Omelettes, part 1

Waiting for thought to percolate about work-related matters (design and coding stuff, nothing exciting), so writing about omelettes instead, to give my backbrain time to work on the other stuff.

Omelettes have a rep for being hard to make*, but this is not necessarily true. There's about as many techniques out there as there are cooks (and as there are ways to spell omelette/omelet/omlet/etc), and if you ask around you'll find a range of opinions on what makes The Perfect Omelette (and you'll find discussion getting heated at times as people discover that Someone on the Internet is Wrong about the proper way to make one).

* Or at least that's been my experience when telling people I make omlettes--I even had one roommate who demanded I make one in front of her, as she couldn't believe that the average person could make one. Your mileage may vary.
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Omelettes, part 2

The basic procedure for a basic omelette without any add-ins goes more-or-less thusly:

Crack your eggs into a small or medium-sized mixing bowl. Those in the know claim that striking your eggs against a thin surface like the edge of a bowl leads to more shell in the egg because it fractures it into pieces. You're supposed to crack them against a flat surface like the countertop. In practice, find that I get way more eggshell in the bowl and way more egg on the counter with the latter method, so I stick to the edge of the bowl (unless I managed to grab one of the plastic jobs instead of the metal mixing bowl).
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Omelettes, part 3

Now that you've got a basic technique* for making omelettes, you get to start playing. Eggs are fairly basic in flavor and meld well with all sorts of flavors from the savory end of the spectrum--pork and onions in U.S. diner-style omelettes--to the sweet--soy sauce, sake and sugar in Japanese omelettes.

* "A" basic technique, not "the" basic technique because there is no One Ideal Technique.

I'm staying closer to the savory end with this post because while I enjoy Japanese-style tamagoyaki, I've yet to cook one successfully in a way that achieves the folded layers of egg the traditional technique calls for. If you're interested in that, I suggest heading over to the tamagoyaki post on Just Hungry.
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