As a teenager, I used to astound my friends by cooking the perfect omelette. And I always told them the secret was in the cooking oil.

Once back in their own homes, they would have a go at making one. Their way was to pour a good portion of their mother’s most expensive cooking oil into a frying pan, crack a couple of eggs into a bowl which they’d briefly whisk before tipping the lot onto the luke warm oil in the pan. What ensued might be an interestingly textured scrambled egg ensemble. But certainly not an omelette.

There are many lessons to be learned from this story. Avoid jumping to conclusions could be one. Another could be wait until you have all the details before you rush off. But I think it’s more about this: ask the right question, and you’ll get the right answer.

Sure, cooking oil is important to making an omelette. For two reasons. Firstly, you need to use cooking oil to make a decent omelette. You can’t pour the egg mixture directly onto the frying pan – it’ll stick. Second: get the cooking oil nice and hot. Really hot. The cooking oil in the pan needs to be very hot, but it doesn’t need to be smoking to avoid sticking your omelette to the frying pan. So instead of ending up with a frying pan full of scrambled egg, you’ll have a beautifully crafted omelette.

However, the best question certainly wasn’t ‘What’s the secret to cooking the perfect omelette?’ Firstly, that assumes there’s one secret. For another thing, it leaps to the conclusion that there is a secret. There’s no secret to making an omelette, or in the cooking oil. The answer to that question is something like: ‘the secret is in the cooking oil’. So my friends thought that using special/expensive/fancy/organic cooking oil would transform their omelettes. They focused on the object itself like good little consumers.

A much better question would have been, ‘How do you ensure your omelette is perfect every time?’ – which would have produced an outline of the procedure from cracking the eggs to levering the omelette onto the plate.

Another right question would have been, ‘Can you show me how to make an omelette?’ – and I would have been delighted to. After all, there was no secret.