Jacques Pépin makes a seafood omelet

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

Well, today I'm going to show you how to make a seafood omelette.

I love eggs in any form, but that's a bit different.

So I have a few shrimp here.

Whoop, in fact, this one's is a bit frozen burn here.

So trim them.

I have three, four small scallop, about four or five shrimp with a quarter of a cup of a mushroom, couple of scallion, five eggs.

That could be plenty for doing an omelette main course for two.

We have a spoon and a half of butter in there.

So I'm going to cut those in like three piece.

Three, four piece, doesn't really matter.

And that'll cook very fast.

Okay, here.

The scallop...I'll cut them in like, meh, two or three piece, depending how big they are.

You could have calamari in there.

And actually, you can do that with, with fish as well.

You know, I mean, if you have a piece of salmon, you want to do that, that will be fine.

This...my mushroom here.

I cut this way.

The scallion, actually, you know, all of that, I'm going to put in the skillet together because the scallion will take as long, at least, as the shellfish to cook in.

So...I am going to put this right in there.

(sizzling) This is not going to take much more than three, four minutes to cook.

So, put a bit of salt on top of it.

A little bit of pepper.

And, my eggs.

I have five eggs here.

(shell cracking) I buy my eggs to a friend of mine who has chicken next door, so those are really organic.

Not only organic, but free range.

And it makes a difference.

And frankly, for the price of it, you should buy organic eggs as much as you can.

Okay, here.

Yeah.

High temperature.

So again here, salt, pepper... and maybe I'll put some chives in there directly.

In France I always use a lot of those herbs when they come out of my garden, you know, in all of the dishes.

Well, here we are.

Okay.

Well, I like to use, if I have some around, a little bit, maybe two tablespoon of cream or so, in my eggs, if you don't have it, fine.

Milk, water, or nothing at all, it's okay.

Just break the yolk here, with your fork.

And make sure that you go from one end to the other end, not just turning in the middle, because you don't break the white and you want to break the white... so that you don't have any long strand of white.

That's it.

So this has been cooking, what, maybe minute, minute, and a half.

And I know that those scallops, that's cooked enough.

A little bit of olive oil, maybe a dash.

And my eggs.

In a conventional classic French omelette, I move things very, very fast, as fast as I can, to get the smallest possible curd.

You know, and this is kind of French omelette which is very creamy in the center with very, very small curd, like scrambled eggs, basically.

And that's one way of doing it.

This, I like it with larger curd, where I wait a little bit like that to move this, to make some larger curd with this.

But I mean, it's a question of, of taste.

Shaking it like this.

I know people who like the omelette this way inside, you know, very, very wet.

I like it a bit wet inside, but not that much.

Okay, again...here.

But I think that, now, it is the way I like it.

See, the wet a little bit inside.

Clean that up around.

I let it brown, which a classic French omelette, I don't really let it brown.

And then you fold it.

So, here, I'm using... a large spatula like this.

To kinda fold it.

I'm going to put a dash of olive oil here to get me some color.

And to bring that lip here, back onto, I hit here, see that, make it lift up, and then you can press it back on top of it.

On that one, I'm going to let it brown for a second.

Then usually, you know, I'm moving this way.

To unmold your omelette, you go the other way.

You change hand, you put your hand, not this way, you put your hand underneath like this, you bang it on the side...of the table so that you're very close to the end so you can unmold it.

That's it.

The whole omelette now.

And you can see that even the center of it is going to be very moist and creamy.

This is a dish fit for a King.

Mmm.

Try that with your friends.

Happy cooking.