What You Need to Know about Cooking Oil to Cook 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. Their way was to pour a good portion of their mother's most expensive cooking oil into a frying pan, crack a couple of eggs into a bowl which they'd briefly whisk before tipping the lot onto the luke warm oil in the 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. You can't pour the egg mixture directly onto the frying pan - it'll stick. Second: get the cooking oil nice and hot. Really hot. The cooking oil doesn't need to be smoking, but if it is, you can be sure that your omelette isn't going to stick. So instead of ending up with a frying pan full of scrambled egg, you'll have a beautifully crafted omelette.

However, the best question certainly wasn't 'What's the secret to cooking the perfect omelette?' Firstly, that assumes there's one secret. For another thing, it leaps to the conclusion that there is 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. They focused on the object itself like good little consumers.

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 happy to. After all, there was no secret.