How do I best turn an omelet?
Whenever I make an omelet I have a hard time turning it over to fry it from both sides. I use a plate, cover the pan and turn everything so that, in the best case, the omelet now is on my plate and I can just put it back into the pan with the not fried site facing down.
However, very often the omelet is outright stuck in my pan and I can't seem to get it off. This leads to me making scrambled eggs instead of an omelet (which is not the goal).
I normally preheat the pan to medium heat with some oil. Should I add more oil so that the omelet is floating onto the oil? If I do so, I fear to burn myself with excess oil when turning the omelet. Are there other methods so that I can always enjoy a nice omelet? What are the best ways to turn an omelet?
4 answers
One thing that might work (depending on how you want your omelet), is to quarter it before turning it. This makes it easier, because the parts fit better on the spatula. Now you can simply turn each of the four parts:
(the black is the pan, the yellow is supposed to be the omelet)
I read this a few days ago, when I made "Kaiserschmarren" (some kind of pancake ripped into pieces). For that, it doesn't matter if there are four parts, but for other omelet-like foods it might be unsuitable if you want them served in exactly one piece.
You ask in your question if you should add more oil when you have this problem. Absolutely not.
When I have trouble keeping the omelette together, it's almost always a sign that I've added too much oil (and then it devolves into scrambled eggs). It burns too much, gets burnt onto the pan, and doesn't flip.
The way my mother taught me how to get a proper omelette flipped is to fold it in half.
Put a little bit of oil on the pan, heat it and spread it around, then pour your egg in (usually two eggs). Use a spatula to keep it from spreading too much. After a minute or two, it should be solid enough that you can take your spatula, put it under part of your omelette, and fold it over onto itself. Your omelette should now take up half your pan.
Leave this cooking for a minute or whatever. It should be solid enough and cooked enough, then, that you can take your spatula and flip over the entire thing to cook the other side.
The end result should be that you have a fully cooked, folded in half omelette.
Afterwards, you can of course re-separate your omelette, or just have it folded over. But folding it makes it much easier to flip over as opposed to trying to flip it while it's all spread out.
If you can avoid it... don't.
Many ovens (certainly here in the UK; not sure about anywhere else) have either an integrated or a separate grill, with heating elements or gas flames at the top of the oven. That's exactly what you need here: instead of trying to turn the omelette over and all the mess that risks, you can fry it most of the way in an all-metal frying pan, then put it under the grill for 3-4 minutes to finish it off, still in the pan.
I had that exactly same problem... And solved it for good buying something that, here in São Paulo, we call "omeleteira" (which would translate to something like "omelet maker").
Its just two frying pans that fit together... So when it's time to turn the omelet, you just fit the other pan on top of the one you are using to cook one side of the omelet, turn the whole set and then let the other side fry on the other pan.
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