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purplynurply OP t1_j6bp3hb wrote

Reply to comment by Calm_Memories in [Homemade] A plump French omlette by purplynurply

French omelettes are very technique driven and notoriously one of the hardest egg dishes to make well. It's taken me a long time to get proficient at them but I'm pretty obsessive about cooking, so of course now it's basically the only type of omelette I make lol. I would say don't even bother with them unless you're into that type of finicky thing.

Couple of key tricks to getting a nice French omelette:

  1. Use a non-stick pan. I've made them successfully in a carbon steel pan before but it's much much more difficult to avoid sticking and get the correct texture. Save yourself the frustration.

  2. Preheat the pan well on medium low. At least a few minutes. You don't want the pan to be too hot but you need to make sure there is enough thermal mass in the pan to cook the eggs without the pan cooling off and totally stunting the cooking process.

  3. Butter. Even though you're using a non-stick pan, you still wanna use a good amount of butter. At least half a tbsp. Add it to the pan once preheated and just as the bubbles start to dissipate is the right time to add your eggs. You don't want to let it brown at all.

  4. Chopsticks. You need to keep the eggs moving from the moment they hit the pan and I find the best way to do this is to use a pair of wooden chopsticks as your stirring implement. They're really a great, nimble tool and make it easy to scrape any egg off the side of the pan, etc.

  5. Watch a bunch of videos on people making them to get a sense of the technique. And then practice, practice, practice. Worst comes to worst, you'll just end up with more of a regular omelette or if it gets really bad, well then you've always got scrambled eggs to fall back on.

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Calm_Memories t1_j6bqt00 wrote

Thanks for the thoughtful reply! Regarding the chopsticks, are you intentionally stirring without touching the bottom or are you scraping it? Should the sides be scraped right away or once egg has begun to cook/form? I hadn't tried using them and I wonder if my rubber spat is part of my issue.

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purplynurply OP t1_j6bvvjl wrote

I'm definitely scraping the bottom of the pan. Gently of course but because they're wooden you don't really have to worry about scratching the pan or anything. And I'd say scrape down egg that sticks to the sides right away, and reincorporate it to the mix. You wanna keep everything as homogeneous as possible. And youll kinda shake the pan and stir with the chopsticks at the same time, quite vigorously to avoid large curds from developing. Then once it's mostly set and kind of looks like a super soft, runny scramble, just leave it for a sec to set up the base, then you can begin the fold. Just tilt the pan and use the chopsticks to get under the eggs and begin to fold toward the other side. Once you have it folded basically in half, you'll put the chopsticks on the other side of the omelette, kind splitting them out in a V shape in order to flip the whole thing over. Or you can flip it right onto a plate. I personally like to let the inside cook a little bit more so it's not so runny. It's really a difficult thing to explain without a video haha. It's just a symphony of different movements all happening at the same time. Kenji Lopez Alt probably has the closest technique to what I do: https://youtu.be/0eUedeTH_aI

I only use two chopsticks though, and once it's to the point where he flips it onto a plate, that's where I would instead use the V method I talked about to get behind the omelette, as well as a dose of confidence and maybe slight acrobatics, to quickly flip it and let the other side cook for a second.

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