The best recipe for the best potato omelette
In Sylkar They have been making potato tortillas for 50 years. Award pancakes. Tortillas that you try and repeat. And you recommend. Tortillas you come back to again and again. And you ask again and again as soon as you find out that they take them home. In this bar of always, of all life, Founded by Alfredo and María in 1970, their children, Carmen and Alfredo, today maintain the same recipe that is half a century old.
“It is a normal omelette, the omelette that my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother who descended from Galicia, from a town in Lugo, used to make”, Alfred explains. “They cooked like this at home and my mother started making it here 50 years ago as she did at home. And it has no other mystery.”
Alfredo explains it downplaying it, in a humble and plain way, they know they make a very good potato omelette, but there is no secret. The only mystery is launching into it, he says, and if in recent years they have sold more than ever it is "because people don't cook". And yes, you are probably right. And we miss the flavors of always, those of the tortillas of our mothers, grandmothers, aunts. Sylkar's reminds us of those or reveals a real potato omelette, which we had never tried before.
“Babosin omelette”, as they say in Asturias, very creamy, juicy tortilla. This is Sylkar's, as it should be. “We leave it a little done, call it Betanzos style, Galicia style, call it whatever you want, but the tortilla as it is consumed the most is a juicy tortilla”, explains Alfredo, the data taken in the years that he has been behind the bar and in the kitchen endorse it. “Statistically it is 99 against 1. Of 10 tortillas that come out underdone, one wants it very curdled, that is the proportion.”
oh, the babilla
In Sylkar they make an average of 125 tortillas a day, figures that double on weekends with games and celebrations. Sylkar's tortillas, in addition to being juicy, They are 30 centimeters in diameter and about two centimeters high, for those perfect proportions you have to have the right pan, eye. From here on, Alfredo shares his recipe with us, no problem, because "there is no secret or mystery," he insists.
RECIPE FOR THE BEST POTATO OMELETTE IN MADRID, by SYLKAR
“First of all, we start from the highest quality of the four main products that carries the tortilla: potato, oil, egg and onion. And the fifth, which is salt, but I am not going to qualify Maldon salt, nor rare salts”.
Potatoes: monalisa (“The best”, which they even cultivate for half the year); 1.5 kilos (about five or six potatoes), they cut them into thin slices of about 2.5 millimeters, in the pan with plenty of extra virgin oil until they are “as cooked”, that they are tender.
Onion: 1 sweet and chubby. "Good onion, there are no specific brands here, onion for cooking, sweet and well poached."
We poach the onion separately from the potato and then we put them together in the appropriate quantities: 2 parts of potato and 1 part of onion.
Eggs: 6. Beat the whites first and then the yolks.
And the mixture, unified, is thrown into the pan to set. Leave it on one side for about a minute, turn it over after brushing the pan with extra virgin oil.
"And there are no more stories: there are those who add broth to it, there are those who put whiskey in it, more egg yolks so that it is more eggy... "so now they are peculiarities that don't suit me".
ONION OR NOT ONION?
That is another question. Alfredo is also clear. “The same as with the slightly curdled tortilla, here they are sold new against one: of the nine that come out with onion, they want one without onion”, bill. "There are many people who want it without onions because in other places they don't fry it well and that's why they don't want it, but here they do eat it with onions." The secret? Again, there is not. "The onion must be poached very well and make it a very good onion."
And point. This year, they again present their potato omelette to the National Tortilla Championship. Stopped since 2012, now they start it up again in Alicante. They won it once and the rest were finalists. "Let's see if we win," he says.
Can one fall in love with a potato omelette?