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.

Once back in their own homes, they would have a go at making one. 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 certainly not an omelette.

There are many lessons to be learned from this story. Don't make assumptions might 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. There are 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. Secondly, you need to let the cooking oil get hot. Really hot. The cooking oil in the pan needs to be very hot, but it doesn't need to be smoking to avoid sticking your omelette to the frying pan. 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. 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. The answer to that question is something like: 'the secret is 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.

A much better question would have been, 'How do you ensure your omelette is perfect 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.