> In truth, the best time to caramelize onions is yesterday
Yep. I took the article's suggestions to heart, and now when I have a recipe requiring caramelized onions I take the time needed, or prep them in advance. Now my mujadara is pretty darn good.
Yep - you don't want to just let the whole thing sit, but certain parts of a meal are better done over time (for example, I've heard the best pizza is where the dough is made the day before, but the pizza itself is made fresh).
The butter 'trick' is just browning the butter (which happens faster than onions) to add deep color and extra flavor to sauteed onions. For some bizarre reason the author interpreted this as blasting onions and olive oil at high heat until they were a charred mess, and then goes on to blame recipe writers for why they can't seem to cook onions. What a strange article.
If it's just browning the butter, it's not really caramelizing the onions. I could get brown onions with any number of coloring agents, but it's not the same thing.
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 portion out of the freezer and thaw. Depending on the recipe you can use them as-is (soggy) or crisp them up in a pan.
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 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.
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 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.
Name the brand and model of your amazing 5 dollar slow cooker and give us some recipes to use in it.
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.
My point was
>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.
The 15 minute caramelized onions, the cheap slow cooker onions, and other such things are nearly always lies, despite how much I wish them to be true.
I have used a number of different slow cooker brands over the years. Most were Crock-pot brand, but I've used others. I've never been able to tell the difference.
Sure there are tools where brand matters, but in the case of a slow cooker I'm putting the burden back on you: find me any brand that is actually inferior or better than the others. I don't think you can.
Non-slow-cooker things like a pressure cooker (ie instant-pot) with a slow cooker function are inferior to a real slower cooker, but they don't claim to be a slow cooker either.
Never a need for the home cook. Professional chefs pay for quality much like we do in tech. Ergonomics, edge retention, sharpness, and dozens of other factors can influence that $300 knife and whether its useful for a professional who chops food 8-10hrs a day, 5 days a week.
For the home cook, who chops maybe for 1/10th that weekly, not much reason beyond placebo.
Mind you, going mid-range with something like a Victorinox can be a good bet for home cooking. $50-ish chef's knife that holds its edge well enough that a honing steel will keep it sharp for a couple of months of once-or-twice-a-day use.
Nothing more annoying than squishing your tomatoes as you try to cut (except having to take time out to sharpen your knives all the time).
That's not consistent with my experience. Some knives will never take a good edge. But not all knives actually need a good edge. There are evidently different kinds of "stainless steel"; some kinds are immune to sharpening, some are quite good. But if I want a really sharp kitchen knife, it has to be carbon steel.
Carbon steel knives rust/pit easily - you have to clean them and dry them, you can't just leave them to dry in the sun.
Money does not necessarily buy you quality, or if it does, a worthwhile amount of it. I have some nice knives that cost a decent amount, but guess what, my day to day knives are from a $15 ikea knife set that I bought half a decade ago. Are these knives going to last me decades? No, but with relatively minimal upkeep over the years, they're just as sharp as my nice knives. I will probably eventually throw them out when their handles start breaking, but at that point I will have gotten way more than my $15 of value out of them.
You named no brands for comparison and ignored a specific call out for comparison. Wanting something to be true doesn't make it true and as a novice cook this was the most obvious time I learned it.
Brands of what? Comparison of what? What specifically would you hope to be able to compare between either slow cookers or knives that would have any serious effect on how good the food you can use them to make is?
The most popular pots and pans for cooking do actually have a brand associated with them, even if its as big as Teflon. Not being able to name any, with a good or bad opinion, is comparable to not having a good or bad opinion about a novel. An old medium where its possible they have a valid new opinion, but usually a good indicator of the level of their opinion.
I think most cookware purchases are just what happened to be in the store at the time. Brands aren't considered much. Even for things like large appliances and cars this applies for a lot of people - and they're not necessarily wrong either.
Have you ever used a slow cooker? You seemed obsessed with naming brands and call it a specialized tools makes me think you have never used them.
It’s just the simplest tool which actually shines best to be used for everyday general cooking. You know when you don’t have the time to do fancy cooking and just need a tasty home made meal with minimal effort.
Yeah, you could probably get better caramelized onions if you know how to cook them, if you have time to prepare them, and if you give them your full attention, but I would bet for the regular person cooking for himself, they are likely to get better results with 1/10 of effort just doing what OP mentioned, with ANY slow cooker.
Theres a specific call out, with an admission of possibly being wrong when presented with evidence. Nobody has presented an amazing recipe or a specifically good device that makes good food.
I own a slow cooker, and it was given to me for free from a friend that had to quickly get rid of all of her personal belongings before being deported. The recipes in it are fine, often times actually very good, but theres also nothing about it that can't just be made better in a dutch oven with an extra hour or so on the stove. But the biggest proponents are the exact people I would not want cooking advice from.
> 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 can guarantee you that I can make caramelized onions that are better than pretty much anything you have ever had in your life, but it won't be because I have fancier tools. It will be because I'm using delicious homegrown onions that you can eat raw like apples, that you would be hard pressed to replicate.
What's my point with that anecdote? Don't really have one, much like yours.
> 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.
From what you've said, I think you don't know the subject matter[1] well enough to talk authoritatively about it.
Can you share the make and model of your slow cooker? It might generate some interesting discussions. If anyone else uses this "one trick" (joke), please post your make and model here.
I have used 4 different makes and models, from a really old one on my grandma’s kitchen that only had a on/off switch, to my newest one, a programable hamilton beach. I would say everyone worked the same, at least for beans, rice and some stews.
I only did caramelized onions twice with the same one, but based on my experience, any brand/model should work. And I agree, crockpot is the best way to cook caramelized onions.
I've used this in the past with my instant pot, though it's been a while and I don't recall the exact recipe. I've actually taken to par-cooking my onions sous vide, draining them, and then caramelizing them on high heat on the stove.
I bought it over a decade ago, and have since left it behind when I moved to Europe. It was a Hamilton Beach brand but don't ask me what model. It had a shutoff timer, which was nice because I could set it to cook a roast while I was at work, and not have to worry about what time I got home (it would stay on "keep warm" after cooking).
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 sausage, peppers, and onions regularly. I'm not shy about cranking the heat up, but with just 1 onion and 2 bell peppers some of the onions invariably end up a little burnt even before they've begun to carmelize; but in that dish that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I use the microwave to make a dark Cajun gumbo roux. I'm curious if the microwave would work well for carmelizing a small amount of onion. Though, using the microwave for a roux isn't much faster than using a pan; it's just more difficult to fsck-up.
I think you can make it happen with a small amount of onions, but you have to watch it like a hawk, stir constantly, and add a small amount of water whenever it starts to go too far.
If you crank up the heat you're not caramelizing, you're browning (burning). Caramelizing is a chemical process which requires lower heat and longer time.
My theory about cookbooks: They are not designed for cooking or even cooks.
Instead, the books are fantasy, to let the reader imagine that they could, will, might cook delicious meals and get praise, affection, love, and approval from their family, friends, and dinner guests. And for the onions, part of the fantasy is how easy the cooking will be -- brown the onions in at most 10 minutes.
It might be true of the more stylistic chefs out there for sure -- but I'll pull an America's Test Kitchen recipe rather than a random blog that shows up in google.
A good cookbook can be life changing, a bad cookbook can be near worthless (maybe this is true of any type of book). "12 Recipes" is a book a chef wrote for one of his kids to learn to cook and I loved it. Some soft cooking skills or other background information about what was actually important and what can be skipped really helped me learn to cook much better for myself.
I think the problem with some cookbooks is that cooking is a somewhat technical or scientific process. If the author is too technical, they can gloss over details that will trouble a home cook, like how tos for complex techniques that they are familiar with, how long things will take someone with less practice, how much prep / cleanup can add up at home compared with working at scale in a restaurant with dedicated prep cooks and dishwashers, etc. My partner was a professional chef for a catering company and the "recipes" they used internally had almost zero details besides ingredient ratios. I couldn't imagine trying to follow one without asking a ton of questions.
