Jacques Pépin makes a country omelet

- Hi I'm chef Jacques Pépin and this is "American Masters At Home."

You know when I don't know what to do for lunch or dinner even, I usually end up with egg.

And I wanted to show you here how to make a kind of country omelet.

Very easy to do, very inexpensive and always great to eat.

For the first thing on this one, I would start with couple of tablespoon of oil.

This would be an omelet for two people, I mean very generous.

And there I'm doing it with, (knife cutting) with potato here, I have a medium potato, half an onion, and you wanna saute your potato and your onion first.

Okay, so here they are.

(oil sizzling) Potato and onion.

We're gonna take about four, five minute to cook a dash of salt on top of it of course.

I may even cover them and cook them gently.

Then in there, I'm going to put four eggs.

Always break your eggs flat like this.

(egg shells cracking) Inside salt, pepper, (pepper grinder grinding) chives.

I do use a lot of herbs, I mean chives, parsley.

One of the reason is that I have a garden and it's plentiful and at that time of the year I always use it.

When you have to pay a small fortune for a little bunch of it, I use it less.

See how my potato are doing here.

(potatoes sizzling) They're starting to brown.

(metal bowl clanging) Okay, make sure when you beat your egg like this that you just don't go in the center like this 'cause it's like a wet mop, go from one side to the other to really break the white.

So you don't have long streak of egg white.

And here I'm putting about 1/3 of a cup of Gruyere cheese or mozzarella or you know Jack cheese.

Any cheese or no cheese at all if you decide.

What we're gonna do is cover the omelet with a tomato.

So I'm gonna cut a plum tomato here, about five, six slice of tomato that should cover.

Let's see, yeah the potato are cooked now.

So you wanna go on, this is a small pan you know, a seven inch total pan and for an omelet for two it's great.

I'm gonna finish that omelet in another broiler.

The first thing that we do however is to cook the eggs.

And as you can see here, I'm gonna bring them around to mostly cook them.

But I still like it slightly wet in the center.

That's purely a question of preference you know.

It's still a bit wet as I can see.

So now I'm gonna put my tomato on top.

And basically, yeah one tomato should cover about the whole thing.

Maybe a dash of salt on top, and a little bit of oil too.

And then I'm gonna put that under the broiler.

I have my omelet now, underneath as you can see.

I could unmold it you know or make it slide.

Usually with a good nonstick pan it should slide out.

I can put a little bit of oil around on the edge.

Okay.

Yep, I could unmold it this way you know or as I said if you want it the other way it should slide around this way.

We like that, look better.

So here you cut that omelet.

As you can see that omelet will still be a little wet inside.

And that's how I like it, especially how Gloria likes it So this is the... (cheerful bright music)