27 ms·

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

• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• cratermoon 3y ago
  I read this article some time ago. > 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.
  • bombcar 3y ago
    I suspect that many recipes benefit from being started a day or more early. I know bread does.
    • duckmysick 3y ago
      Do does (dry) brining meats. On the other hand, recipes with eggs and soft vegetables are better freshly made.
      • bombcar 3y ago
        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).
• qbasic_forever 3y ago
  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.
  • GeneralMayhem 3y ago
    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.
    • pierat 3y ago
      When the butter solids brown (and blacken) that's burning the solids in butter. Separating those from the clear golden liquid is how you make ghee. Again, times given are stupid ridiculous.
• kstenerud 3y ago
  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.
  • wussboy 3y ago
    I would wake up with a ravenous hunger as the smell would have permeated the house! What a delightful problem to have!
    • xxs 3y ago
      ...unless you have curtains or other fabrics that soak up the smell.
      • tourmalinetaco 3y ago
        So my house constantly smells like caramelized onions? Win for me!
        • xxs 3y ago
          Even then, the molecules degrade/break down with time and the smells won't be all the fresh
  • Larrikin 3y ago
    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.
• phnofive 3y ago
  (2012) Top past discussion here from a couple years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27632835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27632835 See also: https://slate.com/comments/human-interest/2012/05/how-to-cook-onions-why-recipe-writers-lie-and-lie-about-how-long-they-take-to-caramelize.html https://slate.com/comments/human-interest/2012/05/how-to-coo...
• swayvil 3y ago
  At some point the words become more powerful than what they're referring to. At that point, even if you know better, you're afraid to deviate. I think they call it "post structuralism". We see it in social media all the time.
• wahern 3y ago
  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.
  • dunham 3y ago
    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.
  • throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
    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.
• graycat 3y ago
  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.
  • bombcar 3y ago
    You can tell because Goodwill is always filled with romance novels and cookbooks. They’re both very aspirational.
  • bb88 3y ago
    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.
  • schwartzworld 3y ago
    The phrase you're looking for is "food porn"
  • naet 3y ago
    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.
• MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  They lie about making a roux, too. 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.
  • drekipus 3y ago
    I often screw up roux, sometimes I get it and sometimes I don't. For the times I don't, there's Nutribullet.
    • MisterBastahrd 3y ago
      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.
  • wheels 3y ago
    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: https://imgur.com/a/wDrMZrU 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.
    • MisterBastahrd 3y ago
      Yeah, especially with a lot of quality cookware which has a really thick core at the bottom of the pan. Those things hold heat forever.
• papandada 3y ago
  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.
  • HarryHirsch 3y ago
    Elsewhere she quotes herself instructing one of her students in one of her cooking classes: "Continue stirring, they won't burn!"
• nonethewiser 3y ago
  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.
• idontwantthis 3y ago
  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.
  • kazinator 3y ago
    They probably do the same thing, and don't notice that it doesn't coincide with the static balance point.
  • vultour 3y ago
    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.
• kazinator 3y ago
  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.
• pbj1968 3y ago
  Sifting flour. Sautéing spices “to release the flavor” and then adding them to stew where they’ll simmer for an hour or more. Pretending “restaurant quality” is anything besides twice as much butter and salt as you’d dare use at home. “One tablespoon of olive oil” to brown absurd amounts of meat at high heat. Once you start recognizing recipe BS, you see it everywhere.
  • drekipus 3y ago
    You actually don't want too much oil when cooking steaks, otherwise they splatter everywhere. That's something I'm glad to learn.
    • saaaaaam 3y ago
      Pat them dry before you put them in the pan. No splatter.
    • wenc 3y ago
      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.
      • 7speter 3y ago
        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.
        • wenc 3y ago
          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.
• yamtaddle 3y ago
  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.
  • AmericanChopper 3y ago
    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.
    • yamtaddle 3y ago
      > 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.
• jamesliudotcc 3y ago
  Thomas Keller does not lie about this. It takes 6 hours on the stove.
  • throwaway2037 3y ago
    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.
• crtified 3y ago
  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.
  • sfink 3y ago
    I suspect this is correct. 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.
    • harshalizee 3y ago
      The best way to learn the importance of using the right onion is by making french onion soup with red onions. You'll quickly realize that it belongs straight in the trash.
