Healthy Omelette Ideas

Enjoy our favorite healthy omelet recipes—perfect for a hearty start to the day

Enjoy our favorite healthy omelet recipes—perfect for a hearty start to the day, weekend brunch, or breakfast-for-dinner dish.

Originating in France, omelets can be easily adapted to suit any taste—fill with seasonal vegetables, meats, or a variety of cheeses. Here, our favorite omelet recipes offer an array of flavors and tastes for a meal (anytime of day) that everyone will love.

First up is our Classic French Omelet, the perfect way to start off any morning. The trick to a perfect French omelet is to pull the pan off the heat as needed, while stirring, to control how fast the eggs cook. The finished omelet should be golden outside and unbrowned, while still creamy at the very center.

Some people are passionate about pancakes, others are wacko for waffles, but when it comes to breakfast, I’ve always been an egg man. Beatles references aside, nothing makes me happier than hollandaise-topped eggs Benedict with gooey orange yolks or sizzling baked eggs dotted with bacon. Yum!

Still, my all-time favorite egg dish has to be the omelet. Ready in seconds, an omelet can be made with almost anything—chances are you have a perfect combination of fillings in your fridge right now. They work for any meal of the day and taste great—I love the balance of fluffy, golden eggs with the mild crunch of still-firm hot vegetables.

Cooking an omelet couldn’t be easier. Basically you whisk some eggs together, cook them in a nonstick pan with a little oil, add the filling of your choice and then fold it and serve. That said, there is some finesse involved in making a perfect omelet. Get step-by-step instructions on making an omelet here.

It’s hard to go wrong with omelet fillings. I’ve filled omelets with everything from gourmet prosciutto and capers to leftover red beans and rice. Both were delicious!

In cuisine, an omelette or omelet is a dish made from beaten eggs quickly fried with butter or oil in a frying pan (without stirring as in scrambled egg). It is quite common for the omelette to be folded around a filling such as cheese, chives, vegetables, meat (often ham and/or bacon), or some combination of the above. To obtain a fluffy texture, whole eggs or sometimes only egg whites are beaten with a small amount of milk or cream, or even water, the idea being to have "bubbles" of water vapour trapped within the rapidly cooked egg.

History

The fluffy omelette is a refined version of an ancient food. According to Alan Davidson, the French word omelette came into use during the mid-16th century, but the versions alumelle and alumete are employed by the Ménagier de Paris (II, 5) in 1393. Rabelais (Pantagruel, IV, 9) mentions an homelaicte d'oeufs, Olivier de Serres an amelette, François Pierre La Varenne's Le cuisinier françois (1651) has aumelette, and the modern omelette appears in Cuisine bourgoise (1784).

According to the founding legend of the annual giant Easter omelette of Bessières, Haute-Garonne, when Napoleon Bonaparte and his army were traveling through southern France, they decided to rest for the night near the town of Bessières. Napoleon feasted on an omelette prepared by a local innkeeper that was such a culinary delight that he ordered the townspeople to gather all the eggs in the village and to prepare a huge omelette for his army the next day.

## Records

On March 19, 1994, the largest omelette (128.5 m²; 1,383 ft²) in the world at the time was made with 160,000 eggs in Yokohama, Japan,[6] but was subsequently overtaken by another, weighing 2,950 kilograms (6,500 lb), made by the Canadian Lung Association at the Brockville Memorial Centre in Brockville, Ontario, Canada on May 11, 2002. In turn, that record was surpassed on August 11, 2012, by an omelette cooked by the Ferreira do Zêzere City Council in Santarém, Portugal. This record breaking omelette weighed 6,466 kilograms (14,255 lb), and required 145,000 eggs and a 10.3 metre diameter pan.