3 ms·
There are several other posted here, but I feel that all of them do something which will fundamentally disrupt the flavor (e.g. crockpot will make them soggy an
by AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
There are several other posted here, but I feel that all of them do something which will fundamentally disrupt the flavor (e.g. crockpot will make them soggy and not quite the deep mahogany brown that you want, adding water will do the same). Being a lover of French Onion soup, here's a method that's worked well for me over the past four years or so of experimenting:
1) Choose a pan that has high heat retention. A cast iron skillet would work well for this purpose, although you may run into some concerns when it comes time to deglaze. Generally one deglazes with something like wine, but people recommend keeping highly acidic stuff away from cast iron out of fear of damaging its seasoning.
2) Throw the onions into the pot/pan. Add a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar to the onions. This will help them caramelize more quickly.
3) Turn the heat up to high and cover them for about two minutes. When you open the lid, you should notice a large amount of steam escaping. This is called "sweating" the onions. Onions need to be dry in order to brown properly--the sweating method helps them dry out more quickly.
4) Turning the heat down to medium-high, stir occasionally. You'll stir more frequently towards the end, pushing up from once every two minutes to once a minute, to once every thirty seconds, to constantly near the end. They're done when they're a deep mahogany brown.
That's it, really. As the original author said, there aren't any shortcuts to proper caramelized onions. The salt+sugar will help ever so slightly, the sweating will help ever so slightly. But you really shouldn't expect to caramelize them in less than a half hour.
EDIT: Down-votes for posting a recipe on HN? That's gotta be a new one on me.
- magic_beans 10y agoCaramelizes onions in a cast iron pan!?? Please, no one ever do that unless you want to destroy your pan AND your onions.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoHow does that hurt the pan?
- mod 10y agoDoesn't. You can do almost nothing to hurt a cast-iron pan itself. It can destroy your seasoning, though, and require you to "fix" it by thoroughly cleaning and re-seasoning it. It's not that difficult, but generally you want to retain your previous seasoning as it's much easier and it gets better with time. People also think soap and water "damages" cast iron, and that's not true either. http://www.seriouseats.com/2014/11/the-truth-about-cast-iron.html http://www.seriouseats.com/2014/11/the-truth-about-cast-iron... Anyway, prolonged rusting or breakage are the only ways to "destroy" cast iron.
- aethertap 10y agoDeglazing is pretty hard on the seasoning of the pan (basically polymerized fats from cooking), which means your stuff will probably stick next time you cook with it. I actually use exactly the method above for caramelizing onions, and I use either an enamelled cast iron pan or a tri-ply stainless/aluminum pan. Both work well, but I think the results seem a little better with the cast iron. That may just be because I can go straight into making onion soup in the same pot, so every bit of the sticky onion stuff makes it into the soup.
- AdmiralAsshat 10y agoYou might have missed the part where I said it would be a good option, if not for the deglazing problem. Cast Iron is what usually comes to mind when we think heat retention, however, which is why I mentioned it.
- ska 10y agoThe obvious choice to keep you both happy is a enameled cast iron dutch oven.
- magic_beans 10y ago:')