On the other hand, some people aren't technical enough and so they can't properly assess the details or break things down into a strong formula for someone else to replicate. They can be vague about measurements, timing, or technique, so even if you follow what's written your result is pretty far from whatever they had done in their own kitchen.
Then there are the "telephone" recipes that have been stolen back and forth from different blogs or articles without anyone making them and over time they've degraded into something just plain wrong.
The key to making a dark roux, as is used in Cajun cooking, is stirring, scraping, and homogeneity. You can crank the heat on high and stir for about 10-15 minutes, or you can keep it over medium and stir for an hour. If you stir like you're supposed to, you can get the same roux in less than half the time. A good wooden spoon (soft enough to scrape the bottom of the pot) that can get into the corners of a pot and a little elbow grease is all you need.
So why do they tell you that you need to stir for so long? Because if you screw it up, you've gotta start over.
The funny thing is that the jarred stuff is just as good as the roux you make on your stove. It's also perfectly fine to make a giant batch of the stuff and freeze it, and there are numerous recipes for doing it in your oven or even your microwave with great results.
I was curious how fast I could do a dark roux (notably, after burning my first one and needing to restart), and I actually managed one in under 8 minutes, and even took a photo to document such:
And yeah, the key really is stirring constantly, and riding the stove knob to keep the heat right.
My stupid thing that I do that sometimes burns it is stopping stirring when I turn off the heat when I'm done. Pan is still hot enough to burn it, if you don't get it out of there, or add vegetables quickly.
Interesting to mention Madhur Jeffrey, who I had indeed felt betrayed by in her descriptions of browning onions by time, which never seemed to match my experience. Her book World Vegetarian otherwise taught me to cook 20 years ago. Or maybe, that following directions closely to a good recipe could make up for a serious lack of experience.
dont over follow recipes. Get the ingredients and the amounts if you care to and then use your judgment. I mean read it so you know what they do, but there are likely small details that are missing or that are included but not relevant. It also may just not be optimized for your preferences.
Similarly: Why do drum teachers and instructional videos lie about how to hold drumsticks? I was told for years to hold them at the balance point. This is wrong! You generally hold them a few inches lower than the balance point which allows you bounce the stick loosely in your hand so that it rotates in the air around the balance point.
Do they? Most tutorials I've seen tell you to find the perfect "bounce" spot, which is the spot where the stick will give you the most bounces when released and left to freely pivot around your finger.
In hot oil, small pieces of onion will turn into a crunch brown crisp in well under 5 minutes, and larger pieces can have the outside surfaces crisped.
I suspect the authors are not lying, but simply calling the above effects caramelization; not aware that what it means is for the onion to be evenly brown all the way through.
You can cook steaks without adding any oil at all -- in fact, this is how to cook steak in an apartment without getting it all smokey.
According to America's Test Kitchen, do this: Pat dry. Start cold in nonstick/cast iron — no preheat, no oil. Flip every 2 mins. Start high, after few flips, turn heat down to medium. Keep flipping every 2 mins until done.
Most cuts worth eating have some fat on them (filet mignons might not but they are very dry anyway -- to me they're not worth it). This fat is enough to brown and cook the steak on. It's completely unnecessary to add oil.
Even better is a reverse sear in stove on an elevated rack on a baking sheet at 230 degrees for 30 minutes, then you finish the steak off on a hot oiled (avocado or maybe peanut oil) skillet for 1 minute on each side.
I went from sous vide > reverse sear (faster than sous vide) > oil-free pan-sear, in the decreasing order of time of it takes.
I find the pan-sear delivers almost the same results in much less time (of course, you won't get the uniform insides of a reverse sear, but close enough since you're flipping so much). I'm also at a stage of life when I can afford better cuts of meat.
That’s what chefs were taught too. The reasoning behind it is that less flipping equals good browning. The idea is that carryover heat and resting will cook the insides adequately.
But I think ATK or someone else debunked this as the best practice. Flipping more than once gets you more even internal cooking.
In my oven, 230deg is just about maximum temperature; cooking anything that hot for 30 minutes will result in cinders. I take it your oven is calibrated in Fahrenheit?
I’m curious too — 230F seems low for that amount of time. I’ve cooked plenty of meat in a smoker at 200-250F, but it takes many hours. On the flip side I agree 450F (~230C) sounds a bit high, but not imo catastrophically so.
> The tablespoon of olive oil is to kickstart the process, after that enough fat will render out of the meat to keep it going.
Agreed on meat, but I consistently see way-too-small amounts of oil suggested for cooking veggies, too. It's like every recipe writer online got together and decided that 1) they must specify oil quantities for those steps, but 2) the quantity must never exceed one tablespoon.
If you take a university student who has just left home and never cooked for themselves and tell them "just pour a glug proportional to the ingredients"...that's pretty close to useless for them, especially since they don't yet an intuition for what things you can freehand (and how much you can freehand them) and which things you shouldn't.
After all, you (probably) wouldn't ever say "I just open the Morton's salt and pour a glug in" because getting salt wrong even by relatively small amounts has a big impact on the final dish.
That said, I agree with you that recipe writers usually do a poor job of laying which things fall more on the "suggested amount, you can just eye ball it" end of the spectrum and which ones are "you should really pull out at least a spoon to get close on this one".
> After all, you (probably) wouldn't ever say "I just open the Morton's salt and pour a glug in" because getting salt wrong even by relatively small amounts has a big impact on the final dish.
Not GP and I wouldn't phrase it quite like that - but I definitely would. You can give a rough indication, but salt should be added to taste.
(Unless we're talking about baking, where for one thing you can't taste until the end anyway. In that case yes of course measure, still to taste, but the feedback loop is longer.)
>After all, you (probably) wouldn't ever say "I just open the Morton's salt and pour a glug in" because getting salt wrong even by relatively small amounts has a big impact on the final dish.
No, but you do, almost universally, say "salt to taste." Which is a different way to say the same thing.
Vegetables can release a lot of water. The amount and how much it affects the other ingredients varies significantly on which you put in, in what order, how much, and in what size of pan. If the pan is crowded, has high walls, or a lid, that can also affect how much water stays in the pan.
I can't think of any situation where I would want more than a literal tablespoon of oil for cooking the first veggies thrown in (usually onion). By the time the onions have begun to caramelize there's is enough water that the original tablespoon of oil is no longer significant.
The first step in carmelization is to remove most of that water so the onions can reach maillard reaction temps. Try doing it without oil and an equivalent amount of water instead. It's much more temperamental.
> The first step in carmelization is to remove most of that water
Where did I say it wasn't?
Anyway, about adding water, I respectfully disagree. The oil is necessary and it really is a tablespoon in a shallow and uncrowded pan with the lid off.
EDIT: I'm specifically talking about browning some onions when called for as an initial step in a recipe, not for making a huge batch of them for use as a condiment. Cutting the onion into finer pieces also speeds things up.
America's Test Kitchen actually does suggest adding water to reduce the amount of time needed for caramelization--and not an equivalent amount of water, but much more than the amount of oil you'd use.
The idea is that adding water, raising it to a boil, and covering the pan reduces the amount of time needed to raise the temperature of the onions to the caramelization point, more than offsetting the amount of time needed to remove the water itself. That plus adding some baking soda near the end reduces the overall time considerably.
I'd rather not comment about the reliability of ATK because that would be missing the point, but their recipe seems overly fussy and anyway they cut their onions too long in that video. I think it's kind of gross when you have dangling onion strands.
Slow cook them first for a few hours at a low temperature and then caramelize after. All your onion in a dry pot. Don't add water. Strain them when done and you have... soggy pale onions. Heat up the biggest pan you have and add some butter to do the caramelization (don't crowd the pan like they do in their video). Add some good balsamic vinegar and brown sugar while you're at it. Be sure to make a huge batch so you can freeze some for later. Don't bag and freeze before letting the onions come to room temperature. It's a lot of water in them onions man, but you can use that strained out water for a vegetable stock!
