Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)

What struck me in this piece is that the author tried to experiment but not to understand what he was trying to do. Chemically/Physically I mean.

I became a way better cook when I understood that the Maillard reaction happens starting at 140°C and caramelisation at 180°C (Wondered why this is the default setting of for oven cooking ? Now you know).[1]

The whole thing of cooking, apart from flavour mixing, is to bring your food (onions or anything else) to a high enough temperature to attain the desired reaction. And it is way complex than it seems with several parameters to play with : pan material for general heat conduction, stirring will allow homogeneous temperature conduction in the pan and will give time to the highest bits to cool down, fat helps for local heat conduction, adding water or wine will detach flavorous parts after "maillared" or caramelized (known as deglaced). And certainly many more that I still ignore.

So to come back to the point of caramelized onions, time can help but it is not the unique parameter. As suggested in other comments, you can slow-cook during the night and achieve easily a perfect result. You can also do it quite quickly (I have done it in 5 to 10 min I think) with a strong enough heat source and a lot of stirring to avoid pyrolysis.

In the end, it is no wonder that the famous post of Tim Urban is called "The cook and the chef [...]". [2] All of this makes me wanting to know more about "first principles" of cooking (mainly for flavour mixing, I still have a lot to learn on this point). Maybe receipe writers are making them up on the go, but most of the one I read have at least a bit of "chef" in them to be roughly good in their parameter estimates.

I am surprised no one else bring that up in HN. My main excuse to indulge in frequent visits of this site is that I think most people here try to be first principle thinkers when they comment. By the way, this is a way to long post for here, but I hope it will be useful for curious cooks.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction

[2]https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-s...

edit : formatting for readability

Already on it! The images part. https://jellicles.substack.com/p/10-rooting-for-root-vegetab... : all images are AI generated. I am a classically trained chef and so the recipes are tested. Sure saved me a lot of time to put it together. There is no way I could have thrown something together with pictures without midjourney. The actual recipes are already ready but won’t be up before 2024.

I can come up with..say 10-15 Cabbage dishes with pictures and a write up in 30 minutes. The recipes might take less than one hour if I know where to look. The main thing we learn at culinary school is flavour pairings + texture + colour. French cuisine is very codified with its mother sauces..the six main cooking methods etc ..everything else is derived from the main templates. It’s a little more now with sous vide and gels and alginate etc. but that’s not for home kitchen recipes.

Example: cabbage. Goes well with sweet potato, guacamole, onions, citrus, chilli peppers. carrots, peas. Another example: Walnuts+cabbage. Because there is walnuts, apples will piggy back on those flavors. Because it does, cranberries will piggy back on the apples. Decide which one of the mother sauces. Then I can make a salad or in a taco or a sandwich or a quinoa bowl or soup or like a cabbage roll. That’s like at least..6 recipes I can come up with this one flavour combination.

But there is a method and order to it. You can’t pair cranberries with chilli peppers and cabbage. It won’t work unless you have apples and walnuts. It’s kind of nested.

This is how we build flavours as layers. Next we repeat the same process for textures. Then we do for colours(because we eat with our eyes too). French cuisine being so codified, this process can be applied to any cuisine and any ingredient.

I am putting it across in a simplified manner, but it takes years to ‘get it’ intuitively to build a dish on the fly. I started cooking professionally twenty years ago. I can come up with a book of recipes within a day.

But the pictures tho’ … AI generated photos are a time + money saver. Game changer. I love it!

Such a useful book. Algorithms for cooking! I still use this every time I make pancakes, fritters, any type of dough.

Summary: to make bacon-wrapped mozzarella sticks, take mozzarella sticks (?!) and wrap in bacon.

HelloFresh does a good job explaining how to cook their recipes. After a year of their subscription you will know the basics.