How Knowing about Cooking Oil will Help You Make the Perfect Omelette

As a teenager, I used to astound my friends by cooking the perfect omelette. 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. Their way was to pour a good portion of their mother's most expensive cooking oil into a frying pan, crack a couple of eggs into a bowl which they'd briefly whisk before tipping the lot onto the luke warm oil in the pan. What ensued might be an interestingly textured scrambled egg ensemble. But certainly not an omelette.

This story contains many lessons, as a kung fu guru might say. Don't make assumptions might be one. Another could be wait until you have all the details before you rush 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. Second: get the cooking oil nice and hot. Extremely hot. Your Omelette certainly won't stick to the pan if the cooking oil is smoking hot - although it doesn't need to be that hot. And that means you'll end up with a well-formed omelette, not a pan of scrambled egg.

But the right question wasn't 'What's the secret to making a good omelette?' Firstly, that assumes there's one secret. For another thing, it leaps to the conclusion that there is a secret. To be honest, making an omelette holds no secrets - and neither does the cooking oil. Ask that question and you get: 'the secret's in the cooking oil'. So my friends thought that using special/expensive/fancy/organic cooking oil would transform their omelettes. Like good consumers, they couldn't see beyond the object itself.

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.

An even better question would have been, 'Could you show me how to make an omelette?' - and I would have been delighted to. After all, there was no secret.