I've got my own invented version of this style. I will boil them in a cm of water or something at the perfect time it evaporates I then add the oil.
I don't like them like the Americans do but there is lots of to play with it. (I've even started boiling onions whole before I use them in a bunch of other dishes)
> I can't think of any situation where I would want more than a literal tablespoon of oil for cooking the first veggies thrown in
I've helped cook at a camp where 500 people were going to eat the meal. That requires very different thinking from large family cooking where at most 20 people are eating, and a small family is different as well.
Yet this act is a staple of Indian cuisine. The key is knowing what spices in what forms can take how much heat. Whole pods of cumin or peppercorns for example can benefit from browning without the entire structure burning.
Or as I like to say (especially when a friend is apologizing for serving slightly charred food): More colors more flavors!
> Spices in a stew will only ever possibly reach 212. When blasted on dry heat they can get higher.
Some claim that this is a thing when making rice too. I've tried toasting the grains for a few minutes before adding the water to boil, but I can't say I can tell the difference. Maybe that's a time issue like the onions, or maybe it just doesn't do anything...
> Some claim that this is a thing when making rice too. I've tried toasting the grains for a few minutes before adding the water to boil, but I can't say I can tell the difference. Maybe that's a time issue like the onions, or maybe it just doesn't do anything...
Quite a few Indian dishes require toasting the rice first, if you don't you will end up with a very different dish. In the right context, it makes a huge difference.
Strictly speaking a PhD isn't a PhD "in" something. It is simply a PhD (a doctorate in philosophy).
Obviously philosophy isn't that informative a term, so people try to be helpful by adding what
field or topic their actual research was about.
Some vocational/applied higher degrees in specific fields do have specific initials to differentiate them from a "generic" PhD (for example, the EngD).
You can conceivably get a Maillard reaction with toasting some spices (e.g. cumin seed) where you wouldn’t just by throwing them in a stew. But I agree with your overall point. The 1-2 tbsp olive oil is -everywhere-. Also, better to use canola oil for browning meat.
Olive oil is not the best choice for browning meat, because its burning point is too low. Once it burns, it will disintegrate into bitter byproducts, some of which are carcinogenic.
Canola oil has a high burning point so is a better choice, but if you really want to avoid it, sunflower oil is a good choice as well.
Light/refined olive oil has a smoke point of up to 470°F. You can sear meat anywhere between 400°F and 500°F.
There is absolutely no reason you can't sear meat with olive oil. You just have to use the light/refined stuff, and not the virgin/extra virgin (which have smoke points closer to 410°F.
Worth noting that canola oil, in the best case scenario, has a smoke point of 450°F.
1-2 tbsp of oil is enough to improve the thermal conductivity between the pan and the meat. you're not cooking the meat in that oil. then the meat starts releasing it's own oil (and water) and continues the process without needing additional oil.
if you don't put in a bit of oil, then you're searing one side in a dry pan, and the second side in an oiled pan. and if you're only putting a bit of oil in and it's all in contact with the meat there's really no reason to worry about smoke point, use whatever oil is handy.
Toasting spices can flavor your oil, but the Mailard reaction really only happens when amino acids react with reducing sugars, so nothing to do with spices at all.
Olive oil is fine for browning as long as it isn't extra virgin olive oil. Refined olive oil can actually have a higher smoke pointe than rapeseed/canola oil.
That strikes me as a fairly modern thing. I imagine that weevils and/or rocks in flour was a common issue just a few generations ago (or, in many countries, to this day).
It can also remove clumps that can form in wetter climates, or from flour of lower quality. During the pandemic I got a big ol bag of flour that was loaded with clumps, and I had to gradually sift all 50lb of it. So, I guess it can still be totally useful in modern times if you have bad purchasing and storage options.
The issue isn’t that bugs get in, but that bugs are already in. Weevils will lay their eggs in with the flour, which are impossible to sift out. Unless you bake them at 140°F/60°C, freeze them at 0°F/-18°C, use pesticides, or deprive them of oxygen, they’ll eventually hatch and eat your flour/grain.
Hah, for once, a benefit of having celiac, no wheat for me apparently means no weevils for me. I mix up a lot of gluten-free flour mix to substitute for all-purpose flour. It's a mix of way too many flours and starches (white rice, brown rice, sweet rice, potato starch, potato flour, ivory teff, tapioca starch, arrowroot flour) that I got from a blog many years ago, and haven't tried to slim down because it works great for me. Never had any bug issues; maybe specialty flours have better quality control.
I mix up 2 kilograms at a time: 500 grams sweet rice flour, 400 grams brown rice flour & potato starch, 200 grams ivory teff & arrowroot starch, 100 grams white rice flour, potato flour, & tapioca starch. The original recipe had almond flour instead of white rice flour, but I decided to make this nut-free (had some friends with nut allergies).
Nope - those are all bagged single ingredients I usually order online. Authentic Foods has most of them. The ivory teff is from Maskal. The arrowroot and tapioca might be called flour, starch, or powder - all the same thing. Potato starch and potato flour are 2 different things.
oh, so for example it's 100 grams white rice flour, 100 grams potato flour, and 100 grams tapioca starch, not 100 grams of a mix of the three? i guess that makes it add up to 2 kg
I always put my flour in clear plastic containers so I can see how much I have left. I also put bay leaves in with the flour, as the eggs/larval stages of a lot of grain pests are susceptible to their eugenol. [0,1]
For anything long term I pour the flour out onto long trays, let it reach 0°F/-18°C in my freezer and keeping it there for 3 days, then storing it in food safe 5-gallon buckets with bay leaves and oxygen absorbers, though some also use dry ice. [2]
these are great tips! i recently bought some of the buckets (pp), and I've been freezing all my grains and legumes upon purchase for a long time for exactly that reason
i'd be nervous about putting dry ice in a hermetically sealed container like a bucket
a thing i've noticed with storing food in plastic (pet) coke bottles is that they never seem to get beetles and that they tend to collapse a bit over the first year or so; i suspect that, even without a fe/nacl oxygen absorber, the food oxidizes enough to consume the oxygen initially present, which reduces the gas volume about 20 percent and kills any beetles initially present
a lot of my flour is in 6-liter pet water bottles with pp caps; none of it has evident beetles but i did freeze it first
Nah, a cake with settled, minimally touched flour is dense and too… cakey. You take a fork and run the tines through settled flour thats been sitting for any length of time and you see you end up with much less fluffed up flour in a given volume. Now mix in cornstarch, for either cake or frying batter, and that helps prevent the gluten from forming when you mix in whatever liquid, keeping the texture of the cake or breaded whatever airy and light.
I only sift flour if I'm making scones, it seems to make a difference. I'm not a cakey person, I don't bake cakes. It's cake bakers that tend to care about sifting.
Restaurant quality is real and it’s because high end restaurants usually buy the best produce at wholesale and pay for stuff a grocery store can’t. For example they get much better blackberries in top restaurants because they need to be handled extremely gently when ripe: a grocery store can’t put that stuff out on shelves or it would get destroyed.
At the very high end, restaurants also get a quality edge by creatively using excessive labor — in other words using ingredients that are very hard to source, and doing things to food that are so tedious or complicated that nobody would try them at home.
One of the world’s most celebrated restaurants, Noma in Copenhagen, is closing soon. Their menu costs about $800 per person, but even at that price the business barely turns a profit and runs largely on unpaid interns who put in the endless hours of manual labor so they could have the famous restaurant on their CV:
Plus, restaurants can practice the same recipe again and again for months or years on end. It would be pretty damning if they wouldn't be better than home cooks after that much repetition.
I'm going to bet that this one is going to depend in part on the particular product, and it's freshness/storage conditions, your location relative to the source mill, and ambient weather.
I use one to two teaspoons of oil, which is just barely enough to coat the pan if you swirl it, and it works fine if the heat is right. You're not trying to shallow fry the meat in a sea of grease, just stop it sticking and get better thermal conductivity.
