I have a history of being a very picky eater. As a child, I subsisted for years on a diet of frozen French bread pizzas, sweetcorn, Birds Eye potato waffles and edam cheese. It’s a miracle I didn’t keel over from malnutrition. In adult life, I’ve attempted to conquer most of my, what food writer Jeffrey Steingarten acutely identifies as, food phobias. The big areas of difficulty remain fish, especially shellfish; milk and cream, especially in a sweet context; and eggs.
I have learned to tolerate hard-boiled eggs in something like a Cobb salad, for example, and a few years ago made the exciting discovery that fried eggs in particular are quite nice with bacon. (Really, it sounds peculiar, but you should really try it). Scrambled eggs remain utterly beyond the pale, combining as they do an unpleasantly eggy flavour with a revoltingly sloppy and slobbery texture. I have a similar aversion to porridge – and don’t get me started on custard. My wife tells me that (with a little help from St Delia) I make the best scrambled eggs in the world. I can’t say for certain – I’ve never sampled them.
On the thing which has in the past frustrated me as the chief cook in our household is my inability to stomach omelettes. Omelettes combine fast convenience with their ability to incorporate whatever you happen to have in the fridge. Like risotto, once you have mastered the basic recipe, you can fling in almost whatever you fancy. Unlike risotto, an omelette is ready in 5-10 minutes and requires very little in the way of constant stirring. Inspired by a satisfactorily overcooked and delectably rubbery omelette I ate on a plane (really!) I recently tried a gutsy Gordon Ramsay version which involved frying up bacon and tomatoes, then pouring the eggs into the same pan and adding cheese (I think parmesan) and other good things. But after half a portion, I had to surrender as the relentlessly slobbery egginess overpowered me.
The fearsomely forensic Felicity Cloake tackled the Spanish omelette in her “perfect” Guardian column this week, and her article made me think that this might be the way forward. A dinner primarily consisting of potatoes, with some bright salty flavours to cut through the relatively small amount of egg, which would a) serve merely as a cement to glue the thing together, and b) be heavily caramalised and for the most part cooked through to rubbery toothsomeness.
Luckily for you, I documented the process. I’m adding chorizo and feta to Felicity’s basic recipe, as well as taking some short cuts. This is still around 40 minutes to an hour from fridge-opening to plating up – considerably less than a French omelette – but it’s fairly relaxed, leisurely cooking for the most part. Take your time and have fun.
Onions and potatoes: I cut up a Spanish (of course) onion and gently fried it in olive oil until it was mostly transparent. While the onion cooked, I sliced up around 300g of charlotte potatoes as thin as I reasonably could (I didn’t bother to peel them, although Felicity says I should have). They went into the pan for another 10-15 minutes until they were basically cooked through, but before the onion went from brown to burnt.
Eggs: six of them, briefly beaten up with a fork and generously seasoned with salt and pepper. The onions and the potatoes join the eggs in their jug for some happy mingling while I turn my attention to the
Chorizo: I sliced up half a 225g “ring” of chorizo and briefly fried it in the same pan while I prepared the
Feta cheese and herbs. I’ve got a 200g pack here, cut into cubes, a generous pile of chopped flatleaf parsley and just a little fresh thyme.
Combine: once the chorizo is cooked, everything goes in with eggs to ensure an even distribution of ingredients.
Second pan: These then go into a smaller pan (about 25cm across) because we want a compact thick Spanish omelette, not a wide flat French one. Again, there’s a slick of olive oil in here, but we don’t want to cook the egg mixture too fast. Slide a pallet knife around the edges and when it feels like the bottom is cooked through, turn it out on to a plate and then slide it back in to the pan to cook the other side. (Some people put the whole pan in the oven or under the grill at this point instead of turning the omelette over.)
Stuck and falling apart. What you hope, if you take the turn-out-on-to-a-plate method, is that a beautifully golden-brown omelette will plop neatly out of the pan ready to be slid back in, runny-side down for a further gentle cooking. What actually happened in my case, due to the age of my pan, or lack of care, or who knows what, is that bits of the omelette stuck to the bottom of pan and had to be hacked free with a slotted spoon. This significantly impaired the aesthetic of the dish, but the taste didn’t appear to suffer.
Serve. When the other side is finally done, turn the whole thing out and cut slices to serve. The quantities given serve four as a modest main course.
The results were almost exactly as I had hoped. The omelette was very satisfyingly potatoey and the sharpness of the feta and the salty richness of the chorizo combined with the iron parsley to cut through what little eggy cement there was in a very lively way. The result was comforting, filling, fresh and none too difficult to prepare. It was also delicious cold the next day.
The only questions which remain are – what else is good to put in a Spanish omelette (red pepper, broccoli, parmesan, taleggio, gruyere, bacon – any other ideas) and is there any really difference between Spanish omelette and the Italian frittata except geographically?
UPDATED TO ADD: Tonight’s version included bacon, purple sprouting broccoli and pecorino cheese and was quite delectable. I also learned the trick of turning it out of the pan neatly.