      • wussboy 3y ago
        Do you have a recipe to recommend?
        • dmurray 3y ago
          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. [0] https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/french_onion_soup https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/french_onion_soup
• chongli 3y ago
  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.
  • dopidopHN 3y ago
    I did it for a living over a summer. Helper for a Syrian restorant in France. 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
    • quickthrower2 3y ago
      no drink wine?
      • tourmalinetaco 3y ago
        Syrian, not French
  • ars 3y ago
    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.
  • occoder 3y ago
    > add a bunch of water to the pan and steam them 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.
• dboreham 3y ago
  I find that all recipes vastly underestimate prep and cook time for everything.
• jrflowers 3y ago
  If you add a little baking soda you can dramatically speed up caramelization.
• zwieback 3y ago
  Has anyone here tried the baking soda trick? I've read about it but can't imagine the flavor would be any good
  • Semaphor 3y ago
    You need very little to make it work with onions. I regularly use it in cooking, both for caramelizing onions and meat, can’t taste any weird flavours with it.
  • imp0cat 3y ago
    Yes, it works. Do not use too much of 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-curry-japanese/ 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.
    • zwieback 3y ago
      thanks for the detail! I'll give it a shot. I do like my onions a bit firmer but sometimes an onion jam is a good thing
  • MandieD 3y ago
    Pinch of baking soda thoroughly mixed with a teaspoon of sugar, then sprinkled over the chopped onions to make sure it gets evenly distributed.
• GarlicToum 3y ago
  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.
  • tourmalinetaco 3y ago
    I’ve seen recipes that completely exclude the prep time, especially when the actual cooking only takes 10-20min. Yes, let’s just ignore the hour of prep that goes alongside that 10 minutes of cooking.
• richk449 3y ago
  Recipes are terrible when it comes to time. I have this one open in a tab so I can try it soon: https://www.seriouseats.com/lamb-biryani 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?
  • diffeomorphism 3y ago
    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.
    • williamdclt 3y ago
      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).
      • diffeomorphism 3y ago
        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".
• deafpolygon 3y ago
  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.
• WheelsAtLarge 3y ago
  Saw a show the other day that added a bit of baking soda to caramelize them in a fraction of the time. I tried it a few days ago and it worked. Here's a page about it: https://www.onions-usa.org/onionista/faster-caramelized-onions-with-baking-soda/ https://www.onions-usa.org/onionista/faster-caramelized-onio...
  • ars 3y ago
    Yah, but then they taste bad - I can taste even small amounts of baking soda, and I hate it.
    • ccsalvesen 3y ago
      A splash of white wine vinager when they are done will neutralize left over baking soda and bring it back to normal pH. It makes all the difference. They will still be mushy thou.
  • williamdclt 3y ago
    Makes onions mushy though: https://www.seriouseats.com/caramelized-onions https://www.seriouseats.com/caramelized-onions
• dang 3y ago
  Related: Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27632835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27632835 - June 2021 (299 comments) Why Do Recipe Writers Lie and Lie About How Long It Takes to Caramelize Onions? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8262889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8262889 - Sept 2014 (4 comments)
• triggercut 3y ago
  Purposeful strategic misrepresentation from those in power leaving others to succumb to sunk cost fallacy and perpetuate the myth of Hirschman's hiding hand... Yum!
• bruckie 3y ago
  Recipe writers are still lying about cooking time in 2023. I signed up for a Hello Fresh promo recently to get some new meal ideas, and it's making me feel like the slowest cook on the planet. I reliably exceed their stated prep and cooking times by 100-200%. Tonight's "40 minute" recipe took about 70 minutes, and that was with a family member helping out with some of the prep and cooking. I wonder if they collect any data on how long it takes actual customers to cook them. I might be slower than many, but I'd be surprised if the median customer could complete the recipe in anywhere close to the listed time.
  • egman_ekki 3y ago
    You should watch a couple of Iron Chef episodes if you want to feel extra slow :D
  • wjnc 3y ago
    Do you prepare following the steps in the guide? I’ve found that it’s much quicker to prepare based on what hits the pan when. If you do that the first items hit the pan sooner and you are in a nice rush to keep up the cutting with the cooking. Massive efficiency gain. And do some YouTube based cutting training. But that was coming from total beginner level.
