Learn Jacques Pépin's famous omelet techniques

If I had to judge how technically good a chef is, I would probably ask him to make an

omelet

. It's hard to make a really good

omelet

te and there are different types of omelettes. I'm going to show you two types of omelettes: a kind of country French omelet, which is basically the way we make it in the United States, and then a classic French omelette. One is not better than the other, it's just a different technique, a different taste, a different look that you have on it. In the first one - I'm making an omelet with four eggs, here - In the first one salt, a dash of pepper, the only thing I'm going to do is stir it well first and cook it so that it has quite a large egg curd, and lightly browned on all sides, achieving the look and flavor that we want to be country.

A little bit of butter in there, and here I have a beautiful mold because that mold has no corners. You see, it has a beautiful sway. It is a non-stick pan, so it is ideal; It's actually an omelette pan. Now notice that in my eggs, I don't have any pieces of egg white hanging out to begin with, so it's not like you're just scrambling the eggs back and forth; you have to go from one hand to the other to really break them and don't put long pieces of egg white, otherwise they will stay white on the plate, in the pan while it cooks.

So what we do here, in the country omelette, let it brown a little, look, the eggs, here the butter, will brown a little, which in the classic omelet I don't want it to brown. So clean your pan well and you don't have to worry too much here. You move it from time to time, to take the large curds like this, and you replace those large curds with liquid. This will be totally different in the classic French omelette, where I move the mixture very very quickly, as fast as I can, to have as little curdling as possible.

Don't brown it at all, because browning will harden the albumen and I want something very tender and very soft in a classic French omelet. In country style, it's different. Now, how long do you cook it? It totally depends on you. You can have it slightly wet in the center. I like it a little wet. I would say my omelet is still a little moist here, which is how I personally like it, but I would probably brown it for a minute as well. Then fold it in half like this. At that point, I would put maybe a little bit of extra butter if I want, on the bottom here to brown the bottom of my omelette.

And now I'm ready to turn the tables. Over here, you switch hands and grab the handle over here. You hit it a little to make it slide and roll it upside down. You have a delicious, beautifully browned tortilla; This is a country omelet, but you can see quite large curds and all that. One way to do it. Now let's go with the classic French omelet. The technique is different. First, clean your plate, or rather, your pan. Put it there. I have a lot of heat in that pan and this is what I want for an omelet.

And as you see, it is a gas stove, and of course gas is going to be much better than electric because you want to have the flame for everyone, and a good stove should give you a large amount for an omelette. as well as a very low setting: low heat or something like that. So here again I have four eggs, in that omelet this time I put some chives, a truly classic herb omelette - herb omelette in France, you have chives, parsley, tarragon and chervil for the classic, but this one is just a chive omelet. So you can see here that my pan is hot but I don't want it as hot as the other one.

So again we put it in there, and now, contrary to what I did before, just letting the eggs form big curds, here with the bowl of the fork I want to move this around and stir it as quickly as I can. The smallest curd possible, and at the end, like at the end like now, I want to bring the whole mixture, I bring it from this side as you can see it's basically all here, that is, instead of having one. layer that I roll up like a carpet, everything is there. Pass my knife, bring your lip back and you can see here.

I want to have a nice crescent shape. Run this behind to get that lip back. Hit it there, as you can see, lift it up and then push it down. You want a nice corner and you don't even want to gild it more. This is the time, between the lips, where you would want to fill it in, if you have any type of filler. We change hands again, bring it this way. Then, pound it so it reaches the edge of the pan, then invert it to get an omelet. A classic tortilla that should be white like this or pale yellow, with the end just pointed like this, soft and without folds.

This is what a classic French omelet is. And as you can see, it's quite different and, as I said before, one is not necessarily better than the other. It's a different technique and a different taste. The curd is going to be much harder here, and if I open it up to show you, you'll see that the center of that omelet is very creamy, very soft, and very nice, which is the shape of the classic omelet. It should be.