OMG Omelets

I will give credit to The Frugal Gourmet, Jeff Smith, for teaching me how to make an omelet in one of his television cooking shows sometime during its reign on PBS in the late 80s. I grew up in a household with a French Canadian mother who taught herself how to be a pretty good cook, but strangely never prepared omelets, despite its French underpinnings. I think the first omelet I ever ate was at a Waffle House.

Now, you can make fun of Waffle House restaurants all you want. For those with a Food Network Guy Fieri's Diners, Drive-ins and Dives smugness, Waffle House restaurants are a bane of mass-produced cookie-cutter diners with "good food served fast." Of course, they have none of the character of those one-off diners that Guy promotes on his show ad nauseum, eating his way behind every cooking line and palling around with the cooks. But you gotta say one thing about a Waffle House: they're consistent. They all look exactly the same, are exactly the same size, have exactly the same menu and their food is consistently served the same way.

Okay, that does sound pretty boring, but my point is, Waffle House makes an unbelievably good omelet that you cannot get anywhere else because of the unique method they use to mix the eggs. While most cooks use a wire whip to blend the egg yolks and whites together, at Waffle House, they use the same kind of commercial kitchen appliance that you used to see at soda fountains to blend ice cream with other ingredients to make delicious malted shakes. The ones I remember at my neighborhood Rexall Drug Store lunch counter when I was a kid were semi-circular and had perhaps five spindles. A well organized busy soda jerk could keep several malted shakes mixing at the same time.

At Waffle House, the cook cracks two eggs into the stainless steal mixing cup, plugs it into the malt mixing machine, and lets it whirl for about a minute. At 18,000 revolutions per minute, this beats air into the completely homogenized eggs and therein lies the great texture and flavor of a Waffle House omelet. It is light, fluffy and you cannot find this technique in use anywhere else, which I frankly don't understand. It's not like it is a patented process. If I were opening a restaurant serving breakfast, this is precisely how I would prepare omelets.

Jeff Smith didn't advocate malted shake mixers as a method to blend yolks and whites together. But he did help me gain confidence in the basics techniques to cook an omelet, which is ultimately pretty easy if you know a few tips and tricks:

• Use a non-stick skillet with fluted edges.
• Use butter. Period.
• Mix the eggs ahead of time and allow the mixture to come up to room temperature. The omelet will cook more evenly that way.
• Use medium high heat to warm up the skillet. Crank the heat to high when you first introduce the egg mixture to the skillet, then back the heat down to medium as the eggs start to solidify.
• You don't need to flip the omelet to cook it all the way through.
• Don't fold the omelet in the skillet. Instead, let the omelet fold in half onto itself as you let it slip out of the pan onto your plate.

I'm going to give you two recipes: (1) A Waffle House style omelet made with a immersion blender; and (2) An Uppy Omelet, using a more traditional wire whip.

Ingredients
For the ultimate tomato, sausage & cheese omelet
2 eggs
1 14.5 oz can petite diced tomatoes (like, Hunts)
2 tsp minced garlic
2 green onions, chopped (or 1/3 cup diced yellow onions)
2 oz cup red wine
1 tsp Italian seasonings
2 oz grated sharp cheddar cheese
2 sausage patties, cooked and chopped
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp butter

The Recipe:
You will need an immersion blender for this recipe. Unless you want to go out and buy a Hamilton Beach malted shake mixer, this is the closest I can get you to the Waffle House omelet experience.

First, make the tomato mixture:
While you're frying your sausage patties, you want to make the tomato mixture in advance.

Heat the olive oil in a sauce pan, then saute the onion over medium heat until the onions collapse, about ten minutes for yellow onions or 3-5 for green onions. Add the garlic and cook another minute, then add the tomatoes, Italian seasonings and red wine. Turn the heat to medium high heat and bring the mixture to a hard simmer. Stirring almost constantly, you want to cook the tomatoes and allow the liquid to evaporate so the sauce reduces until it is a thick consistency, like a salsa. It's important to pay attention and stir constantly, because the tomatoes can easily burn, and there is no way to recover if that happens. It will be ruined.

By the way, this tomato mixture, with a little added oregano, is a great sauce to mix with cooked pasta for a light, Mediterranean meal. Black olives sauteed into the sauce would enhance the experience. But I digress....

Turn the heat lower as the tomato mixture comes to its final stages of reducing. Once you have the sauce the consistency of a salsa, take it off the heat, but leave it uncovered so it will continue to lose moisture, thickening the sauce a little more.

Once your sausage is fried, drain it well on paper towels, and then chop thoroughly and set aside.