If you need more than one tablespoon of oil then maybe you just don't know what you're doing. Meat contains fat and vegetables contain water. Consider learning patience (i.e. using lower heat) instead of criticizing people on the Internet for being better at cooking than you are.
This won't work. Together with fat, juice is released as well. As long as there is liquid water, temperature won't go over 100C so you're effectively boiling your meat and not browning it.
Searing your meat only goes at temperatures that are high enough to immediately evaporate any escaping liquid.
You mean, use a cast iron pan at high heat? Yeah that definitely works, it's standard practice in professional kitchens to do it like that.
But at low heat it will not. Or well, eventually your meat will brown, but first your steak will have boiled for a while so you'll never be able to serve your steak rare or medium rare.
I season before bringing the steak to room temperature; and after seasoning I leave it standing for a good hour.
The idea is that salt on the outside of the steak initially draws moisture out of the steak, making it dry. But given enough time, the salt penetrates deeper into the steak, and holds the moisture in.
Yet, "sifting flour" was a thing years back... not the one bought in the store but the one stored in large sacks, and ground in the local mill. The amount of lumps sifted out was non-trivial.
Sifting makes sense if you knead by hand - makes absorption easier.
Toasting spices in a little oil - spices release flavor into the oil and your kitchen smells awesome.
Meat also releases fat when browned. So it is kind of self sustaining.
Whether you dry-roast or toast in oil depends on what you're trying to achieve; if you want flavoured oil for something like a tadka, then you use oil. Dry roasting to season e.g. a curry produces different flavours. It's also harder; different spices burn at different speeds, so for example add cumin first and turmeric last. burnt turmeric is very bitter.
> Pretending “restaurant quality” is anything besides twice as much butter and salt as you’d dare use at home.
until you read Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and start watching the epicurious yt channel.
the "4 levels" and "pro chef vs home cook" epicurious playlists are amazing eye openers, where they exactly highlight the actual difference in skills and knowledge.
Sifting flour is absolutely essential if you’re adding it to a liquid. Sometimes you can get away without sifting if you mix a few dry ingredients first then add liquid on top. If you get it wrong, the flour clumps up tiny grains and never separates. You can end up with really grainy cheese cake
Plenty of spices distribute their flavors better in oils/fats than in water.
Take some szechuan peppercorns and boil them in a soup and see if you feel the ma numbing sensation. Then saute them in oil for a few minutes and then add the soup, and notice the difference.
Recipe writers routinely lie about how long a recipe takes, too. Most reporting a time requirement much under 30 minutes get there by ignoring how long it takes to process & prep the various ingredients. "15-minute meals" often take 10-15 minutes of prep before you can start them.
The entire recipe-industrial-complex is optimised primarily for convenience. Even a majority of the supposedly reputable cookbook authors are obsessed with “quick and easy” recipes. If you actually want to learn cooking a cuisine, most of the content you find via google or top selling cookbooks is going to be useless and filled with shortcuts and overly simplified ingredients lists. If you’re looking at a recipe that’s quick, easy, or simple, that’s a huge red flag that the recipe is BS. Another one is if it’s a foreign dish and you can somehow find all of the ingredients in your local supermarket.
> Another one is if it’s a foreign dish and you can somehow find all of the ingredients in your local supermarket.
Fun one I noticed: if you search for Hungarian (as in, written in Hungarian) recipes for paprikash, you'll get one dish[1]; if you search for it in English, practically every result would best be classified as some other dish—maybe also good, but not really the same thing.
The key difference seemed to be that the writers of the English recipes were terrified of the amount of sour cream you need to make the real thing. It's a lot. I mean, I'm not Hungarian, but judging from what ~every Hungarian recipe I found said, the correct amount is at least 4x the sour cream per serving of what the English-language recipes suggested. Depending on the recipes one paired up from each language, some were more like 20x.
[1] "What's 'paprikash' in Hungarian, though?" that's what the Wikipedia "other languages" links are for! Find your recipe or ingredient or whatever there, then hit the dish's native language in the language bar. It doesn't even need to be in a script you can read. Works for just about any dish popular enough to have an English-language Wikipedia entry. More reliable (for this specific thing) than Google Translate.
Using the original source language can certainly help. But even then most of the blog recipes you find are going to have the same problem with being very simplified.
A problem with Google Translate specifically is that it’s often not great at translating ingredients. For instance it will translate daun salam as bay leaf, but there’s something like 6 different types of bay leaf, and they’re not at all similar. If a recipe calls for daun salam it probably wants you to use Indonesian bay leaf, but if you didn’t already know that distinction you’d end up with something weird. Another example would be bawang putih, which translates literally to white onion, but means garlic. Google translate has learnt this meaning sometime recently, but it used to give the literal incorrect translation.
Hungarian here. Yes, it needs a lot of sour cream. Having said that now living in the UK I rather use crème fraîche, which I find closer to what you can buy in Hungary.
Yes. My favorite is quickie salad recipes. Their times are correct, as long as you happen to have a refrigerator stuffed with containers of chopped vegetables for some reason.
I've seen youtube videos where they "make" such salads. It's really not far off from "cooking time: 10 minutes. 3 to pick from the menu, 2 to call for delivery, 5 for it to reach you."
That is exactly what "time" means for recipes and why ingredients list say things like "onions, finely chopped" and not just "onions".
Restaurants do have containers with chopped vegetables sitting around for this reason. You might not like this convention, but it is pretty universal.
So your complaint sounds like "3 minute angel hair pasta?!?! My water won't even have started boiling by then." Totally understandable misconception for someone who just started cooking, but you should learn pretty quickly what 3 minutes actually means.
Electric kettles are certainly fast, but this feels like an exaggeration. Technology Connections[1] made a good video on this recently and even boiling roughly 1 quart of water (which is significantly less than you'd typically use for something like cooking pasta) required almost 5 minutes to come to boil in an electric kettle.
Sure, but having wildly different conventions would be even more confusing.
In any case, I am very disappointed with HN for this thread. While I also think "actual time" would have been a more useful standard, words mean what they mean and the comment quality is ...
- "Hey, surely everyone is lying, instead of me misunderstanding a common convention."
- "That universal convention used since forever is dumb. Me complaining to you surely is going to retroactively change this in every publication ever."
- "How dare you tell me that I misunderstood something. I am sure you are personally responsible for that convention."
- "Of course a butterfly is made out of butter, it is right there in the name you moron!"
No. "Time" for recipes by convention starts with all of this done. This is always the case and allows for easy comparability of recipes.
You might not like this convention, but nobody is lying. It is somewhat surprising that you genuinely thought "writers routinely lie" and never thought to stop and think whether your understanding might be wrong.
Jesus, that sounds so boring. Do they have robots (single devices) that can do it? I always thought having a pot that can gently stir itself would be helpful in a home kitchen.
After looking at the recipes in question, I suspect that some of these writers are merely using the term Caramelized in a loose, informal (or, if you prefer, "technically-incorrect") sense.
When what they more-precisely meant is lightly softened, translucent - a state of onionhood used in no shortage of recipes as an intermediary step during the cooking process.
The writers are therefore perhaps guilty of casual syntax misuse, as opposed to deliberate or wilful mistruth.
I find softened onions preferably for a number of uses. Caramelized onions can be too sweet, and soggy/limp. I've even found that leaving a trace of crunch is better in many cases (eg beef bolognese).
But don't listen to me, I've never really figured out the difference between cooked yellow, white, and sweet onions, and just buy whatever is available and has the least mold and soft spots. Even red onions, once cooked, are pretty much the same to me.
I've very often made it with red onions (or half and half red vs white/yellow). It's delicious and always been a success.
I've used a version of this recipe [0] which explicitly says "red or yellow onions". It's also honest on the cooking time. I'd agree with its main warning, that making your own nice stock from bones really improves the flavour. Doesn't have to be beef stock. But I've also used stock cubes in the past.