  • episteme 3y ago
    I had the same problem with Hello Fresh. I dreaded doing all the prep. However, we tried one called Green Chef and found it much more realistic. The cost of any of these services is too high for me to stomach without some sort of discount but we actually enjoyed cooking the recipes with this one while it lasted.
  • brnt 3y ago
    Absolutely! I think I am especially slow at cutting veg, which is a compromise between my motorically undeveloped and untrained self not cutting my fingers (happens every few weeks) and speed. Multiplying by 1.5 is a safe lower limit for me. I did learn a few things through it though (how to use vinager and not to be afraid of more than 5 ingredients), which is a great outcome. Apart from a bigger selection of recipes I know.
• BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  For the same reason devs lie about installing arch linux without any problem. When you are good at something, you don't realize how much you do anymore. This article is unrelated, but has a good explananation of the problem in one section : Why not tell people to simply use x https://bitecode.substack.com/p/why-not-tell-people-to-simply-use https://bitecode.substack.com/p/why-not-tell-people-to-simpl...
  • dj_mc_merlin 3y ago
    This is different. If you learn enough about Linux, you can install Arch in 15-20minutes no problem. Especially since learning about Linux means reinstalling your OS many times until you finally learn how to keep it clean and rescue it from any situation. You are not going to be able to cook chicken in 3-4minutes per side like so many recipes claim. It's just not possible to have a good outside temperature and a good inside temperature no matter how you cook it if you only have that amount of time. They're lying to make it seem easier and to get more clicks on their recipes.
    • Broken_Hippo 3y ago
      Exactly this. You simply aren't going to speed up the chemical reactions that happen during cooking. Even if you do find a way, your result will often be different or the result of using ready-made ingredients at the store. (I can buy frozen caramelized onions, for example).
      • secondcoming 3y ago
        I think cooking times assume the ingredients are already at room temperature. If you cook chicken taken straight from the fridge it'll take longer and cook more unevenly than room temperature chicken.
        • fendy3002 3y ago
          it also depends on the cut and what you cook too. If you only stir-fry chickens that has been diced small with high heat, (I think?) you can achieve it 3-4 minutes, however that requires extreme precision and I think also require good utensils with precise heating. Cooking it longer, ex 7-8 minutes with lower heat usually bring better result and far easier. Deep-fry or boiling? I'm unsure. Steaming one? Surely you can't
• mattlondon 3y ago
  Hmm I dunno. Are people using a stone-cold pan or something? You can brown (I presume this is what most recipes mean when they say "caramelise") onions brown fairly quickly in ~5 mins or so on a good induction hob and normal (i.e. not absurdly weighty) day-to-day saute pan. It was equally as fast on gas hobs when those used to be a thing too. A non-induction electric hob of course is a total different matter as they are total utter garbage, so if they are using those then yeah it probably just takes 10 minutes to get to the right temperature to cook at all! Maybe the onions you bet in Europe are easier to cook? Wouldn't surprise me if there is some different variety that is common here but not there etc.
  • onion2k 3y ago
    You can turn onions brown fairly quickly in ~5 mins.. Caramelized onions are not the same as browned onions. Going from raw to brown takes 5 minutes, and going from brown to caramelized takes about another 25 to 45 minutes.
    • tourmalinetaco 3y ago
      looks at username Now you, you I can trust on this topic.
  • wpm 3y ago
    Sauteed onions are not the same as caramelized onions.
  • peepee1982 3y ago
    Heat is not the problem. I don't think you understand what browning onions well means. Which is understandable, because getting them "brown" in a few minutes is pretty easy, and that's the way it's explained in most recipes. Browning usually means at least partial (noticeable in taste) caramelizing. That just won't happen in five minutes.
  • GrumpyNl 3y ago
    Caramelize onions take between 45 and 60 minutes. First result on Google https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/how_to_caramelize_onions/ https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/how_to_caramelize_onio...
• peter_retief 3y ago
  I had to google because I forgot the term for sauteed onions, had the term braised in my head. https://www.platingsandpairings.com/sauteed-onions/ https://www.platingsandpairings.com/sauteed-onions/ The main difference between sauteed onions and caramelized onions is the cooking time. Caramelized onions are cooked at a lower temperature, for a longer period of time, resulting in super sweet, tender onions.
