I've had this conversation with people many times, a consequence is that some of them have no idea what caramelised onions actually are - they think it's the state you get to after 10 mins.
Thinly slice 10 onions, dump them in a big pot with some oil on a medium heat for 10-15 minutes stirring frequently. Then turn the heat down to low and cook for a further 45-60 mins, check on it and stir every 10 mins or so. When it gets dry, add water and use it to deglaze the bottom of the pan to prevent burning. It's finished when the onions are a deep brown colour and their volume has reduced to about 1/6th of what it was to begin with. Store in fridge, enjoy with every meal in the following few days.
The real issue is simply a vague use of the word "caramelize," not that they expect you to be at the stove a half-hour longer than they say.
The vast majority of recipes that say "caramelize" simply mean "cook until softened and sweet." No, technically the onions won't be caramelized after 15 minutes, but very few recipes actually want you to caramelize the onions.
Take an Italian pasta sauce. As an Italian who has cooked (and eaten) across Italy, I can say that there are nearly zero sauces where the onions are supposed to be caramelized. Yet people routinely use the word "caramelize" when describing cooking the onions for a pasta sauce.
The wrong reaction to reading that word would be to say "these damn recipe writers don't know how long that takes, dinner's going to be late kids, I guess it's going to be 45 minutes before I can add the next ingredient." The right reaction would be to cook the onions for the given time, until they are soft and translucent, and forget the word "caramelize."
The confusion comes in the color versus the process. I've seen some recipes call for "cook down onions until translucent and caramel in color". This is the most accurate definition of what most recipes want when asking for caramelized onions.
However the true use of the word "Caramelized Onions" are onions that have gone through the cooking process of caramelization. This process requires three things: sugar, heat, and time. Just like making candy caramels, you are performing the same process to onions. This makes true caramelized onions actually sweet, with savory notes throughout.
Most recipes bastardize the word "Caramelize". They tell you to caramelize onions, when in reality you don't actually want caramelized onions (which in many cases would actually ruin the recipe), instead they want softened onions with browned to a light caramel color, which is a completely different thing.
This is like a recipe needing turkey but asking for chicken. Like sure, it will probably work, but it is clearly different and not entirely substitute.
French Onion soup is the most common use of real caramelized onions, which is sweet and savory soup. It could not be made with browned onions, that would ruin it. Coq-a-vin is another popular recipe that uses caramelized onions, which complements the prominent wine flavors of the dish into a sweet, savory, gamey (usually made with game hens), and earthy delight of a meal. The caramelized onions are what pull that dish together and critical part of the recipe. This meal takes a long time to cook, similar to a gourmet version of American potroast.
Real French Onion dip, made with onions and not a prepared packet, is another nice dish with real carmelized onions. Alton Brown has a good recipe for the basic version: https://altonbrown.com/recipes/onion-dip-from-scratch/ Note he's honest about how long it takes ("Total Time: 2 hours", step 3 doesn't have a time estimate but it's about right overall).
It isn't haute cuisine, but for something you might serve for a Superbowl party it's at least pointing in that direction. It can stand up to taking a moment to savor and inhale it, moreso than most of the rest of what might be served up there. Pair with the bizarrely tasty Costco Kettle Krinkle Cut potato chips.
This sounds like the same problem as recipes that call for "browning the meat" which I tend to read as "sear the meat" because e.g. mince will brown up within seconds but the searing is what actually gives you the flavour.
I've found you really do need to use sweet Onions like Texas 1015s or Vidalias if you want good, quick(er) carmelized onions. Adding sugar is not the same thing at all as having the sugar grown into the onion itself!
Adding water early on in the cooking process to steam cook and soften the onions really speeds things up, too. (See Lan Lam's YouTube video on cooking carmelized onions. I use a slightly different method, but she got me on the track of adding water early, which really does help...)
They're not lying, they're just using the word in a more imprecise manner.
Recipe authors have probably been using the word "caramelize" to mean "soften and turn brown and sweet" for longer than food nerds have been nitpicking the exact definition of caramelize.
This irritates me (I know it's a silly thing to be irritated by). I'm far from a food nerd. I'm not a cook. I rely on following recipes to turn out decent dishes (I'm good at following recipes).
It would have been nice if someone had clued people like me in to their special definition of the word before now. I'd have saved a whole lot of time and frustration.
But now I'm presented with the other problem: when a recipe calls for caramelized onions, how am I supposed to know if they mean caramelized onions or "cook until translucent"?
If you followed the recipe as written without overthinking it, you would have had translucent onions after ten minutes and a complete and tasty dish.
You aren't supposed to interpret a recipe. You are supposed to follow it. If you have enough skill, practice, or ability to order pizza, THEN is the right time to make decisions about whether this recipe actually needs REAL caramelized onions.
Recipes have been vague and don't make sense out of context for millennia.
I do follow the recipes without overthinking them, because I don't have the skill required to make judgement calls. But also, I know that any time a recipe gives is highly suspect, so don't judge if something is done based on times in recipes.
So when a recipe says to "carmelize onions", that's what I do. To do anything else is to deviate from what the recipe is plainly telling me.
