How to Make a French Omelette

I've written about French omelettes in the past, but it's been a while, and I don't know that I've ever written down an actual written recipe that is complete and accurate. The recipe in my first book, The Food Lab, ended up correct, but early printings have a typo that has you roll the omelette the wrong way (the photos make it clear).

That recipe also incorporated the use of tiny cubes of butter diced up and mixed in with the eggs to keep them moist and tender. It's sort of a cheat-y hack that works, but isn't really necessary if you are careful with how you cook your eggs.

This technique is very classic. It's the way that I learned how to do it from Jacques Pepín's shows years ago. There's one novel trick I incorporate which solved an issue that had plagued me for years: how to accurately gauge pan temperature. For an omelette, you want the pan to be hot enough that butter starts foaming instantly, but not so hot that it burns quickly. This is a pretty narrow range!

The trick I came up with is to add a bit of water to the skillet before pre-heating it. Then, as the water starts to bubble, swirl the pan around, moving the water around until it's all evaporated. Your pan is now at the exact right temperature for an omelette. This works because as long as there is water left in the pan, it will steal heat energy from the pan's surface in order to evaporate, effectively limiting the pan's surface temperature to around the boiling point of water (or slightly higher).

This temperature happens to be just the right temperature to get butter to immediately foam. (This should not be surprising - it's the water in butter evaporating that causes it to foam, after all).

To make the omelette, you thoroughly beat three or four eggs (depending on skillet size) with a pinch of salt (salting eggs in advance will keep them more tender and moist as they cook). You then add butter to a non-stick or well-seasoned carbon steel pan that is heated to around 250°F or so--the point at which the butter added to it will immediately start to foam but not burn. Then you add the eggs and cook, shaking the pan and mixing the eggs vigorously with the bottom of a fork until they form a very fine-textured curd with loose, custard-jiggle.

You roll the omelette by tilting the skillet away from you so that the eggs collect in the bottom, carefully loosening the edges of the set eggs, and rolling the downwards, letting gravity to most of the work. To roll the second side over, you hold the handle of the skillet and rap it sharply with your other hand right where it meets the body. Doing this repeatedly should case the back end of the omelette to curl forward and over, closing it up.

Finally, you finish by grasping the handle of the pan with your hand facing backwards (imagine how you'd grasp the handle if the pan was on the other side of it) inverting a plate over the omelette, then flipping everything and rolling the omelette onto the plate.

If you want to get fancy you can rub the omelette with butter and sprinkle it with chives and salt.

And you know what? Now I remember why I don't often write recipes for omelettes like this. It's because a reading a recipe to learn how to make an omelette is like reading a manual to learn how to ride a bike. The format of a recipe is really not the best way to explain the details of the technique. I hope my written description paired with the video and audio explanation will make it all clear.

But here it is anyway:

This recipe has been updated and moved here.