• isaacfrond 3y ago
  My sister in law writes recipes. She has a recipe column in a newspaper and wrote a few high quality recipe books. I saw them in a bookstore. So she's reasonable successful. Her pieces are charming, her recipes inspiring. The thing is. At a birthday party when I was talking to her, she confessed to me that she never actually tries her recipes. When it's time to do a new piece, she sits down at her computer and makes up a recipe. She is experienced and knowledgeable she it usually turns out ok. But if you make her recipe you may well be the first one to do it. What is worse, she claims that virtually all recipe books are made like this. So if you cook from a recipe you'll have to adjust to realities and modify it were needed, because the recipe writer sure as hell didn't do it for you.
  • rutierut 3y ago
    Maybe this is just my experience, but I've almost never seen a recipe book where the recipes are not accompanied by pictures of the result?
    • pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      I think the thing here might be "of the results". Here's my grandma's recipe for flapjacks ... accompanied by a picture of flapjacks ... the recipe I made up, the picture was from a stock photo site (best place to get pictures of gravy! /jk) ... For me that revelation explains a lot.
      • rwmj 3y ago
        I know a food stylist and a food photographer (both work / have worked for major UK newspapers) and this is nonsense. They cook and photograph every recipe.
    • OJFord 3y ago
      Even in Delia's course - she has a good reputation for testing & refining etc. over time, not a TV personality with questionable time/skill in kitchen - the photos & making of those dishes to photograph are credited to someone else. (And sometimes they do clearly vary from the recipe - like clearly not the called-for cheese, or without the described scattering of something over the top or whatever. Which I think's mostly fine or even good, but occasionally I think 'what do you mean by x' and either can't tell from the photo, or have to remind myself that that's only someone else's interpretation anyway.)
• techwiz137 3y ago
  There was a time I believed caramelizing meant adding sugar. So I went to caramelize some red peppers by adding sugar. By far the best thing I ever made.
• joaomoreno 3y ago
  Actually, J. Kenji López-Alt has a great recipe for 15 minute caramelized onions [0]. [0] https://www.seriouseats.com/quick-caramelized-onions-recipe https://www.seriouseats.com/quick-caramelized-onions-recipe
  • voxadam 3y ago
    I respect the hell out of Kenji but if properly caramelized onions are central to the dish (e.g. French onion soup, caramelized onions for a burger, etc.) I tend to come down on the side of Daniel Gritzer (also of Serious Eats).[0] [0] https://www.seriouseats.com/caramelized-onions https://www.seriouseats.com/caramelized-onions
• boo-ga-ga 3y ago
  Was thinking exactly the same recently, but about all the recipes across the Internet. I need an "honest cooking time recipe" website where people will not tell about the whole meal in 20 minutes, but calculate the time honestly, and include all the preparation stages.
• withinrafael 3y ago
  Reminds me of recipes that still mention searing a steak to seal in the juices. [1][2][3] [1] https://twitter.com/altonbrown/status/1349000588105756675 https://twitter.com/altonbrown/status/1349000588105756675 [2] https://www.seriouseats.com/old-wives-tales-about-cooking-steak https://www.seriouseats.com/old-wives-tales-about-cooking-st... [3] https://www.thekitchn.com/does-searing-meat-really-seal-in-the-juices-food-science-218211 https://www.thekitchn.com/does-searing-meat-really-seal-in-t...
• ReptileMan 3y ago
  Make a huge batch of them and freeze the rest.
• pazimzadeh 3y ago
  Actually, my grandma can do it in ~20 minutes and her onion soup using one onion will still taste better than mine which uses four onions. Apparently the trick is to use enough oil for the amount of flour that you use. A lot of the golden color comes from that.
• smcl 3y ago
  I talk about cooking and food a lot with my Czech teacher (not just because I like to cook, but if I'm low-energy it's such an easy topic) and I brought this idea up - something along the lines of "What do you think about all the recipes that say 'fry onions until caramelised - about 5-10 minutes'?". Her reply floored me - "ha! yeah, 10 minutes? They'd be burned by then!". I spent the next few minutes trying to explain exactly what I meant, thinking that I'd said something wrong or been misunderstood. Nope, no misunderstanding. She swore blind that onions caramelise at 5 minutes and burn after 10. I suspect she's cooking them on a volcano or something.
  • throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
    She's thinking of browning. Most people simply don't know what caramelization is.
    • smcl 3y ago
      I’m not sure five minutes is even enough for browning
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
• teekert 3y ago
  I have Jamie Olivers 15 minute meals (or something). I put a 4 over the 1, because for me it's 45 minutes minimum.
  • Tepix 3y ago
    I thought it was me because i don't cook often and feel like i'm slow. I routinely need 45 minutes for 15 minute recipes. The food tastes good, however.
    • teekert 3y ago
      It does taste good (omg that Turkish pizza), and I picked up some techniques and changed some ingredients here and there, left out some things. I feel that 15 min is only feasible with everything ready within (fast moving) arms reach and all cutting done by a food processor...
• gswdh 3y ago
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• alkonaut 3y ago
  I think a) because adding a 20 minute step to a recipe makes it unappealing so calling it 10 makes the recipe more popular, but more importantly b) because what they mean is "make them transparent and possibly slightly brown" which you can sort of do in 10. No one cared that this isn't really caramelizing. Very few recipes really need caramelized onions. They're a sweet mess. Basically I think recipe writers just like to throw around terms too loosely to make their recipes sound fancy when what the 99% of recipes including fried onions needs is "lightly fried, transparent looking onions".
• 0wis 3y ago
  What struck me in this piece is that the author tried to experiment but not to understand what he was trying to do. Chemically/Physically I mean. I became a way better cook when I understood that the Maillard reaction happens starting at 140°C and caramelisation at 180°C (Wondered why this is the default setting of for oven cooking ? Now you know).[1] The whole thing of cooking, apart from flavour mixing, is to bring your food (onions or anything else) to a high enough temperature to attain the desired reaction. And it is way complex than it seems with several parameters to play with : pan material for general heat conduction, stirring will allow homogeneous temperature conduction in the pan and will give time to the highest bits to cool down, fat helps for local heat conduction, adding water or wine will detach flavorous parts after "maillared" or caramelized (known as deglaced). And certainly many more that I still ignore. So to come back to the point of caramelized onions, time can help but it is not the unique parameter. As suggested in other comments, you can slow-cook during the night and achieve easily a perfect result. You can also do it quite quickly (I have done it in 5 to 10 min I think) with a strong enough heat source and a lot of stirring to avoid pyrolysis. In the end, it is no wonder that the famous post of Tim Urban is called "The cook and the chef [...]". [2] All of this makes me wanting to know more about "first principles" of cooking (mainly for flavour mixing, I still have a lot to learn on this point). Maybe receipe writers are making them up on the go, but most of the one I read have at least a bit of "chef" in them to be roughly good in their parameter estimates. I am surprised no one else bring that up in HN. My main excuse to indulge in frequent visits of this site is that I think most people here try to be first principle thinkers when they comment. By the way, this is a way to long post for here, but I hope it will be useful for curious cooks. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction [2]https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-s... edit : formatting for readability
• mns 3y ago
  I would say also because people at home are afraid to use the proper heat needed, don't know exactly how to use the stovetop and balance the heat, most people don't have a gas stove (or induction), which could give you more control and people just don't have the proper pans and tools and experience.
• ranting-moth 3y ago
  Ah, recipes. One person's (unless otherwise stated) opinion on what method and mixture of ingredients are good, often written in a haphazard way. I think the reason for many people can't (or think they can't) cook is that they tried a few times and failed. Or they're intimidated and don't know where to start. And that's the thing with recipes, they are very often not a good place to start. Most recipes assume you have a lot of knowledge and can read between the lines.
• kwhitefoot 3y ago
  Recipe collections are pointless anyway. The best cookery book I have is Process Cookery, a textbook for commercial cooks studying at vocational colleges in England. It tells exactly how to do things and has example recipes with flowcharts showing which parts of the process are unique and which parts are common to other recipes.
  • sandgiant 3y ago
    Sounds interesting! Do you have a link? I can't seem to find it anywhere. I've had decent success with "The Science of Good Cooking"[1]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Science-Good-Cooking-Illustrated-Cookbooks/dp/1933615982/ https://www.amazon.com/Science-Good-Cooking-Illustrated-Cook...