Not even close - sweet onions (like Texas 1015s, Vidalias, or Mauis) may be whitish, but they have noticeably more sugar embedded into the structure/tissues of the onion itself. Sweet onions are not white (or yellow) onions, or vice versa. FWIW, Vidalias are a bit less crisp than the others, which helps if you're really after carmelizing, but I find 1015s are the "sweet spot", so to speak, of softenability and enough fiber to hold up so they don't turn to mush.
Red onions are a different flavor profile altogether, and best for some (not all!) Mediterranean or Mexican dishes, or smoked salmon (NOT lox - yuck!) on a bagel with cream cheese and capers.
they taste differently from each other. some are sweeter and some are less sweet, due to having less sugar. Some are sharper or more bitter than others.
This is so clearly true I wonder if the author intentionally “misunderstood” the situation so they could rant. Bonus points for commenters years later making the same “mistake”.
No, they don’t really mean caramelization. No, no one else cares.
It's not clear to everyone. Until I read that comment, I had exactly zero idea of that. When a recipe says "carmelized", I foolishly thought it meant "carmelized".
I'm just sad that they spoil perfectly good fresh, juicy, crunchy onions.
They call it 'caramelized' but don't even put any caramel in. Which is probably good because actual caramelized onions would be gross too. But why not just be honest and call them burnt onions? Or "onions with all the flavor and texture removed"?
Personally, I find those recipes quick enough because I simply opt not to ruin the onions. They don't need any cooking. Just chop 'em and drop 'em on the finished product for a zesty flavorful crunch that you'd be missing out on if you actually followed the recipe directions.
This is exactly it. We don't have a short snappy term for onion where you have fried it just enough to burn off the harsh chemicals, so recipe writers went for "caramelize" instead of a clunky construction like "lightly softened, translucent".
There is a term for cooking onions like that: it is "sautee". That specifies the method cooking bbut the "lightly softened, translucent" level is what everybody assumes.
The solution to confusion might be contact everyone using "caramelize" to verify they mean that or sauteing.
The trick to caramelizing onions (without leaving them overnight in a slow cooker) is to add a bunch of water to the pan and steam them until they’re completely wilted, then boil off the water and add oil. This will cause most of the onion cells to burst, releasing their water, allowing that water to quickly evaporate so that the oil can do its job raising the temperature of all the onions to the point at which the sugars begin to caramelize.
I just add the some oil and a lot of salt (all the salt the dish will use) at the start and cook on high. Once they release their water lower to medium-low and let it cook.
---
1) Prepare Pressure Cooker: Heat up your pressure cooker (Instant Pot: press Sauté button) over medium heat. Ensure your pot is as hot as it can be (Instant Pot: wait until indicator says HOT).
2) Pressure Cook Caramelized Onion Purée: Melt 3 tbsp (45g) unsalted butter in pressure cooker. Add in sliced onions, shallots, ⅓ tsp (1.3g) baking soda. Sauté until moisture starts to come out of the onions (~5 mins). Close lid and pressure cook at High Pressure for 20 minutes, then Quick Release. Open lid.
3) Reduce until Caramelized (takes roughly 16 – 17 mins): There will be lots of moisture from the onions. Reduce until most moisture has evaporated over medium high heat (Instant Pot: press cancel, Sauté button and Adjust once to Sauté More function). Stir constantly with a silicone spatula. Once most moisture has evaporated, adjust to medium heat (Instant Pot: press cancel and Sauté). Stir until onions are deep golden brown and all moisture has evaporated. Season with kosher salt & ground black pepper to taste. Remove caramelized onion purée and set aside.
In the modern age, SEO is partially to blame for inaccurate recipe cook times. At some point Google realized that folks would click on more recipes with shorter times, as people would use that as a metric when cooking. So they would promote quicker recipes.
What ended up happening is some recipe developers would try and actually reduce the amount of time their recipe took, and others would just "shorten" prep (or even cook) time down, to try and get the most clicks. I know Kenji talks about it in one of his POV videos, but I couldn't find it in a cursory search.
Since there isn't really a reliable way to know how long recipes would take for _you_ across different sites, it's almost not a useful metric, but it is what's been optimized for.
No, that is not the prep step. The prep step starts with all of these done and is mixing all of these together in a zip lock bag and putting it in the fridge. So 5 minutes seems even a bit high.
The time for recipes is always "with all ingredients washed, peeled, chopped and set ready to go in a bowl. Start!". Also note that step 2 is to put the onions into the pan (but no step says to cut onions) and that the ingredient list says "garlic, peeled, finely grated" and not "garlic" and "onions, sliced thinly".
You might not like that convention of "time" or would like "actual time" in addition, but it is a pretty universal convention. And it makes sense: the prep time can vary wildly (e.g. peeling and chopping veggies) making the "actual time" quite useless and in professional kitchens other people do this prep work.
So hard disagree from me. The time seems pretty spot on.
The "prep time" is _not_ the time for the "prep step"? Internet seems to agree with you, it's wild. Why is it not called "assembly time" or something?
Plus, it's not like that recipes on the internet (or books) are usually targeted at professional kitchens. Or like professional kitchens will take times at face value (and won't test it).
It is a bit weird but not moreso than, say, the word "butterfly". People agreed on one convention and one phrasing and stuck with it and it would be confusing to have wildly different time^pro and time^home scales. Just like pasta tells you the time starting with boiling water, so "5 minute pasta" does not mean "5 minutes from entering the kitchen".
> And it makes sense: the prep time can vary wildly (e.g. peeling and chopping veggies) making the "actual time" quite useless and in professional kitchens other people do this prep work.
This is a recipe for home cooks not professional kitchens. Both cook time and prep time are always going to be estimates. Labeling a step as "prep" and excluding all of the actual prep tasks isn't useful for someone trying to plan their day. This 5 min step ads nothing of value to the recipe as far as I can see.
This is a great post. Thank you to indulge us. I also like the domain name: SERIOUS Eats!
Real question: I wonder if these recipe websites have done A/B testing on total amount of time in the recipe. In 2023, I could believe it. If recipes with shorter durations are shown, you get more hits. Same with the ridiculous suggestion that all recipes need 1 tablespoon of oil (or less!). People will also return more frequently to your ad-tech empire that provides lousy recipes.
To me, free recipes are no better than free media (online newspapers, YouTube TV, etc.). If you aren't paying, then you are the product.
I use online free recipes to get an idea of the ingredients and proportions. Sometimes, an YouTube video can give you ideas about technique if you are new to an style of cooking. I need to cook something a few times to find the right balance.
My latest recipe is trying to replicate the black vinegar semi-sweet thickened sauce used in Chinese fried eggplant recipes. The premade stuff has a huge list of ingredients -- too many "extracts". I'm am trying to reduce to the fewest number possible, but still tastes close to restaurant style. Each time I make it, I look at my cooking notes, then make small adjustments.
A vast majority of recipes are just inaccurate when it comes to timing.
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.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 349 ms ] thread> In truth, the best time to caramelize onions is yesterday
Yep. I took the article's suggestions to heart, and now when I have a recipe requiring caramelized onions I take the time needed, or prep them in advance. Now my mujadara is pretty darn good.
On the other hand, recipes with eggs and soft vegetables are better freshly made.
Separating those from the clear golden liquid is how you make ghee.
Again, times given are stupid ridiculous.
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 portion out of the freezer and thaw. Depending on the recipe you can use them as-is (soggy) or crisp them up in a pan.
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.
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.
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.
The 15 minute caramelized onions, the cheap slow cooker onions, and other such things are nearly always lies, despite how much I wish them to be true.
Sure there are tools where brand matters, but in the case of a slow cooker I'm putting the burden back on you: find me any brand that is actually inferior or better than the others. I don't think you can.
Non-slow-cooker things like a pressure cooker (ie instant-pot) with a slow cooker function are inferior to a real slower cooker, but they don't claim to be a slow cooker either.
For the home cook, who chops maybe for 1/10th that weekly, not much reason beyond placebo.
