Striped Mushroom Omelet

This past March, we had to make about 360 omelets to serve dur­ing our week­long launch of Modernist Cuisine in New York City. We made all of them ahead of time at The Cooking Lab, in a sin­gle 19-hour day. In six of those hours, we churned out more than 300 omelet “skins.” I’ve never been as deliri­ous as I was then...that’s a lot of omelets!

To be cer­tain the omelets would keep well dur­ing the trip, we ran per­isha­bil­ity tests in advance on all of the com­po­nents, and we then used the test results to time our pro­duc­tion care­fully. You don’t want to be guess­ing when you’re car­ry­ing a whole bunch of vacuum-sealed eggs across the coun­try! We found that the omelets and the scram­bled egg foam keep pretty well for two to three days, but they really are best after no more than one day. After four or five days, the eggs start to get sticky. Nobody wants four-day-old eggs.

Needless to say, you need a lot of eggs to make 30 dozen omelets. It’s always fun to see the expres­sions on store clerks faces when we buy a lot of one thing: in this case, four cases of eggs at Whole Foods. That’s not unusual for us. When we prep for events, we’ll often buy 20 pounds of pig skin or all of the beef fat that the butcher trims in the morn­ing. Restaurants typ­i­cally use pur­vey­ors, who deliver large amounts of var­i­ous prod­ucts right to their door. When we show up at sub­ur­ban super­mar­kets, they just never know what hit them.

–Johnny Zhu, Culinary Research Assistant, The Cooking Lab

If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. This isn’t the usual way we do it in the kitchen at The Cooking Lab. But since we have an ultra­high­speed video cam­era at the lab, and one of our cowork­ers owns a rifle, we just had to take this shot.

RECIPES

Tips and Substitutions:

  • Try sub­sti­tut­ing truf­fle con­cen­trate (see page 2·427) for the mush­room puree.

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  • Stripes of mush­room puree are visu­ally stun­ning, but skip­ping the stripes alto­gether saves nearly an hour of prep time. Omitting the stripes does not detract from the remark­able tex­ture, which is what makes this omelet truly special.

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  • If you don’t own a combi oven, you can cook the omelet in a non­stick pan, cov­ered with a tight-fitting lid, in a hot oven. If you are mak­ing the striped ver­sion, the non­stick coat­ing on the pan is not likely to be suf­fi­cient, so line the pan with sheet of non­stick mate­r­ial, such as a sil­i­cone mat, magic paper, or even wax paper. A sil­i­cone mat shaped in a cir­cle the same cir­cum­fer­ence as the pan is ideal.

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  • The Omelet Base recipe calls for 145 g of eggs, which equals about three eggs; the 12 g of egg yolk is about one egg yolk.

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  • Pour the egg base over the stripes with a spat­ula in order to dis­perse the liq­uid gen­tly with­out dis­rupt­ing the mush­room stripes.

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  • To make the mush­room mar­malade, saute 80 g of mush­rooms, 60 g of shal­lots, and 30 g of clar­i­fied but­ter over low heat until the liq­uid has evap­o­rated, about 25 min­utes. Add 20 g of brown chicken jus, and then sea­son to taste with salt and pep­per. Finely mince 2 g each of fresh chervil, chives, and pars­ley, and 1 g of tar­ragon, and then stir the herbs into the mar­malade. The mar­malade keeps in the refrig­er­a­tor for sev­eral weeks. It goes great with a vari­ety of foods, so you might want to make a big batch!

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  • If you don’t have any brown chicken jus on hand, or if you want to make a veg­e­tar­ian ver­sion, sub­sti­tute some soy sauce and a lit­tle bit of honey. This com­bi­na­tion cre­ates the same intense umami fla­vor as the jus does.

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  • If you don’t want to use the mush­room mar­malade, sim­ply sauté some mush­rooms to your lik­ing and serve those as an accompaniment.

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  • You can cook the omelet base and the scram­bled egg foam a day ahead of time. We cooked the eggs in advance and then heated them ever so gen­tly back up to 55 °C, where we held them for two hours to pas­teur­ize them. At that point, you can just load them back up and siphon them out.

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  • Add a sprin­kling of chopped fine herbs to the omelet before rolling it up.

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  • Brush the plated omelet with a lit­tle bit of clar­i­fied but­ter just before serving.

The final plated dish is filled with siphoned scram­bled eggs and mush­room marmalade.

Spread the mush­room puree on a sil­i­cone mat with a spat­ula. Make sure the sur­face is smooth and even.

A pas­try comb is repur­posed to cre­ate dra­matic stripes, which pen­e­trate both the front and back of the omelet.

The omelet base con­sists of eggs, an extra egg yolk, heavy cream, and salt, which is then poured over the stripes of mush­room puree.

The stripes are just as clear on both sides.