I once had the honor of spending an afternoon cooking omelets with the legendary chef André Soltner. It's a task that seems simple but of course isn't, and for that reason making an omelet was what chefs would ask prospective employees to cook as an audition. As the well-known refrain goes, everything you need to know about a cook, you can learn by observing them make an omelet.
Interestingly, Soltner's lesson didn't start with the omelet. It started with cracking eggs. I'd been cracking eggs my whole life, but I had no idea just how detailed a person could be about the right way to do it. His method was rooted in extreme resourcefulness: Soltner grew up in wartime France, when food was often scarce. An egg, in those years, was beyond precious, a source of nutrition and sustenance like little else. To waste even a drop of it was unthinkable.
He showed me how to crack the egg, split the shell in two, dropping the white and yolk into a bowl, then cradle each half in his fingers, freeing his thumbs to carefully scrape every last bit of white from the shell halves. His method was deft, efficient, and beyond thorough.
Well, that's not what I'm here to show you today. Instead, I'm going to show you the exact opposite. You see, there are timessuch as war and perhaps a calm weekend morning when you're taking the time to make the most painstaking omelet of your life for yourself and maybe, maybe a loved onewhen that kind of care is essential. But then there are other times when speed, crude and rough, is all that matters.
As a guy who used to work a Saturday night dinner shift and then return to the restaurant early the next morning for a Sunday brunch that stretched into a dinner service, at least 15-hours on my feet working non-stop from start-to-finish, I know that sometimes you need to crack a lot of eggs as freaking quickly as possible.
For home cooks, speed-cracking is not something you need to do every day. But sometimes it comes in handy. Let's say you've rented a house on a lake with your friends, a whole big bunch of them plus all the significant others. And you wake up one chilly morning and decide to make scrambled eggs for the crowd. Sure, you could break the eggs one-by-one, semi-carefully, the way most of us normally do. But this is a moment that is crying out for some badassery. This is when you want to stand there in that rented kitchen and bang those motherf-ers out like nobody's business. Your friends will be astonished. They'll also be fed more quickly.