Nothing more annoying than squishing your tomatoes as you try to cut (except having to take time out to sharpen your knives all the time).
That's not consistent with my experience. Some knives will never take a good edge. But not all knives actually need a good edge. There are evidently different kinds of "stainless steel"; some kinds are immune to sharpening, some are quite good. But if I want a really sharp kitchen knife, it has to be carbon steel.
Carbon steel knives rust/pit easily - you have to clean them and dry them, you can't just leave them to dry in the sun.
It’s just the simplest tool which actually shines best to be used for everyday general cooking. You know when you don’t have the time to do fancy cooking and just need a tasty home made meal with minimal effort.
Yeah, you could probably get better caramelized onions if you know how to cook them, if you have time to prepare them, and if you give them your full attention, but I would bet for the regular person cooking for himself, they are likely to get better results with 1/10 of effort just doing what OP mentioned, with ANY slow cooker.
I own a slow cooker, and it was given to me for free from a friend that had to quickly get rid of all of her personal belongings before being deported. The recipes in it are fine, often times actually very good, but theres also nothing about it that can't just be made better in a dutch oven with an extra hour or so on the stove. But the biggest proponents are the exact people I would not want cooking advice from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzjR0yL4f0Y
I can guarantee you that I can make caramelized onions that are better than pretty much anything you have ever had in your life, but it won't be because I have fancier tools. It will be because I'm using delicious homegrown onions that you can eat raw like apples, that you would be hard pressed to replicate.
What's my point with that anecdote? Don't really have one, much like yours.
Specifically what aspect or quality of yours do you think makes better caramelized onions?
From what you've said, I think you don't know the subject matter[1] well enough to talk authoritatively about it.
[1] How slow cookers work, or cooking in general.
And no, your Le Creuset caramelized onions will taste no different than slow cooker caramelized onions. This is what we call in science a placebo.
I only did caramelized onions twice with the same one, but based on my experience, any brand/model should work. And I agree, crockpot is the best way to cook caramelized onions.
Top past discussion here from a couple years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27632835
See also: https://slate.com/comments/human-interest/2012/05/how-to-coo...
I think they call it "post structuralism".
We see it in social media all the time.
I've only made French onion soup once or twice, but I make Italian sausage, peppers, and onions regularly. I'm not shy about cranking the heat up, but with just 1 onion and 2 bell peppers some of the onions invariably end up a little burnt even before they've begun to carmelize; but in that dish that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I use the microwave to make a dark Cajun gumbo roux. I'm curious if the microwave would work well for carmelizing a small amount of onion. Though, using the microwave for a roux isn't much faster than using a pan; it's just more difficult to fsck-up.
Instead, the books are fantasy, to let the reader imagine that they could, will, might cook delicious meals and get praise, affection, love, and approval from their family, friends, and dinner guests. And for the onions, part of the fantasy is how easy the cooking will be -- brown the onions in at most 10 minutes.
I think the problem with some cookbooks is that cooking is a somewhat technical or scientific process. If the author is too technical, they can gloss over details that will trouble a home cook, like how tos for complex techniques that they are familiar with, how long things will take someone with less practice, how much prep / cleanup can add up at home compared with working at scale in a restaurant with dedicated prep cooks and dishwashers, etc. My partner was a professional chef for a catering company and the "recipes" they used internally had almost zero details besides ingredient ratios. I couldn't imagine trying to follow one without asking a ton of questions.
On the other hand, some people aren't technical enough and so they can't properly assess the details or break things down into a strong formula for someone else to replicate. They can be vague about measurements, timing, or technique, so even if you follow what's written your result is pretty far from whatever they had done in their own kitchen.
Then there are the "telephone" recipes that have been stolen back and forth from different blogs or articles without anyone making them and over time they've degraded into something just plain wrong.
The key to making a dark roux, as is used in Cajun cooking, is stirring, scraping, and homogeneity. You can crank the heat on high and stir for about 10-15 minutes, or you can keep it over medium and stir for an hour. If you stir like you're supposed to, you can get the same roux in less than half the time. A good wooden spoon (soft enough to scrape the bottom of the pot) that can get into the corners of a pot and a little elbow grease is all you need.
So why do they tell you that you need to stir for so long? Because if you screw it up, you've gotta start over.
For the times I don't, there's Nutribullet.
https://imgur.com/a/wDrMZrU
And yeah, the key really is stirring constantly, and riding the stove knob to keep the heat right.
My stupid thing that I do that sometimes burns it is stopping stirring when I turn off the heat when I'm done. Pan is still hot enough to burn it, if you don't get it out of there, or add vegetables quickly.
I suspect the authors are not lying, but simply calling the above effects caramelization; not aware that what it means is for the onion to be evenly brown all the way through.
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.
According to America's Test Kitchen, do this: Pat dry. Start cold in nonstick/cast iron — no preheat, no oil. Flip every 2 mins. Start high, after few flips, turn heat down to medium. Keep flipping every 2 mins until done.
Most cuts worth eating have some fat on them (filet mignons might not but they are very dry anyway -- to me they're not worth it). This fat is enough to brown and cook the steak on. It's completely unnecessary to add oil.
I find the pan-sear delivers almost the same results in much less time (of course, you won't get the uniform insides of a reverse sear, but close enough since you're flipping so much). I'm also at a stage of life when I can afford better cuts of meat.
But I think ATK or someone else debunked this as the best practice. Flipping more than once gets you more even internal cooking.
In my oven, 230deg is just about maximum temperature; cooking anything that hot for 30 minutes will result in cinders. I take it your oven is calibrated in Fahrenheit?
The tablespoon of olive oil is to kickstart the process, after that enough fat will render out of the meat to keep it going.
Agreed on meat, but I consistently see way-too-small amounts of oil suggested for cooking veggies, too. It's like every recipe writer online got together and decided that 1) they must specify oil quantities for those steps, but 2) the quantity must never exceed one tablespoon.
That said, is anyone actually measuring a tablespoon of oil? I just pour a glug of a size proportional to the ingredients and adjust as needed.
If you take a university student who has just left home and never cooked for themselves and tell them "just pour a glug proportional to the ingredients"...that's pretty close to useless for them, especially since they don't yet an intuition for what things you can freehand (and how much you can freehand them) and which things you shouldn't.
After all, you (probably) wouldn't ever say "I just open the Morton's salt and pour a glug in" because getting salt wrong even by relatively small amounts has a big impact on the final dish.
That said, I agree with you that recipe writers usually do a poor job of laying which things fall more on the "suggested amount, you can just eye ball it" end of the spectrum and which ones are "you should really pull out at least a spoon to get close on this one".
Not GP and I wouldn't phrase it quite like that - but I definitely would. You can give a rough indication, but salt should be added to taste.
(Unless we're talking about baking, where for one thing you can't taste until the end anyway. In that case yes of course measure, still to taste, but the feedback loop is longer.)
No, but you do, almost universally, say "salt to taste." Which is a different way to say the same thing.
I can't think of any situation where I would want more than a literal tablespoon of oil for cooking the first veggies thrown in (usually onion). By the time the onions have begun to caramelize there's is enough water that the original tablespoon of oil is no longer significant.
Where did I say it wasn't?
Anyway, about adding water, I respectfully disagree. The oil is necessary and it really is a tablespoon in a shallow and uncrowded pan with the lid off.
EDIT: I'm specifically talking about browning some onions when called for as an initial step in a recipe, not for making a huge batch of them for use as a condiment. Cutting the onion into finer pieces also speeds things up.
The idea is that adding water, raising it to a boil, and covering the pan reduces the amount of time needed to raise the temperature of the onions to the caramelization point, more than offsetting the amount of time needed to remove the water itself. That plus adding some baking soda near the end reduces the overall time considerably.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ovqhzil3wJw
Slow cook them first for a few hours at a low temperature and then caramelize after. All your onion in a dry pot. Don't add water. Strain them when done and you have... soggy pale onions. Heat up the biggest pan you have and add some butter to do the caramelization (don't crowd the pan like they do in their video). Add some good balsamic vinegar and brown sugar while you're at it. Be sure to make a huge batch so you can freeze some for later. Don't bag and freeze before letting the onions come to room temperature. It's a lot of water in them onions man, but you can use that strained out water for a vegetable stock!