    • kwhitefoot 3y ago
      I just knew someone would ask and I'm embarrassed to say that I misremembered the title. It's Professional Cookery: The Process Approach by Daniel R. Stevenson Here's a link https://www.amazon.co.uk/Professional-Cookery-Approach-Daniel-Stevenson/dp/0091583314 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Professional-Cookery-Approach-Danie... It doesn't go into a lot of theoretical detail about food chemistry but it is an eminently practical and down to earth textbook for people who will cook for a living. No frills, no pictures.
• Polybia 3y ago
  I worked with company that creates cook books and utensils in Switzerland in 2010, and they have a workshop kitchen on their premises. For every new recipe, they invite regular people to cook it at least twice. If the results are bad or inconsistent, they tweak the recipe and repeat. I guess we don't have a kitchen of much global appeal, but at least it's consistent.
• Karupan 3y ago
  Most recipe sites are also misleading when it comes to the amount of fat required and the quantity of spices (at least for Indian cooking). I used to wonder why the special “restaurant” recipe was as just meh. Then after I got a little more experience cooking regularly, I just realised instinctively that the quantity and duration of cooking wasn’t accurate at all!
  • rightbyte 3y ago
    Spices are hard to specify the amount since the spice taste so differently according to freshness and exact species.
• Tepix 3y ago
  Instead of sticking to recipes, for many it's a better approach to learn what is going on behind the scenes. "Cooking for Geeks", published by O'Reilly is a book that focuses on explaining cooking. https://www.cookingforgeeks.com/ https://www.cookingforgeeks.com/ PS No affiliation.
• al_be_back 3y ago
  [dead]
• EarthLaunch 3y ago
  The title edit saves characters but makes it less funny! Original title: > Why do recipe writers lie and lie and lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? > lie and lie and lie Those recipe writer propagandists!
• Svarto 3y ago
  This is why I built Yumee (https://yumee.recipes https://yumee.recipes), a social recipe sharing app where you can only share recipes that you have yourself cooked (and you need to share a picture of your creation). Makes it very real and you can build your cookbook own cookbook mixed with recipes from your friends and family
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  》Or throw the onions in a crock pot and go to bed. At what temperature??
• baxuz 3y ago
  I think that the author is mixing up "caramelized" and "frying until golden brown", intentionally or not. Almost none of the examples that he gave never mentioned the term "caramelized" Most recipes don't require caramelized onions. In fact, they can be overwhelming in most recipes.
• hackernoteng 3y ago
  Im a talented cook. I have no idea how long it takes to caramelize onions, lightly brown garlic, etc. I just do it by look, feel, smell, etc. So if asked to write down a recipe, it would just be rough guesses. Same with measuring, is it a tablespoon? I dont know, its "this much". A lot of cooking is just tacit knowledge and really hard to write down specifics. Its not like baking which is more of a chemistry experiment.
  • therealcamino 3y ago
    Recipe writing is a specific skill, for sure -- it's teaching rather than doing. But for anyone who isn't learning alongside an older relative, there has to be a way to develop that intuitive sense. A good recipe writer can call out those key areas where you have to develop a feel for something, and enable that kind of learning. Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is a great example of that.
• mattcoles87 3y ago
  [flagged]
• aurizon 3y ago
  Deep fry the onions, same with bacon. Cut so they are separate, but large enough to be removed with the metal grid deep fry pot. Watch as you first dip - the steam flashes off quickly at first. Have the oil under 350 - watch with care as they burn fast. Keep stirring to break clumps and when they reach the brown you want, remove and drain. Same with bacon - m break up clumps. This will give nice crisp bacon - too long and it gets hard - bacon bit stuff. I learned this in the Air Force kitchen when they have a surge and onion loving bacon eaters early in the AM, en masse...
• dragosion 3y ago
  My wife's recipes are ALL tested by me. Multiple times. I even used her recipes to cook myself (rare). Her cooking blog and vlog didn't get any attention other than lots of hate for the Borsch vs Borscht debate and others. Her blog: https://www.rednumberone.com/ https://www.rednumberone.com/ Vlog: https://www.youtube.com/@rednumberone1 https://www.youtube.com/@rednumberone1 I really wish she made more of these so I can test interesting food - sacrifice man. Tell her to make more. All made real, all photos are made by her and the videos too. It takes a lot longer to make a recipe for photos and video. Preparation for photos and video recording gives you a strong reason to make-up recipes 10 / day and hope they go well.
