Respect the egg, dude

Ignore the hapless hipster hordes, here’s how to make an honest-to-goodness, three-egg omelette karoostew

PEOPLE love to make things unnecessarily complicated. Like the sprinkle of chocolate powder or cocoa or, worse, Milo, on top of a cappuccino. That’s almost as shameful as topping your coffee with cream instead of foam. That’s not a cappo, dude. That’s a coffee with cream, china.

You want to mar your cappuccino with sweet stuff that belongs on a children’s dessert, be my guest. Just don’t try it anywhere near Sicily if you don’t want to wake up to a horse’s head in your bed next morning.

And Appletiser coming out with Peachtiser or Ambertiser or whatever it’s called. I tried some, it’s horrible. Appletiser has a purity of flavour and a refreshingly gentle mousse. (That’s the sparkle you find in Champagne, bud.) I get Grapetiser even though it is marginally too sweet. But please don’t give me Guavatiser or Avotiser or I might have to refer you to the Beverage Mafia.

And you, trendoid young wine producer whose daddy bought him a vineyard. Yes, you, listening to Joshua Na die Reen on your iPod. with the longdrop earring and the shoulder tatt that clashes so ironically with your retro check shirt. Look, you are undeniably Bolandcool, man, you’ve made Maties the new Ikeys, you smatter your Afrikaans with English (or is it the other way round?), you rub shoulders at nightclubs with your dudeband mates from Die Heuwels Fantasties and Van Coke Kartel. You make English okes look lame, dude.

But could you lose the chocolate pinotage please? Did you have to take South Africa’s one and only original vintage (okay, it is a hybird but still) and turn it into a luxe trend? Do you not know that there are eighteensomethings who think that the wine is actually mixed with chocolate? That’s it’s like a kind of like dessert thing? Like, you know, those vodkas that taste of anything else but vodka?

Do you see the Scots tweaking their single malts to give them a chocolate twist, or orange, or guava? Would someone who would kill for a good, peaty single malt not evoke the spirit of William Wallace and do battle with the sassenach who came up with that bloody ridiculous idea? There’d be mayhem in the glens, feathers flying in the heather.

But no, the marketers are taking control of all these things and bending things to meet the ends of what they imagine the market to want.

Sure, a chocolatey undertone is a covetable aspect of certain wines, but this chocolate pinotage fad has been taken to a mad level. I swear I once saw one of them marketed with a bar of actual chocolate tied with a ribbon to the bottle neck. Or maybe that was a nightmare.

All of which brings me to the humble omelette and the insistence by some people, even most people, of tampering with what ought to be a madly simple recipe. I have little doubt that recipes for the chocolate omelette or the single malt omelette cocktail are being formulated in some chef ’s fevered mind even as I write. But what I’m getting at is the unnecessarily complicated recipe for an omelette that many, including breakfast chefs, aspire to.

The argument goes that you add baking powder to make an omelette fluffier. Sure, that does work. But it also changes the texture, and the flavour, and for me it ruins it stone dead.

You want to make an omelette really fluffy? The secret is in your elbow. You need to have the eggs in a bowl (three of them, ou, let’s not be stingy) and a good, solid whisk, and you need to beat the living daylights out of those eggs so that they are full of air when you cook them.

As for the other addition most cooks insist on, which is to use a little water or milk to make the omelette lighter, I don’t buy that either, because anything that makes it even remotely less eggy, for me, spoils the result.

So, here’s how I believe a good omelette should be made, and how I make them in our restaurant in Cradock.

Prepare any filling of your choice – cook bacon, grate Cheddar cheese, chop tomatoes, crumble feta, chop herbs, slice and fry onions or mushrooms – and have them to hand. Have the clean frying pan and a metal spatula ready. Have the stove at a moderately hot heat. On my stove I start cooking an omelette at number 4, and then turn it down to 3.

Put the pan on the heat and when it is hot, add the butter. While it melts, vigorously whisk the eggs and keep whisking while you pour them into the melted butter. Leave the eggs to begin to set for eight to 10 seconds. Using the spatula, draw the cooking egg in from the sides while tipping the pan to allow the gooey raw egg in the centre to shift to the edges. Keep doing this, carefully, until most of the egg is settled evenly. Turn down the heat and sprinkle over the filling of your choice. Leave for no more than a minute, and then carefully work the spatula under the further side of the omelette and fold it towards you. This becomes easy and perfect with practice, and you will get the hang of it.

Cook for a short while longer but Do Not Overcook An Omelette. That is the chief rule.

In short: it must be butter, it must be only egg other than filling, there must be three of them, and don’t cook the damn thing to the point where it becomes a dry, sad reason for a chicken never to have been born.

Respect the egg, dudes. There. Now bugger off and have a skinny cappo.

TAKE NOTE: Do not overcook an omelette – that is the chief rule.