I don't like them like the Americans do but there is lots of to play with it. (I've even started boiling onions whole before I use them in a bunch of other dishes)
Highly recommend it.
I have a few recipes that call for browning onions in a cup (or more!) of ghee.
Works wonderfully. Still takes forever.
There are many ways to brown onions, all of them suck. I tried the "boil in water first" method while back, that works OK ish.
I've helped cook at a camp where 500 people were going to eat the meal. That requires very different thinking from large family cooking where at most 20 people are eating, and a small family is different as well.
Blast them on high heat and you drive off most of them, and polymerize the rest to creosotes.
Or as I like to say (especially when a friend is apologizing for serving slightly charred food): More colors more flavors!
Some claim that this is a thing when making rice too. I've tried toasting the grains for a few minutes before adding the water to boil, but I can't say I can tell the difference. Maybe that's a time issue like the onions, or maybe it just doesn't do anything...
Quite a few Indian dishes require toasting the rice first, if you don't you will end up with a very different dish. In the right context, it makes a huge difference.
When I was teaching 20 ago I would have given you a 2 for that. I happen to have a PhD in so I am knowledgeable about that matter.
Good for you.
Obviously philosophy isn't that informative a term, so people try to be helpful by adding what field or topic their actual research was about.
Some vocational/applied higher degrees in specific fields do have specific initials to differentiate them from a "generic" PhD (for example, the EngD).
Apologies for ++pedantry :)
> people try to be helpful by adding what field or topic their actual research was about
Right, and a common way to do that is to say 'PhD in blah', or 'on bazzing foobars for blah' as though 'PhD' referred specifically to their thesis.
I'm not any kind of cooking whiz but I always use an instant pot (electric pressure cooker) for stuff like that, so it gets up to 230 or so, I think.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-021-01365-x
Canola oil has a high burning point so is a better choice, but if you really want to avoid it, sunflower oil is a good choice as well.
There is absolutely no reason you can't sear meat with olive oil. You just have to use the light/refined stuff, and not the virgin/extra virgin (which have smoke points closer to 410°F.
Worth noting that canola oil, in the best case scenario, has a smoke point of 450°F.
> Light/refined olive oil has a smoke point of up to 470°F.
Where did you get that number? Any source I found gives olive oil a burning point of at most 410F. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Smoke_point_of_cookin...
Also seriouseats puts it at 465°F https://www.seriouseats.com/cooking-fats-101-whats-a-smoke-p...
Also see https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-comprehensive-rebuttal-...
if you don't put in a bit of oil, then you're searing one side in a dry pan, and the second side in an oiled pan. and if you're only putting a bit of oil in and it's all in contact with the meat there's really no reason to worry about smoke point, use whatever oil is handy.
i have not had weevils in a number of years but I have recently had red flour beetles or confused flour beetles
they suck
what proportions do you use
For anything long term I pour the flour out onto long trays, let it reach 0°F/-18°C in my freezer and keeping it there for 3 days, then storing it in food safe 5-gallon buckets with bay leaves and oxygen absorbers, though some also use dry ice. [2]
weevils/beetles all absolutely suck.
[0] - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/096708797229040?...
[1] - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/096708799227950
[2] - https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
i'd be nervous about putting dry ice in a hermetically sealed container like a bucket
a thing i've noticed with storing food in plastic (pet) coke bottles is that they never seem to get beetles and that they tend to collapse a bit over the first year or so; i suspect that, even without a fe/nacl oxygen absorber, the food oxidizes enough to consume the oxygen initially present, which reduces the gas volume about 20 percent and kills any beetles initially present
a lot of my flour is in 6-liter pet water bottles with pp caps; none of it has evident beetles but i did freeze it first
my older notes on the topic are at https://dercuano.github.io/notes/food-storage.html
I only sift flour if I'm making scones, it seems to make a difference. I'm not a cakey person, I don't bake cakes. It's cake bakers that tend to care about sifting.
One of the world’s most celebrated restaurants, Noma in Copenhagen, is closing soon. Their menu costs about $800 per person, but even at that price the business barely turns a profit and runs largely on unpaid interns who put in the endless hours of manual labor so they could have the famous restaurant on their CV:
https://www.ft.com/content/6377b292-d825-4b3a-8527-04d147551...
I love watching cooking videos where they say “a tablespoon of olive oil” and proceed to pour in half the bottle
Searing your meat only goes at temperatures that are high enough to immediately evaporate any escaping liquid.
But at low heat it will not. Or well, eventually your meat will brown, but first your steak will have boiled for a while so you'll never be able to serve your steak rare or medium rare.
The idea is that salt on the outside of the steak initially draws moisture out of the steak, making it dry. But given enough time, the salt penetrates deeper into the steak, and holds the moisture in.
Yet, "sifting flour" was a thing years back... not the one bought in the store but the one stored in large sacks, and ground in the local mill. The amount of lumps sifted out was non-trivial.
Whether you dry-roast or toast in oil depends on what you're trying to achieve; if you want flavoured oil for something like a tadka, then you use oil. Dry roasting to season e.g. a curry produces different flavours. It's also harder; different spices burn at different speeds, so for example add cumin first and turmeric last. burnt turmeric is very bitter.
until you read Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and start watching the epicurious yt channel.
the "4 levels" and "pro chef vs home cook" epicurious playlists are amazing eye openers, where they exactly highlight the actual difference in skills and knowledge.
but sure, anyone can cook well, even a rat.
Take some szechuan peppercorns and boil them in a soup and see if you feel the ma numbing sensation. Then saute them in oil for a few minutes and then add the soup, and notice the difference.
It's the same with lots of spices.
Fun one I noticed: if you search for Hungarian (as in, written in Hungarian) recipes for paprikash, you'll get one dish[1]; if you search for it in English, practically every result would best be classified as some other dish—maybe also good, but not really the same thing.
The key difference seemed to be that the writers of the English recipes were terrified of the amount of sour cream you need to make the real thing. It's a lot. I mean, I'm not Hungarian, but judging from what ~every Hungarian recipe I found said, the correct amount is at least 4x the sour cream per serving of what the English-language recipes suggested. Depending on the recipes one paired up from each language, some were more like 20x.
[1] "What's 'paprikash' in Hungarian, though?" that's what the Wikipedia "other languages" links are for! Find your recipe or ingredient or whatever there, then hit the dish's native language in the language bar. It doesn't even need to be in a script you can read. Works for just about any dish popular enough to have an English-language Wikipedia entry. More reliable (for this specific thing) than Google Translate.
A problem with Google Translate specifically is that it’s often not great at translating ingredients. For instance it will translate daun salam as bay leaf, but there’s something like 6 different types of bay leaf, and they’re not at all similar. If a recipe calls for daun salam it probably wants you to use Indonesian bay leaf, but if you didn’t already know that distinction you’d end up with something weird. Another example would be bawang putih, which translates literally to white onion, but means garlic. Google translate has learnt this meaning sometime recently, but it used to give the literal incorrect translation.
I've seen youtube videos where they "make" such salads. It's really not far off from "cooking time: 10 minutes. 3 to pick from the menu, 2 to call for delivery, 5 for it to reach you."
Restaurants do have containers with chopped vegetables sitting around for this reason. You might not like this convention, but it is pretty universal.
So your complaint sounds like "3 minute angel hair pasta?!?! My water won't even have started boiling by then." Totally understandable misconception for someone who just started cooking, but you should learn pretty quickly what 3 minutes actually means.
So boil your water in a device designed for the purpose: an electric kettle. Takes about a minute.
