"Omelettes, Souffles & Frittatas," Lou Seibert Pappas

Pros: Some interesting recipes
Cons: Everything comes out… just okay
Rating: 3 out of 5

I’m having trouble figuring out why it is that I’m just not very impressed by this cookbook. None of the recipes have come out terribly. On the other hand, only one recipe has been even the least bit memorable. Everything else has been, well, average. There are a few words toward the beginning of the book on storage and freshness – nothing mind-blowing, but it is useful stuff.

There are plenty of omelettes in here that sound very good, like:

• Bacon, leek & hazelnut gruyere omelette
• Spanish omelette (ham, onion, bell pepper, Japanese eggplant, zucchini, tomato)
• Smoked salmon & caramelized onion omelette

But somehow, they all come out tasting… okay. We’ve improvised better omelettes. The flavor combinations just turn out to be slightly wrong somehow, and the frittatas have worked out similarly:

• Italian risotto frittata
• Ham & sunflower seed frittata
• Leek & amp;chicken sausage frittata
• Ricotta & prosciutto frittata
• Mushroom medley frittata

Maybe it’s the author’s preoccupation with onion variants: everything has its shallot, scallion, leek, red onion, onion, or similar item. I will just never like onion. But even when we leave the onion out, we’re not particularly impressed.

There are a few useful notes in the middle on separating eggs, beating egg whites, beating egg yolks & sugar, folding egg whites, souffle dishes, and baking & serving souffles. Again, nothing ground-breaking, but some good, solid advice, like separating each egg white into its own separate bowl first so that if one is contaminated with yolk, you won’t contaminate an entire bowl of egg white.

The souffles look particularly good:

• Chevre souffle with greens & sun-dried tomato salad
• White cheddar souffle with garlic croutons
• Scallop souffle
• Salmon souffle roulade
• Glazed apple souffle omelette
• Orange souffle omelette
• White chocolate souffle with raspberry sauce
• Grand marnier souffle

And they are better than the omelettes and the frittatas. We did enjoy the white chocolate souffle with raspberry sauce. You definitely need to eat it the minute it comes out of the oven, however – if it has time to fall slightly then it gets a bit liquid in the center and doesn’t taste nearly as good. I wouldn’t try these souffles unless you have a little experience working with souffle. There really are no words in this cookbook on the sometimes-tricky process that is extracting a souffle from the oven intact – the “Baking & Serving Souffles” section I mentioned earlier doesn’t even approach the subject. (Once you have a little practice it’s easy, but it helps to have a cookbook the first time around that gives you some pointers.)

This certainly isn’t a bad cookbook, but neither is it a wonderful one. I find that the recipes from “The Good Egg” are much more reliably delicious, and that there are better helpful instructions in that cookbook as well. “Omelettes, Souffles and Frittatas” has some nice photos, which “The Good Egg” does not, but TGE also gives you many more recipes for your money. The layout here is fairly clear, and the instructions are relatively simple.