How Knowing about Cooking Oil will Help You Make the Perfect Omelette
When I was a teenager, my friends would be amazed at my ability to produce the perfect omelette to order. And I always told them the secret was in the cooking oil.
They would go home and try it out for themselves. They’d take their mother’s most expensive cooking oil, pour it into the pan, break some eggs, whisk them and pour the mixture into the frying pan. What ensued might be an interestingly textured scrambled egg ensemble. But not an omelette by any stretch of the imagination.
This story contains many lessons, as a kung fu guru might say. Avoid jumping to conclusions could be one. You might also consider waiting to hear the whole story before rushing off. But I think it’s more about this: ask the right question, and you’ll get the right answer.
Sure, cooking oil is important to making an omelette. For two reasons. Firstly, you need to use cooking oil to make a decent omelette. The egg mixture will stick straight away if you try pouring it directly onto the frying pan. Second: get the cooking oil nice and hot. Extremely hot. Your Omelette certainly won’t stick to the pan if the cooking oil is smoking hot – although it doesn’t need to be that hot. And that means you’ll end up with a well-formed omelette, not a pan of scrambled egg.
However, the best question certainly wasn’t ‘What’s the secret to cooking the perfect omelette?’ Firstly, that assumes there’s one secret. Secondly, it assumes there’s a secret. There’s no secret to making an omelette, or in the cooking oil. Ask that question and you get: ‘the secret’s in the cooking oil’. So my friends thought that using special/expensive/fancy/organic cooking oil would transform their omelettes. Like good consumers, they couldn’t see beyond the object itself.
The right question could have been, ‘How do you make the perfect omelette every time?’ – which would have produced an outline of the procedure from cracking the eggs to levering the omelette onto the plate.
Another right question would have been, ‘Can you show me how to make an omelette?’ – and I would have been delighted to. After all, there was no secret.