Parmesan soufflé omelette

This is NOT the Japanese layered omelette, tamagoyaki. I’ve just been watching videos of chefs and cooks frying tamagoyakis and it is completely fascinating: layers of barely cooked egg turned and rolled over and over on themselves, a bit like the, equally obscure, German cake Baumkuchen. Using just chopsticks, they make a perfect multi-layered egg roulade which is then sliced and served, weirdly, as a side dish. Egg on the side? Yeah, whatever.

This is also NOT a soufflé. Soufflé needs to be baked, with bated breath and in complete silence, lest the soufflé collapse on a sudden noise. That’s nonsense of course but the art of baking those airy-fairy, sweet or cheesy productions is of a higher plane.

But nor is this an ordinary omelette, the egg tousled a bit with a fork, fried and folded over spinach. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a basic omelette apart from it being basic – it’s breakfast staple, it’s fried egg with split yolk, it’s a scramble you forgot to stir.

This omelette is for when you like eggs for breakfast but are a little bored with scrammies or soft-boiled. It’s a great way to impress, if impress you want to somebody on your first breakfast together. It’s a good way of diverting kids from mountains of Frosties or CocoPops every morning. It’s elegant. And the only slightly difficult thing about it is flipping.

The trick, I might say, is to insert the palette knife underneath the omelette right in the middle, then decisively flip. But to be honest, it’s more a lucky dip, or a lucky flip; sometimes it goes well and sometimes, well, not so much. If you really want it to be flawless, slide it off the pan onto a plate and turn it out back onto the pan. It works. Most of the time.