How I learnt to flip an egg omelette without breaking it into two

Photo: Nemoel Nemo/Pixabay

I developed a liking for eggs when I was in school, probably in middle grade. My mother would occasionally pack a couple of hard-boiled eggs in my tiffin and half a dozen of them for my school picnics. She’d cut them into two halves, sprinkle salt and pepper, and place them in a red-topped lunch box together with slices of white bread. The eggs were often accompanied by a banana. I never asked my mother why she gave me so many. I’m guessing she knew a thing or two about their nutritional value, in which case I grew up better for it.

I learnt how to make eggs in my late teens, though rarely to perfection. I made them boiled, fried and scrambled. I found boiling an egg particularly tricky. It’d either crack open within minutes or remain half-boiled, the yolk still soft and oozy, leaving me with a choice of either scooping it up with a spoon or tossing it into the dustbin. It was a while before I realised the downside of boiling a refrigerated egg on a high flame. Timing and temperature was everything, not to mention patience. But eggs were my go-to meal whenever I was hungry or alone at home, and also because they were easier to make and I didn’t know to cook much else.

Omelettes came later, somewhere in my twenties. While I made a decent egg omelette, I’ve always had a problem flipping it perfectly. A broken omelette looks messy on a plate; and worse, if it’s undercooked and the yolk is runny which is not how I like my yolk in the first place.

Wilson Fisk a.k.a. The Kingpin relishing his egg omelette in the Daredevil series.

Over the years, I have been honing my skills in turning over an omelette when it’s solid enough to be flipped and at just the right time, and I think I’m finally getting the hang of it. If the villainous Wilson Fisk a.k.a. The Kingpin (Vincent D'Onofrio) can do it so effortlessly in the Daredevil series, there’s no reason why I can’t. From that point, my two most recent attempts have been encouraging. Not unlike the Fisk Omelette, I cooked mine to a golden brown and managed to flip them with the expertise of a Pizzaiolo tossing pizza dough in the air.

I broke eggs into a bowl, added salt and beat them several times to counts of hundred, so that they’d rise to the occasion when I cooked them in a non-stick pan. I then added red chilli and turmeric powder, garam masala (a type of hot Indian spice), ginger-garlic paste and a spot of milk to the batter and beat it some more. Finally, I tossed in chopped onion, tomato, coriander and green chilli, and gave it a good stir.

After pouring a portion of the mixture into a heated pan with oil, I spread it around so that the fillings were evenly distributed, covered it with a lid and let it cook on a slow to medium flame; although, I lifted the sides every now and then with a spatula to make sure it wasn’t getting burnt. Once I was confident that my omelette was strong enough to withstand the flip at the hands of an amateur, I gingerly lifted it with the spatula, took a moment to steady my nerves and quickly turned it over. Bingo! Few things in the kitchen are more appealing to the senses than the sight of a flipped omelette landing back in one piece on a pan.

Now that the hard part was over, I went through the motions of cooking the other side of the omelette, poking it here and there with a fork to absorb the fillings. I flipped it one more time after which I sprinkled grated cheese on the omelette, folded it in the shape of a half moon and pressed it down with the spatula before carefully laying it out on a plate with the air of one who is determined to please the MasterChef judges.

I think the reason why my omelettes flipped as well as they did this time around was because I made them small, about the size of an appetiser plate, lest they split in midair and ruined my effort. Luckily, they didn’t and my operation omelette was a success.

© Prashant C. Trikannad