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GoodtoKnow
  • 06/04/2025
Here's how to make Spanish omelette by the head chef at The Salt Yard restaurant. Quick, easy and delicious!
Transcript
00:00Hi my name is Joe, I'm the head chef at Salt Yard Restaurant and today I'm going to show
00:03you how to make a traditional Spanish tortilla.
00:09Traditional tortillas are made up of three ingredients, onions, potatoes and eggs.
00:15The very first step we're going to do is we're going to caramelise the onions
00:19and that's done by really thinly slicing them
00:23and cooking them over a medium heat until they're nice and golden brown and caramelised.
00:36The really important thing to remember when you're caramelising anything, especially onions,
00:40is they have a very high sugar content and you need to counteract that by adding
00:47and cooking salt at the beginning.
00:56The next step is to slice the potatoes, obviously these are already peeled, I'm using
01:01jacket potatoes but you can use any kind of potato, you can use maris piper,
01:05king edwards, whatever is around at the time. I'm going to use a mandolin just for speed but
01:10you know you can easily use a knife at home, just try to cut them about two millimetres in thickness
01:15and that's what you need to do.
01:22Once you slice your potatoes it's really important to then soak them in water.
01:25What this does is it washes off all the starchy,
01:28floury feeling you can feel around the potatoes and it leads to a nicer flavour at the end.
01:35So the first step is going to be caramelising the onions and this is the longest process.
01:40So what we're going to do is we're going to start off by adding the oil to the pan
01:46and then we're going to add the onions and cook them
01:50for about 15 to 20 minutes, like I said with salt.
01:57That is going to be cooked until they're golden brown and caramelised.
02:01So once your onions get to this stage, nice and caramelised and brown,
02:05they're ready to come off the heat and we're going to put them on the side
02:10and let them cool down while we get on with frying our potatoes.
02:16So the next step is cooking our potatoes.
02:18We're going to deep fry them on the stove.
02:21It's really important that you drain the excess water off
02:24as any excess water in the oil will spit and it will burn you.
02:29So drain them off on towel, heat the oil in advance to 160 degrees
02:35and once that's ready then you put the potatoes in carefully
02:39carefully
02:42and cook them until they're golden brown and crispy.
02:55Okay so once your potatoes get to this stage here, golden brown and crispy,
02:59then we're ready to go.
03:01Take them out nice and carefully
03:04and drain off the oil and let them cool down.
03:08The whole reason we deep fry the potatoes is to remove the moisture from them
03:13so that when we add the eggs they soak up more of the egg.
03:16That adds to the flavour of the tortilla.
03:18Once we get to this stage and you've got your cooled fried potatoes, caramelised onions,
03:24eggs, salt and pepper, we just need to mix it all together.
03:27So what I'm going to do first is I'm going to add the caramelised onions to the potatoes
03:30and I'm going to crack 10 eggs in.
03:44Ideally what you would want to do after you've added the eggs and mixed everything together
03:49is allow it to sit overnight and what that does is allows the potato to soak up the eggs
03:54and make the tortilla crispier.
03:56Allows the potato to soak up the eggs and make the tortilla consistency a lot firmer.
04:02So we're going to season with salt and pepper
04:07and then get ready.
04:11I want to break the potatoes and crush them up so that again,
04:14once again they absorb the eggs and make sure it's evenly combined and incorporated.
04:19So we've left this to rest for 15 minutes or so and you can already see
04:23it's starting to firm up and some of that egg has already started to absorb into the potato.
04:28What we need to do is heat your pan and add a little oil to the base, ensure it doesn't stick.
04:34This recipe in a big pan like this would do I reckon two tortillas
04:40but each one would serve two people so this would be four people.
04:43If you were going to do them in little bellini pans you'd probably get
04:46more along the lines of six portions I would say.
04:49So we're going to add the mix in
04:52and you can see the idea behind it is to not give it too much of an aggressive heat
05:06because otherwise you'll put too much colour around the outside of the tortilla
05:10while the inside will still be completely raw.
05:13So you want a gentle heat.
05:22Okay the tortilla has been cooking for a few minutes
05:25on one side it's now ready to turn this could be fun.
05:37On this side we're going to cook it a little bit longer but this side will need a lot less time
05:42than the first one. In a couple of minutes this is going to be ready.
05:48Tortilla is ready it's had a little rest in the pan for a couple of minutes just to
05:53allow it to warm through completely.
05:56Now it's ready to serve I'm just going to flip it out on top of the board.
06:02I'm just going to garnish it with a little bit of oil and rub that in.
06:07We have traditional Spanish tortilla.