Then, prepare the eggs:
Crack two eggs in the blender mixing cup and add a teaspoon of cold water. Blend the eggs for about a minute with the immersion blender on high speed. The mixture will develop a froth on top of the eggs as you blend them, and this is exactly what you want.

Put the prescribed skillet on medium high heat and melt the butter. Add the egg mixture to the pan, and turn the heat up to high. The egg mixture in contact with the bottom of the pan will begin to solidify almost immediately. Your job is to push the egg mixture with an inverted spatula to the center of the pan as the eggs solidify, allowing the eggs that are still liquid to fill in the gaps. As the omelet continues to solidify, turn down the heat to medium and at some point, you will be lifting up the edge of the omelet with a spatula and tilting the pan, allowing the still liquid egg mixture on top to run under the solidifying eggs. Keep up this technique until the top of the omelet is no longer runny. Allow the omelet to cook a bit more, being careful not to burn the eggs. You want the bottom of the omelet to be slightly browned, but only slightly.

Once the egg mixture on top is no longer runny, they are beginning to cook. If you're turned off because they don't appear to be completely cooked solid, don't fret. The heat of the omelet once you fold it will cook it the remainder of the way until they are done. If you wait until the top of the omelet is dry and totally cooked, you will have over-cooked the omelet on the bottom of the pan, so don't make this mistake. Timing, as they say, is everything.

Put 4-5 tablespoons of the tomato mixture on one half of the omelet. If you place the skillet handle at the six o'clock position, you are putting the tomato mixture only from six o'clock to 12 o'clock. Put the crumbled sausage on top of the tomato mixture, and then the sharp cheddar cheese on top of that.
To remove the omelet from the pan, you turn it out with the condiment side of the omelet sliding from the skillet onto the serving plate first, and then fold the omelet onto itself as the non-condiment side slides out of the skillet. The heat from the omelet will melt the cheese in a minute or two.

A variation on this omelet is to use any Mexican salsa (I prefer Paul Newman's Own All Natural Medium) and Monterrey Jack Cheese instead of the homemade tomato mixture and cheddar cheese. Heat the salsa in the microwave first and proceed with the recipe. Garnish with a dollop of sour cream after you have turned out the omelet onto the plate. This gives you a great Mexican flavor twist.

Ingredients
For the Uppy tomato, onion & cheese omelet
2 eggs
1 tsp heavy cream
1/2 small tomato, diced
1 green onion diced
1 tbsp butter
2 oz grated sharp cheddar cheese

The Recipe:
It's called an Uppy omelet because Uppy is the guy that taught me how to make omelets this way. Uppy didn't have an immersion blender, so he made his omelets the old fashioned way, with a wire whip whisk. This method is easier than my Waffle House style omelet and quicker, too. Uppy was usually always in a hurry. Uppy also almost always made cheese omelets. The addition of sauteed tomato and onion to this recipe is my contribution.

Crack two eggs in a mixing bowl, add the teaspoon of heavy cream, and with a wire whip, whisk together until smooth, creamy and well blended, about a minute.

Melt the butter in the prescribed skillet on medium high heat, and then saute the green onion for a minute. Add the diced tomato, and saute another two minutes.

Add the egg mixture to the skillet, but before the eggs start setting, make sure the tomato and onion bits are evenly distributed.

Cook the omelet in the same manner as above, cranking up the heat at first, and then backing it down to medium as the eggs solidify. When the top of the omelet is no longer runny and sets, add the cheese to 1/2 of the omelet, then fold the omelet out onto the serving plate as described above.

This omelet is equally as good as the first, but a little more dense. It's a good one, though, and a bit easier to make when you're in a hurry, with less utensils to clean up. Uppy hated to have a lot of stuff to clean up.

Of course, there are a ton of other ingredients you can put in an omelet...green or red bell pepper and mushrooms would be a fine addition to the tomato, onion and sausage, but saute them first.

Ham and cheese is a classic combination, but dice and saute the ham first and then add the egg mixture. Always add the cheese last.

Smoked salmon and cream cheese sounds good, although I have never tried it. If I did, I would add capers and finely diced red onion, and saute them first, then I would add the smoked salmon and cream cheese at the end.

Sauteed spinach and Parmesan cheese sounds good, too. Again, add the egg mixture to 2-3 tablespoons of sauteed spinach, and add the cheese at the end.

You get the idea.

It think this makes the point that an omelet is as versatile a vessel for the importing of other ingredients and flavors as is pizza dough. The rule of thumb might very well be: anything you can put on a pizza, you can put in an omelet.

Except pepperoni. Somehow, a pepperoni omelet doesn't sound very good.