> Recipes have been vague and don't make sense out of context for millennia.
True. But the fact that this is true means it's essentially impossible to follow a recipe without some degree of interpretation.
I'm just irritated that there was a secret definition to "carmelize onions" that nobody clued me in to.
All of this is meaningless in the grand scheme of things. I'll get over this minor irritation. :)
Exactly. I'm no cook, I'm barely an amateur cook, and I have absolutely no idea what "caramelized onions" means. Turned into caramel? I'm pretty sure you can get onions brown in 10 minutes, though. It probably won't be caramelized, it might be burned, but it's brown. I remember brown, dry onions. I'm sure caramelized ones are better. In fact, I think my wife once did something with onions that made them very sweet. I guess that was caramelized? But that's not what most recipes need.
To be honest, there's a lot of these sort of words that are often used in recipes where I have no idea what they mean. A basic cook book to just explain these sort of things, would be fantastic. Just the different ways to properly cook onions, mushrooms, and other ingredients, and what those techniques are called. And warn for ways that those names might be misused: "If a recipe says to caramelize onions in 10 minutes, don't caramelize them, do this other thing instead." I think a book like that would be really helpful to a lot of people.
How to Cook Everything, I'm Just Here For the Food, and On Food and Cooking are my big three. The first one for the breadth of recipes, the second to learn a bit more about the physics and chemistry of cooking, and the third for the truly deep dive into everything we know about food.
Then Modernist Cuisine just for the pictures. Actually I learned a bunch when Mhyrvold spoke at my company- we talked about how to make BBQ ribs. His suggestion: sous vide, then immerse in liquid nitrogen, then deep fry.
Ruhlman's 20 was that book for me. From that one book I feel like I can dissect and understand so many core concepts that I very rarely follow recipes any longer, I just skim for the key aspects and wing it, substituting with what I have available, and a reasonable intuition for when I can't do so. Am grateful I made that investment (reading it, making most of the recipes).
You're probably right, but it still results in people not knowing what caramelised onions are - which is (or should be) a crime, because they're lovely.
I don't recall seeing instructions to caramelise in pasta sauce recipes, that's usually "until starting to brown", same with curries.. "Until translucent" for risotto.
What I'm really talking about is... Let's have a look... First result for "caramelised onion quiche" says cook onions for 15 mins. Doesn't work!
Luckily, in German, there are three completely different words for preparing onions in a pan:
1.) Anschwitzen, literally "sweating up", means putting them in a pan on low heat for around 10 minutes until they are translucent ("glasig", literally "glassy"). This is how to get a starter for many sauces, and is the standard way to prepare onions for many, many meals and sauces (e.g. a standard tomato sauce). They should not turn brown, as this would for example ruin the color and flavor of white or light sauces - caramelized onions have a kind of "heavy" flavor.
2.) Karamelisieren, "caramelize", which is the meaning described in this article.
3.) Rösten, "roast", which means frying the onions with a bit a flour until they are crispy.
I am sure that Germany has many more words on how to describe cooked onions. Likewise, we have at least a dozen words in the English language for how to cook onions, that also translate directly to the German oddly enough. Unfortunately people who write on-line recipes have latched on to the caramelized onion notation and are not particularly explicit in what they actually want. Having gone through four years of culinary training, I now look at recipes on-line with a very critical eye and much like how you can identify the copy & paste code and architecture of a junior developer, you can also identify the recipe borrowing and construction of people who are better at blogging than they are at cooking.
In English we call these "sweated", "caramelised", and "frenched", respectively. I'm not sure why the phrase "sweat" doesn't get much use outside of pro kitchens, it's a useful term.
>The real issue is simply a vague use of the word "caramelize,"
The linked article gives a few examples where there was no vagueness: The recipes described the visual state that the onion should be in when caramelized, and it corresponded to the ~45 minute process, not the ~10 minutes the recipe claimed it would take.
I've had this issue myself with a meal kit service that said caramelized and showed a picture of the ~45 minute result but the overall prep & cook time for the entire meal, as stated in the recipe, was only 30 minutes. (In general meal prep kits seem to drastically understate the amount of prep time. At best, it might correspond to the amount of time it would take a skilled chef to chop and slice and peel everything, not the average consumer who subscribed on the basis of easy 15-30-45 minute meals)
The article confused things by talking about "caramelizing" but as you say that's a rare instruction in recipes. However, the point remains: what recipes much more frequently call for is to cook until "translucent" or "golden brown" and those times are wildly underestimated in published recipes.
I was hoping that someone would post this! Lan Lam's recent youtube posts have radically improved my cooking (results or ease of execution) and I'd recommend that anyone who cooks frequently check them out.
Yeah that works on my Viking stove with my competent pans, and is basically how I do it, but people with shitty stoves, i.e. the majority, have burners with hot spots and/or mismatched pan widths or even too thin pan bottoms. I suspect that's where the constant stirring/too short time business might originate.
I never realized how widespread this was until I brought dishes to group meals (as in Slow Food) and people complimented me for my caramelized onions.
