61–70 of 747 posts
Has anyone here tried the baking soda trick? I've read about it but can't imagine the flavor would be any good
I regularly use it in cooking, both for caramelizing onions and meat, can’t taste any weird flavours with it.
My favorite technique to caramelize onion is to do it in a convection oven. Just take a batch, add a tiny bit of oil (not olive) to coat it without dripping too much excess oil on the pan. It will just dry out otherwise)... Season it with some salt & pepper and stick it in the oven cold and turn the heat on... ~170C (if your oven runs cooler, you can turn this up to ~180C). Toss every ~20-25 minutes, and it should be nicely caramelized in about an hour and half, or a little longer - just pull it out when you're satisfied with the level of browning.
Bonus: add a touch of brown sugar (1/2-1 tsp / 2-3 medium-large onions) for an extra kick of sweetness about halfway through the cooking time (sometimes, this is cheating).
I like it because there's no open flame or hot stove to deal with, and it leaves me free to do other things.
Sifting flour. Sautéing spices “to release the flavor” and then adding them to stew where they’ll simmer for an hour or more. Pretending “restaurant quality” is anything besides twice as much butter and salt as you’d dare use at home. “One tablespoon of olive oil” to brown absurd amounts of meat at high heat. Once you start recognizing recipe BS, you see it everywhere.
Spices in a stew will only ever possibly reach 212. When blasted on dry heat they can get higher. The tablespoon of olive oil is to kickstart the process, after that enough fat will render out of the meat to keep it going.
Here's a page about it: https://www.onions-usa.org/onionista/faster-caramelized-onio...
I dunno about 10 minutes, but in my very limited experience it's easier to crank the heat up when you have several pounds of onions. Otherwise, if you're just carmelizing one onion, stirring doesn't really allow you to temporarily remove the onion from the heat, whereas if you have a large amount of onions you're basically turning over the whole lot. I've only made French onion soup once or twice, but I make Italian…
The best way to carmelize onions is in a slow cooker. I used a cheapie one for years that I bought at a goodwill for $5. Chop up enough onions to fill the vessel 1/2 to 2/3, leave it running overnight (8-10h), wake up next morning to perfectly carmelized onions. Now drain the juice, portion them out and store them in the freezer (store the juice too for onion soup). Now any time you need carmelized onions, take a por…
Someone could spend days looking for the specific slow cooker you found and maybe your onions from it are good. The idea of saving 50 dollars by buying an unglazed piece of quarry from Lowe's for 5 bucks instead of a proper pizza stone is a popular myth. Anyone who has actually tried it, has probably wasted hours on the internet looking for it and when the idea came out was most likely wasting tons of gas going to multiple Lowe's.
Maybe you got lucky and your 5 dollar slow cooker really makes good caramelized onions. But my experience trying recipes over the years, there are a few good sources of free recipes from a few places on the internet, and nearly everyone, without a team of testers backing them, is at best mediocre and usually sucks. Published recipes in a proper cookbook tend to be of higher quality, but its not always a guarantee. You get lucky every once in a while and find a hidden gem, but its almost never worth the effort to try non-established recipes as a beginner cook that can't read a recipe and immediately find red flags.
I guess this is just a long winded way of saying that maybe your cheaply made onions are good, but after being a home cook for so long I think it is more likely the caramelized onions in my Le Creuset are going to be better. I don't think you're lying for clicks like many recipe blogs out there, but you might just not realize what you could be eating.
The best way to carmelize onions is in a slow cooker. I used a cheapie one for years that I bought at a goodwill for $5. Chop up enough onions to fill the vessel 1/2 to 2/3, leave it running overnight (8-10h), wake up next morning to perfectly carmelized onions. Now drain the juice, portion them out and store them in the freezer (store the juice too for onion soup). Now any time you need carmelized onions, take a por…
For the home cook, its usually a better strategy to spend money up front on quality, but ignore specialized tools, than try to cheap out. Alton Brown's advice about unitaskers is terrible, except for the first time you start cooking at home and don't know what you need. Someone could spend days looking for the specific slow cooker you found and maybe your onions from it are good. The idea of saving 50 dollars by buyi…
Your optimal slow cooker will have decent insulation (saves on energy) and if you crave luxury, a timer so that you can set it to automatically turn off or switch to "keep warm" after x hours.
You're also in luck because most people never use their slow cookers and eventually donate them to the local thrift shop, so you can pick them up super cheap to try out and decide if a slow cooker is for you. Once you've gotten a taste for slow cooked foods, you can start looking around for what tools will best serve your future culinary ambitions.
And no, you don't need a Le Creuset; that's just for snobs who like to tell everyone that they have Le Creuset. It won't make better carmelized onions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the home cook, its usually a better strategy to spend money up front on quality, but ignore specialized tools, than try to cheap out. Alton Brown's advice about unitaskers is terrible, except for the first time you start cooking at home and don't know what you need. Someone could spend days looking for the specific slow cooker you found and maybe your onions from it are good. The idea of saving 50 dollars by buyi…
Folks, just ignore this rude fellow. A slow cooker is essentially a low temperature heating element and a ceramic cooking vessel. The ceramic dissipates the low heat evenly even on the cheaper ones, and you get a result within tolerance so long as the regulator isn't crap. Just don't scratch up the glaze. Your optimal slow cooker will have decent insulation (saves on energy) and if you crave luxury, a timer so that y…
Or people could just read dozens of reviews of a hundred year cooking vessel where they always complain about the price but reluctantly admit its better. Spending lots of money on cooking supplies as a novice is fraught with landmines of people wasting money, but out right dismissals of spending any money is also usually a red flag of someone just discovering cooking. A college sophomore in their first apartment probably doesn't need a $300 dollar knife, but an adult with a job that spends the money on something nice will get years if not decades on a much safer and more efficient knife they will get used to with occasional whetstone sharpening.
Sifting flour. Sautéing spices “to release the flavor” and then adding them to stew where they’ll simmer for an hour or more. Pretending “restaurant quality” is anything besides twice as much butter and salt as you’d dare use at home. “One tablespoon of olive oil” to brown absurd amounts of meat at high heat. Once you start recognizing recipe BS, you see it everywhere.
Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27632835 - June 2021 (299 comments)
Why Do Recipe Writers Lie and Lie About How Long It Takes to Caramelize Onions? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8262889 - Sept 2014 (4 comments)