As a teenager, I used to astound my friends by cooking the perfect omelette. And I always told them the secret was in the cooking oil.
They would go home and try it out for themselves. They’d take their mother’s most expensive cooking oil, pour it into the pan, break some eggs, whisk them and pour the mixture into the frying pan. What ensued might be an interestingly textured scrambled egg ensemble. But certainly not an omelette.
There are many lessons to be learned from this story. Don’t make assumptions might be one. Another could be wait until you have all the details before you rush off. But I think it’s more about this: ask the right question, and you’ll get the right answer.
Sure, cooking oil is important to making an omelette. For two reasons. Firstly, you need to use cooking oil to make a decent omelette. You can’t pour the egg mixture directly onto the frying pan - it’ll stick. Secondly, you need to let the cooking oil get hot. Really hot. The cooking oil doesn’t need to be smoking, but if it is, you can be sure that your omelette isn’t going to stick. And that means you’ll end up with a well-formed omelette, not a pan of scrambled egg.
But the right question wasn’t ‘What’s the secret to making a good omelette?’ Firstly, that assumes there’s one secret. Secondly, it assumes there’s a secret. There’s no secret to making an omelette, or in the cooking oil. Ask that question and you get: ‘the secret’s in the cooking oil’. So my friends thought that using special/expensive/fancy/organic cooking oil would transform their omelettes. They focused on the object itself like good little consumers.
The right question could have been, ‘How do you make the perfect omelette every time?’ - to which the answer would be a list of ingredients plus instructions to guide you through every step of the way.
Another right question would have been, ‘Can you show me how to make an omelette?’ - and I would have been happy to. There was no secret after all.