• sanitycheck 3y ago
  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.
  • SamBam 3y ago
    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."
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • sanitycheck 3y ago
      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!
• lucidguppy 3y ago
  Recipes have too many ingredients these days.
• cabirum 3y ago
  [Del]
  • jlengrand 3y ago
    Well, the only thing is that brown and a bit crispy onions and not caramelized onions, that's it. The author is mostly complaining that the caramelized onions mentioned in the recipes simply aren't that. Brown and a bit crispy onions are nice and that's how I most of the time make them as well. They're just not caramelized onions. (picking one random proper recipe online : https://www.loveandlemons.com/caramelized-onions/ https://www.loveandlemons.com/caramelized-onions/)
• helsinkiandrew 3y ago
  I find it scary that I remember this came up 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27632835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27632835
  • dpcx 3y ago
    I thought this seemed familiar, and generated a decent amount of discussion last time, too.
• forinti 3y ago
  I personally know a baker who publishes recipes that will fail along with a picture of what the end result should be. This is an attempt at self-promotion: you fail; but I am marvelous and can make these wonderful things.
  • oldgradstudent 3y ago
    This should be a capital crime.
• radel 3y ago
  Italian here, I googled "ricetta cipolle caramellate" (caramelized onions recipe) and they all range from 30 minutes to 1 hour in length
  • ghusbands 3y ago
    The article is about caramelized onions within other recipes, not caramelized onions as a recipe.
• grumple 3y ago
  I ran into this issue when making french onion soup for the first time. I was so mad. The recipe said something like 45 minutes to cook the onions down. No. It took over 2 hours. Was it delicious at the end? Definitely. But I'd have started earlier and had it with the rest of my meal.
• throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
  Lol, we're so pampered today. Watch Tasting History with Max Miller (https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCsaGKqPZnGp_7N80hcHySGQ https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCsaGKqPZnGp_7N80hcHySGQ). Every old recipe used to leave out salt, not explain any technique, times, temps, types of ingredients, and barely had proportions. People who cooked recipes were usually professionals who just knew how to cook things. It was around the end of the 19th century that cookbooks for home cooks came out, and they too didn't explain much. If you are really interested in cooking, either take a class, or buy a book that teaches you how to cook. La Technique and Mastering the Art of French Cooking are excellent instruction manuals. If you learn better from video, Jacques Pepín did a 3 hour video of cooking mostly everything in La Technique.
• hahamrfunnyguy 3y ago
  I disagree with the author's assessment. I think it depends on how caramelized you want your onions, but there's a quick way to cook them. I cook mine in a stainless steel pan without oil. The sugars will start to caramelize in the bottom of the pan. At a point I add a small amount of water to the pan (less than a tablespoon) and then cover with a lid. If it's a 10" frying pan, I use a 4" lid. The steam cooks the onions quickly and the cooked onions absorb the browned sugars from the bottom of the pan. People really make cooking a lot more difficult than it needs to be. If it tastes good and your technique works, who cares?
• RenThraysk 3y ago
  The trick is adding vinegar and bit of sugar. At least what is I do when making onions for hotdogs or burgers.
• recipebase 3y ago
  [dead]
• Nathanael_M 3y ago
  There actually is a way to get deeply caramelized onions quickly. Ripping hot pan, start with a bit of water. Then it's just a pattern of sear, deglaze with water, sear, deglaze with water. Repeat until level of caramelization required is achieved. You won't get it in 10 minutes, but it's VASTLY quicker.
• efields 3y ago
  Hilarious that there's 500 comments on this, of all things. You can safely say in a recipe book that caramelized onions take 10, 20, or 45 minutes or an hour. Chances are the writer has the best intentions and reasonable knowledge of the subject matter. Nobody's going to sue you if you're wrong. So there's no single source of truth for how to caramelize onions. Life goes on. FWIW, caramelization boggles scientists to this day. Last I heard/read, there are still unidentified sugars that occur there that don't occur elsewhere.
