelettes when all they had in their house was instant coffee and butter.  I have heard stories from the Second World War of people short of food making omelettes from the blood of livestock.  I have never tried anything beyond the use of eggs.  However, strictly omeletting is as much an approach to cooking as what goes into it.  Thus, it is almost entirely free in how you interpret it, hence my exploration of at least some of the paths you go down with omelettes.

Today I am going to expound my views on the basic ingredient that almost all of us will encounter with omelettes and that is eggs.  There have been campaigns against battery farmed eggs for at least the past three decades.  However, it is not only the cruelty to the chickens, obviously if you have ever encountered a crippled rescue chicken, which is a bad effect of such an approach but also the quality of the egg itself.  I am not a vegetarian and I see good quality livestock products going hand-in-hand with good treatment of the animal providing them.  In terms of egg quality, barn bred hens, i.e. those free to move around but not go outside are not good enough either.

If you have owned chickens you know that often they are not the way people assume.  Many people think they are herbivores.  Many farmers simply feed them corn and/or layer's mash pellets.  In fact chickens are omnivores.  They like fresh vegetables, they like grass but they also love beetles, worms and frogs.  Chickens will fight over eating a frog.  The importance of the meat in a chicken's diet is that it puts Omega 3 into their eggs.  In the UK Omega 3 began to disappear from chicken eggs from the 1970s onwards, so eliminating an important source of this nutrient.  It is easier to get it from your egg consumption than from a tablet, especially if you are not keen on fish.

Picking up an egg you can tell a great deal about the chicken's life.  If the egg is pale in colour then, except with some breeds, it has not eaten grass.  You will expect browner eggs in the summer to those layed in the winter, but certainly you are looking at least for a tan colour to show you a chicken which has run free and eaten what it wants.  If the shell is stippled like the surface of a tiny, tiny golfball, then the chicken was stressed.  In worse cases they will lay small, constrained eggs.  However, if you see this small, hardened pattern the chicken may have been scared, perhaps from a fox attack or from seeing chickens around it stressed.  Thus, this can be a conflicting signal as it might show the chicken is out and about or among other stressed chickens.

Shaking an egg will help you learn more about what the chicken has eaten.  You want the contents to feel 'gloopy' and not watery.  This indicates a chicken that has eaten meat.  Once you open it, you are looking for a bright but dark orange yolk, rather than the yellow too often portrayed in the media.  The more watery and the paler the contents of the egg, the poorer the quality.  A proper free range egg is hard to work with.  It will need to be folded for twice as long as a barn raised chicken's egg.  However, using proper free range eggs you will understand how artists like Vincent Van Gogh used them on paintings.  If  you put a poor quality supermarket egg on a painting if would run off.  A free-range egg dries to a hard texture like Polyfilla.  You can stick things together with it and if you do not soak your plates and bowls quickly you will find you need a knife to really scrape it off.  For cooking and especially adding fillings, this works far better for you when making omelettes (or indeed scrambled, poached or fried eggs) that something sloppy sliding all over the place and lacking both the flavour and the nutrients you need.

Free range eggs are more easily available than ever.  Lidl sells them.  Also look around your area as many people are keeping chickens (though in back gardens rather than on balconies of flats as they do in Belgium) and you can typically buy from them at a very good price; recycle your egg boxes with these people and even get to know the ladies who are providing your basic omelette ingredient.

Next I will be looking at some of the different ways I have experimented with in making omelettes from the Lyons housewife approach to the mille-feuille method to mini-omelettes in a row.

Omelette Exploration 1: What I See As The Basics

This is a topic I have considered blogging on for quite a while.  I was prompted to finally do it by an article in the 'Cook' section of yesterday's edition of the 'The Guardian' newspaper in which Stephen Bush outlined how he had tried out Delia Smith's approach to omelettes from her book 'Delia's Complete How To Cook' (2009).

See: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/apr/22/delia-smith-how-to-cook-an-omelette-the-delia-project-stephen-bush

It is not an approach I have tried but hope to have a go at in the coming months as this facet of my blog continues.  In the meantime I have various other approaches that I have tried, which I will outline here.

Your first question might be why I am focusing on omelettes.  The easy answer is that I am very good at making them.  I have lived with a qualified chef who disliked the bulk of dishes I am able to cook.  I have lived in the same house as a boy, now aged 14, who is a wizard at making pancakes.  Both of these despite their own abilities, has been delighted to eat my omelettes.  As a result I have played from my strengths and have gone on to explore different ways of making them.

My starting point was back in the mid-1990s.  I was working in a low-paid job where most of my colleagues had a second or even a third job to bring in enough income.  One of these was a colleague known as 'Juggo' who was a qualified chef himself and would work in a local pub at the weekends doing basic pub food.  With a family he did not like the hours of catering full time, but this brought in a bit of cash and just impacted on two days of the week. His omelettes were so good that people would go to the pub specially to order them.  I asked him what his secret was.  He gave me a basic set of principles which I have stuck to ever since and I believe allow me to make omelettes that people enjoy.

The principles were:
1) No Milk
2) Just Butter to cook
3) Let the Omelette rise through any filling

I immediately stopped putting milk into my omelette mixture and consequently the taste improved instantly.  There is no need for milk in an omelette at all and nowadays I cannot understand how it ever entered the recipe.

Like a lot of people aware of cholesterol, at the time I had no butter in the house.  However, as Juggo pointed out, there is too much water in margarine so you are effectively boiling the omelette mixture and the transfer of heat is worse.  Oil provides too great a divide between the omelette and the pan and it tends to float around and again not cook properly.  You are looking for a golden brown colour to your omelette not a pale yellow and certainly not something that looks shallow fried.  I do break this rule slightly in that I put a small splash of olive oil on the melting butter, now this is probably hazardous due to the different flashpoints of the two, but it does give a nice flavour to the outside of your omelette.

The major mistake people make with fillings for omelettes is putting in too much and not chopping the pieces down small enough.  Keep the filling light and not too complicated otherwise you can easily verge into a Frittata or even a Tortilla de Patatas (Spanish omelette) if you get onions or potatoes in there.  I put a layer of omelette mixture on the pan rather than exactly following the Juggo approach as fillings can break up the outer layer of your omelette and also burn, so again making it look unattractive.  The only exception to the filling rules is grated cheese.  You can add this to the omelette mixture because it will melt.  The only challenge with a lot of cheese especially if it is yellow or orange that when it is melted you might mistake it for uncooked omelette mixture.

I will talk about the eggs to use and cooking methods for different plain omelettes in following emails.  For now the one final basic point I will include is beating the omelette mixture.  I favour a fork in a small ceramic bowl, one I actually bought in 1988.  I think it is best to 'fold' rather than beat the omelette mixture.  What is essential is to remove any translucent pieces.  With the best eggs you will end up with an orange mixture with light bubbles across the surface; with poor quality eggs it will beat much more easily but leave you with an almost watery, pale yellow mixture.