Greek Style Omeleta
Looks Like a Thick Omelette
Time: 1 Hour 25 minutes
Ingredient Availability: 5/5
Difficulty: 3/5
Omelettes come in all sorts of varieties. In a lot of American restaurants you can put just about anything in an omelette. This omelet recipe from the Zaytinya Cookbook is supposedly Greek style and full of vegetables and feta cheese. Let’s see if this is something I’d like to have more often than my omelettes of randomness.
Key Ingredients & Omissions:
Nothing in this recipe is special or a must have besides the eggs really. Of course, the fewer vegetables you use, the smaller the end result will be. You could probably substitute the vegetable for others if you don’t like them, but then it might not be Greek style. I used everything the recipe calls for.
Tools:
Large Pot
Skillet
8-9” skillet, preferably non stick
Sharp Knife
Cooking Review:
Prep: 21 minutes
The prep for this recipe starts off with filling a pot with water and setting it on the stove to boil. While it is coming to a boil, I tore the kale from the stems/ribs and set it aside. I also sliced the light green and white parts of the kale as well as the sweet onion. Finally, I prepared the dill and chives to be used as garnish at the end.
Kale: 10 minutes
Once the water was boiling, I filled a bowl with ice and water and set it next to the sink before putting the kale into the hot water. I pressed it down using a spider and let it cook for about 2 minutes before draining and transferring to the bowl of ice water. I used my hands to stir the kale in the water to cool it off before squeezing out most of the water with my hands and putting it back into the colander. I used a paper towel to squeeze the kale against the sides of the colander and get rid of excess water. The kale was arranged flatly on the cutting board and chopped up.
Cook Vegetables: 30 minutes
I melted the butter in a cast iron, as it was the closest thing I had to a non-stick skillet. I added the leek and onion and cooked it on low heat for about 10 minutes until soft. While that was cooking, I went ahead and cracked the eggs into a bowl and beat them until well combined. The kale was added to the skillet and cooked for about 8 minutes until soft along with the leek and onion. I transferred the vegetable mixture to a plate, spread out as much as possible, to cool for about 10 minutes.
Mix: 3 minutes
The feta cheese and salt were added to the eggs along with the cooled vegetable mixture. I folded them into the eggs and added some olive oil to the cast iron skillet to heat up.
Cooking: 13 minutes
Once the oil was heated, I added the egg mixture and used a rubber spatula to disturb the bottom to reduce the chance of sticking. I also shook the pan a little for the same reason. After cooking for about 2 minutes, I put a plate on top of the skillet and inverted the omelette onto the plate. Unfortunately, I still had some sticking, so It wasn’t a clean transfer. So, I transferred what I could from the pan onto the plate with the rest of the omelette, cleaned out the pan for the most part, and added the last tablespoon of olive oil to the cast iron over medium heat. Once the oil was hot, I slid the omelette back into the pan, raw side down to cook for about 3 minutes.
Finishing: 5 minutes
I topped the omeleta with the dill, chives, feta, and flaky sea salt and decided to keep it in the skillet rather than attempt to transfer it to a serving platter. I used a plastic knife to cut sliced of the omeleta.
Analysis:
The flavors are pretty much exactly what you’d expect. You can taste everything that goes into the omeleta, which is a good thing, but it doesn’t combine to be better than the sum of its parts. Its texture is nice, as the vegetables add a pleasant crunch against the soft eggs. The feta adds some chew but its flavor is only noticeable every now and then. The egg was still a little runny in some parts, so it probably could have been cooked for a little longer. Surprisingly, the one teaspoon of salt was enough to season this fairly well. Really, I don’t think this would be something that wows you in comparison to an omelette that you could throw together in 10-15 minutes, which is disappointing considering the time this takes. On top of that, I can see a lot of people struggling with sticking even if they use a non-stick pan, which can be disheartening. I’m going to give this recipe a 6/10 because I think it’s a fancy omelette that tastes like an average one. There’s nothing really special about it that warrants the tricky flipping step or the extended prep time. It tastes fine, just not quite worth the time in my opinion.