Oh please, just stop! This elitism around caramelized onions is just absurd. I've caramelized onions on the shittiest of shitty electric stoves using the cheapest of cheap pans Walmart sells. It's not difficult and doesn't take any special equipment or skills - just time.
Most people don't want that though most of the time. In 99.9% of applications fully caramelized onions simply aren't nearly as pleasant as onions that have been cooked until soft and very slightly caramelized.
Yeah, same here - I've used the cheapest pans it was possible to buy when I was a student, on the worst ceramic stove it was viable for my university accommodation to provide. For something like this where precise responsive heat control is unnecessary anything is OK.
(Making actual caramel, OTOH, that's far easier on gas or induction.)
Let me tell you a story. If you go off road just about anywhere in Mexico that's dry enough and interesting enough, and it's possible to go slow enough to have enough clearance, you will find cheap 2WD rear drive cars that are already there. I have seen some amazing accomplishments from these vehicles that almost no US driver would dream of taking off road. Still, I wouldn't trade my 23 yo lifted 4wd truck for them at all. Over time, I'm going to come out ahead, there's simple no dispute.
I don't doubt that you could caramelize onions on the shittiest stoves possible, probably you could do it, with enough patience and care, with a magnifying glass on a hot summer day. But the OP was emphasizing that it's really no big deal, you don't even have to pay attention. I at least have great equipment, but I've stayed in dozens of AirBnBs that didn't have great equipment, same with friends and family. Got to pay attention then.
The idea that there is no difference is completely ridiculous.
Now I can cook some range of dishes reasonably well, but when I was a student long ago I was very much a beginner - and it still worked out alright.
If you happen to already have a big 4WD truck which you need for other things then obviously it makes sense to use that anywhere it might give you an advantage. Sometimes that advantage turns out to be pretty marginal in practical terms but for you, because you're used to to handling the terrain with ease, switching to a crappy 2WD car would feel like a massive downgrade.
Another kitchen analogy, some people spend their whole lives chopping things with a blunt knife. When I offer to help out and realise this state of affairs my first reaction is "how the hell can anyone chop tomatoes with this?!" ... but of course they can, it's just slower and more annoying.
I disagree completely! There are preferences of course but for instance US Southwestern cuisine with the burnt flavors ("charred") appeal to a wide swath of people and the French AFAICT from a lot of visits can't stand it.
If you read Julia Child she is emphatic that onions should almost never be browned.
Guess what? I brown onions in my French recipes (rustic, eh?), and I char my peppers. I would submit that la comida de la gente is likely more plebian than fucking elitist French cuisine, no?
Really? Our induction stove very clearly has two concentric circles of different radii that get hot, and nothing else. If you use cast iron and vary the power slowly you won't notice, but it's very obvious with thinner pots and when you control heat quickly (which is a delight to be able to do in the first place -- yay induction.)
It's induction, not electric. This happens with all my cast iron pans. Easiest way to see it is to boil a thin layer of water mixed with a little hand dishwashing liquid in it. There are clearly two rings where cavities are formed more easily, thus there are two circles of peaking foam.
Oh neat. I have a thermador star burner gas range that makes a wonderful five point star shape oil pattern on a cast iron using a similar technique. I can produce this effect by applying a very thin sheen of high smoke oil point at high heat.
No idea if that’s better for cooking than concentric rings, but it looks really cool.
Are you sure that's an induction element? Induction elements don't get hot, only the pan does. Easy way to tell is - does the element switch only turn on when a pan is on top of it?
One minor clarification because it is important: the elements do get hot, but that isn't the mechanism which they use to transfer heat. The element gets hot because it is touching a super hot pan which will transfer some of its heat.
If you want to know how I found this out: I wasn't using my brain and touched the element after spilling something on it. I received a fairly bad burn as a result. I am saying this because saying "the element doesn't get hot" can put the wrong idea in someone's head.
Yup! I recently made some, and it had been a while since I had made them, and I had forgotten just how long it takes.
Also - if you like oninos, make sure to try 'creamed onions' (carmelized oninos in a creme sauce.
Also, if you like french onion soup - use a french onion soup mix packet as a rub on chicken and pork.
Finally, if youre anything like me - I typically never have to wear deoderant, unless I eat RED/PURPLE onions. If I eat these Ill have BO the following day.
Its also a good indicator when I eat something, if I have BO the next day its a signal that what I ate the previous day was made with red onions, even if it doesnt look like it. (Tikka masala is an example) -- I think its the sulfites in the red onions that cause this.
Well, I followed this method and the onions took 3 hours to get to deep brown. This leads me to “Hofstader’s Law of Caramelized Onions:” Onions always take 3 times as long to caramelize as you think they’re going to take, even when you take Hostader’s Law into account.
Thinly slice 10 onions, dump them in a big pot with some oil on a medium heat for 10-15 minutes stirring frequently. Then turn the heat down to low and cook for a further 45-60 mins, check on it and stir every 10 mins or so. When it gets dry, add water and use it to deglaze the bottom of the pan to prevent burning. It's finished when the onions are a deep brown colour and their volume has reduced to about 1/6th of what it was to begin with. Store in fridge, enjoy with every meal in the following few days.