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, Development Chef
