How to make the perfect omelette

Jamie Oliver: Hi guys! Welcome to the Ministry of Food. We’re gonna do omelettes. Omelettes are fantastic. They’re cheap, they’re flexible, you can use all sorts of different things – crispy bacon, mushrooms, tomatoes, cheeses, you name it.

I think omelettes are the kind of thing that don’t really get, erm, the sort of credit they’re due, actually. If they’re cooked beautifully, they are incredible. They’re cheap, eggs are one of the best forms of protein … go free-range organic eggs – you’ll be laughing.

Personally, I use three eggs for a main course omelette. Just crack ’em in like this – get your egg, crack it on the side, open it up. If for any reason you got shell in there, use the half of the shell to get the shell out. And if you try with your fingers, you’ll be going like this all night, and it won’t work!

So, pinch of salt and pepper, like that. Some people put milk and cream – I don’t, at all. I’ve got a pan, er, the right size pan, about, sort of seven inches, I guess. That’s on a medium heat. Whisk up your eggs. Just a little bit of oil, extra virgin’s obviously the nicer way to go. Knob of butter in there, let that start to melt. Give it a chivvy about in the pan. You want to coat the bottom of the pan, like that. The great thing about omelettes and eggs is, if you get the first one wrong, then learn from it, try it again and just get it perfect. If it’s too dark, cook it less. If it’s too hard, cook it less. If it’s too soft, cook it more. So, just gonna turn that down a little bit, there. You want round about a medium heat. Don’t rush it, otherwise, if you cook eggs too hard and too fast, you get this kind of horrible, horrible sort of crispiness to it, which we don’t like.

Now, for the first twenty seconds, you can bring in the egg from the sides like this, and where there’s the gap, there, don’t worry – just tilt the pan. And then you can bring it in here, and then you can tilt the pan. Just like this, alright? And then after about thirty seconds, right, you want to squiggle the egg around one last time and turn the heat down a bit, and I’ll put a little bit of cheddar cheese in. Now, you could use all sorts of different cheese, I think cheddar cheese is just great. You need the tiniest amount. And this is just for a basic omelette. So, just grate the cheese over the omelette like this. Erm, you can see that the egg still looks a little soft round here – that’s good news, ‘cause the egg, you don’t want it to be overcooked and hard, erm, you want it to be silky and delicious. But, yes – you don’t want it raw!

So, just gonna, just let it just tick over on a low heat now, for about forty seconds, just as this sort of softness of the eggs just starts turning. You can – just look at it, you can see the egg change colour. Then, you get your slice, like this. You can just go around the edges. Don’t sort of over-touch it, just go around the edges and dislodge it. Non-stick pans for this – really essential, I think, er, unless you’ve got a good old cast iron one. See if you can move the omelette like that – can you see how that omelette’s moving, right? So, in theory, I shouldn’t get any grief.

So, what I do then is I tilt the omelette away, put my spatula into one side like this, get it underneath – I don’t want to overcook the omelette – and just flap it, like that. That’s all we want. And that is heavenly! You can see you’ve got a tiny bit of colour there, which is enough. Loads of colour and it’s gone hard. Then, all I do is just serve it, and in the middle there you’ll have a beautiful omelette. I mean, that, y’know, as a snack, with a salad, cold meats, just on its own, tiny bit of ketchup, lovely, chopped tomatoes… you can start making your own omelettes up, just by frying off, say, mushrooms first, then doing your omelette like that. You could, er, fry off crispy bacon first, and then put the eggs into it. So, you can really make so many different things out of an omelette, and I want to show you inside here. What you don’t want is just like a load of cooked egg, ‘cause it’s boring. What you want is that sort of fantastically soft, silky, sort of, inside. Can you see in there? Want it to be soft and silky, right? It’s not raw egg, it’s just lovely, lovely melted cheese.

Nine out of ten, Oliver! See if you can get your eggs that good. Good luck, and if you’re going to pass it on, at home or in the workplace, this is a great dish to do – simple but brilliant. Good luck!

© Jamie Oliver