Electric kettles are certainly fast, but this feels like an exaggeration. Technology Connections[1] made a good video on this recently and even boiling roughly 1 quart of water (which is significantly less than you'd typically use for something like cooking pasta) required almost 5 minutes to come to boil in an electric kettle.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yMMTVVJI4c
That might be true, but the folks who are actually reading these recipes aren't restaurant cooks working in a professional kitchen.
In any case, I am very disappointed with HN for this thread. While I also think "actual time" would have been a more useful standard, words mean what they mean and the comment quality is ...
- "Hey, surely everyone is lying, instead of me misunderstanding a common convention."
- "That universal convention used since forever is dumb. Me complaining to you surely is going to retroactively change this in every publication ever."
- "How dare you tell me that I misunderstood something. I am sure you are personally responsible for that convention."
- "Of course a butterfly is made out of butter, it is right there in the name you moron!"
You might not like this convention, but nobody is lying. It is somewhat surprising that you genuinely thought "writers routinely lie" and never thought to stop and think whether your understanding might be wrong.
When what they more-precisely meant is lightly softened, translucent - a state of onionhood used in no shortage of recipes as an intermediary step during the cooking process.
The writers are therefore perhaps guilty of casual syntax misuse, as opposed to deliberate or wilful mistruth.
I find softened onions preferably for a number of uses. Caramelized onions can be too sweet, and soggy/limp. I've even found that leaving a trace of crunch is better in many cases (eg beef bolognese).
But don't listen to me, I've never really figured out the difference between cooked yellow, white, and sweet onions, and just buy whatever is available and has the least mold and soft spots. Even red onions, once cooked, are pretty much the same to me.
You'll quickly realize that it belongs straight in the trash.
I've used a version of this recipe [0] which explicitly says "red or yellow onions". It's also honest on the cooking time. I'd agree with its main warning, that making your own nice stock from bones really improves the flavour. Doesn't have to be beef stock. But I've also used stock cubes in the past.
[0] https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/french_onion_soup
---
Yellow onions have a stronger flavor, even after cooking. (Though cooking of course lessen it a lot.)
White and sweet are essentially the same, with the latter being slightly sweeter.
In the end they do taste similar cooked. Biggest difference is price. Yellow is usually 20% cheaper than white and 40% cheaper than sweet.
Red onions are a different flavor profile altogether, and best for some (not all!) Mediterranean or Mexican dishes, or smoked salmon (NOT lox - yuck!) on a bagel with cream cheese and capers.
No, they don’t really mean caramelization. No, no one else cares.
They call it 'caramelized' but don't even put any caramel in. Which is probably good because actual caramelized onions would be gross too. But why not just be honest and call them burnt onions? Or "onions with all the flavor and texture removed"?
Personally, I find those recipes quick enough because I simply opt not to ruin the onions. They don't need any cooking. Just chop 'em and drop 'em on the finished product for a zesty flavorful crunch that you'd be missing out on if you actually followed the recipe directions.
The solution to confusion might be contact everyone using "caramelize" to verify they mean that or sauteing.
My instruction : - long filament of oignons, all the same size
- large amount of olive oil
- when it start browning, start moving them. Stop when they are caramélisés.
- dump
- smoke a cig.
- repeat
This is pretty ironic in a thread about the misuse of the term "caramelize".
It's not steaming if you put water into the food directly. It's simply ... cooking, or maybe simmering/stewing.
I regularly use it in cooking, both for caramelizing onions and meat, can’t taste any weird flavours with it.
If you don't mind the pureé-like consistency, you can further speed-up the whole process in a pressure cooker (Instant Pot). Follow the steps 1-3 from this recipe: https://www.pressurecookrecipes.com/pressure-cooker-beef-cur...
--- 1) Prepare Pressure Cooker: Heat up your pressure cooker (Instant Pot: press Sauté button) over medium heat. Ensure your pot is as hot as it can be (Instant Pot: wait until indicator says HOT). 2) Pressure Cook Caramelized Onion Purée: Melt 3 tbsp (45g) unsalted butter in pressure cooker. Add in sliced onions, shallots, ⅓ tsp (1.3g) baking soda. Sauté until moisture starts to come out of the onions (~5 mins). Close lid and pressure cook at High Pressure for 20 minutes, then Quick Release. Open lid. 3) Reduce until Caramelized (takes roughly 16 – 17 mins): There will be lots of moisture from the onions. Reduce until most moisture has evaporated over medium high heat (Instant Pot: press cancel, Sauté button and Adjust once to Sauté More function). Stir constantly with a silicone spatula. Once most moisture has evaporated, adjust to medium heat (Instant Pot: press cancel and Sauté). Stir until onions are deep golden brown and all moisture has evaporated. Season with kosher salt & ground black pepper to taste. Remove caramelized onion purée and set aside.
What ended up happening is some recipe developers would try and actually reduce the amount of time their recipe took, and others would just "shorten" prep (or even cook) time down, to try and get the most clicks. I know Kenji talks about it in one of his POV videos, but I couldn't find it in a cursory search.
Since there isn't really a reliable way to know how long recipes would take for _you_ across different sites, it's almost not a useful metric, but it is what's been optimized for.
Yes, let’s just ignore the hour of prep that goes alongside that 10 minutes of cooking.
https://www.seriouseats.com/lamb-biryani
The first step is the prep step, which it says takes 5 minutes. In that step, I have to:
- trim the fat from, and cube (1in) 2 pounds of lamb
- peel and chop 6 cloves of garlic
- peel and grate 2 inches of ginger
- mix with yogurt and salt in a zip lock bag
That looks like at least 20 minutes of work to me. Include cleanup (raw meat and garlic are both a pain), and it is easily a half hour of work.
Maybe 5 minutes is for an expert chef in a professional kitchen?
The time for recipes is always "with all ingredients washed, peeled, chopped and set ready to go in a bowl. Start!". Also note that step 2 is to put the onions into the pan (but no step says to cut onions) and that the ingredient list says "garlic, peeled, finely grated" and not "garlic" and "onions, sliced thinly".
You might not like that convention of "time" or would like "actual time" in addition, but it is a pretty universal convention. And it makes sense: the prep time can vary wildly (e.g. peeling and chopping veggies) making the "actual time" quite useless and in professional kitchens other people do this prep work.
So hard disagree from me. The time seems pretty spot on.
Plus, it's not like that recipes on the internet (or books) are usually targeted at professional kitchens. Or like professional kitchens will take times at face value (and won't test it).
Then they shouldn't label it prep.
> And it makes sense: the prep time can vary wildly (e.g. peeling and chopping veggies) making the "actual time" quite useless and in professional kitchens other people do this prep work.
This is a recipe for home cooks not professional kitchens. Both cook time and prep time are always going to be estimates. Labeling a step as "prep" and excluding all of the actual prep tasks isn't useful for someone trying to plan their day. This 5 min step ads nothing of value to the recipe as far as I can see.
Real question: I wonder if these recipe websites have done A/B testing on total amount of time in the recipe. In 2023, I could believe it. If recipes with shorter durations are shown, you get more hits. Same with the ridiculous suggestion that all recipes need 1 tablespoon of oil (or less!). People will also return more frequently to your ad-tech empire that provides lousy recipes.
To me, free recipes are no better than free media (online newspapers, YouTube TV, etc.). If you aren't paying, then you are the product.
I use online free recipes to get an idea of the ingredients and proportions. Sometimes, an YouTube video can give you ideas about technique if you are new to an style of cooking. I need to cook something a few times to find the right balance.
My latest recipe is trying to replicate the black vinegar semi-sweet thickened sauce used in Chinese fried eggplant recipes. The premade stuff has a huge list of ingredients -- too many "extracts". I'm am trying to reduce to the fewest number possible, but still tastes close to restaurant style. Each time I make it, I look at my cooking notes, then make small adjustments.
Please try and not use "us" in online discussions. This has been considered to be poor manners since the BBS days.
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.
Here's a page about it: https://www.onions-usa.org/onionista/faster-caramelized-onio...
They will still be mushy thou.