• js2 3y ago
  A NYT Cooking recipe for a French Onion Grilled Cheese sandwich admits 45 minutes to prepare, allocating 30 minutes to cooking the onions. I've made it a few times and I think that's about right. It's friggen delicious BTW: https://archive.ph/2020.10.25-001920/https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1020107-french-onion-grilled-cheese https://archive.ph/2020.10.25-001920/https://cooking.nytimes...
• alfor 3y ago
  Pressure cooker for 5-10 min Then open it up and finish them.
• superbiome 3y ago
  For me there’s never enough sauce, glaze, topper, what-have-you called out for the dish. I consistently have to 2-4x the volume just to serve the meal appropriately. Occasionally the recipe ratios are so off that the entree would burn without more liquid.
• t067633 3y ago
  My onions usually take about 25 minutes. I know because that's when the potatoes are done Yummmmmmmmm!! The big secret is plenty of oil.
• indymike 3y ago
  Mostly because writers think carmelized means sauté until brown.
• kayo_20211030 3y ago
  Wide pan with oil and onions. 350 degree oven. Stir every 10 minutes or so. Done in 60+. No stress. Perfect.
• DigitalParacosm 3y ago
  I wonder if the author remembered to have their pan searing hot before throwing the onions in? They should sizzle from the pan heat and the water from the onion touching your oiled pan. The author says his onions were still raw after 5 minutes in the pan, so there is no way he's using a hot sauté pan or even a fry pan with adequate heated oil. Cooking and baking is like following a lab, you can't miss a single step! We don't blame chemistry when we can't re-create the lab, we retrace our steps. Since the author is a sports blogger gone pseudo-entertainment politics, I think we can safely assume the pan was cold.
• ilamont 3y ago
  I have great respect for Mark Bittman and regularly turn to How to Cook Everything for its solid recipes, but sometimes he gets it spectacularly wrong. Case in point was his spatchcocked turkey recipe. Quoting the NYT Cooking App: In 2002, Mark Bittman published this revolutionary approach to roasting the Thanksgiving turkey, which allows you to cut the cooking time of the average turkey by about 75 percent while still presenting an attractive bird. Simply cut out the backbone — or ask your butcher to do it for you — and spread the bird out flat before roasting, a technique known as spatchcocking that is commonly used with chickens. Roasted at 450 degrees, a 10-pound bird will be done in about 45 minutes. I tried the recipe last Thanksgiving, following the video exactly and extending the time based on many reader comments, and it still came out underdone. It ended up taking 2 hours; we had Thanksgiving dinner at 9pm. A very experienced home cook and scientist I know believes that temperature and timing are thrown off by writers like Bittman who use professional ovens which have far better temperature regulation than the crappy decades-old ovens used by most home cooks. As for unfailingly good and simple recipes, I can't recommend Jacques Pepin short "Cooking at Home" videos on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_PgxS3FkP7ATPveBQ1yah7LDqysyzDCG https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_PgxS3FkP7ATPveBQ1ya...) highly enough. He often takes whatever he has lying around to make some variation of a famous dish - canned tomatoes instead of fresh, a half-empty jar of olives, once even a hot dog to substitute for a sausage in his Sausage Cassoulet (https://youtu.be/Uuli3So6Oo4 https://youtu.be/Uuli3So6Oo4).
  • fooblaster 3y ago
    The recipe writing team at the times has recently made a note of how each recipe is independently tested by other, non professional cooks with normal kitchen equipment. I'm skeptical that the recipe was never tried with a conventional oven.
  • dekhn 3y ago
    The best way to cook poultry (which does take longer than most estimates, I agree) is with a probe thermometer. The real problem is maintaining a balance between fully cooking thick thighs, compared to the mostly-surface-area breast, even after spatchcocking.
• adriancoliba 3y ago
  There is a great hack that makes caramelizing onions a breeze and cuts down the cooking time significantly. The secret would be adding a small amount of water* at the beginning of the caramelization process. Not only does it reduce the overall cooking time, but it also ensures that the onions caramelize evenly without the risk of burning. *https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzL07v6w8AA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzL07v6w8AA
• mech987987 3y ago
  I think the simple answer is that there is a disconnect between what caramelizing onions means for serious applications (i.e. french onion soup) and not-so-serious applications (your average philly cheesesteak or omelette). Just cook 'em down a bit on higher heat if your application is not so serious.
• BlakeSimpson 3y ago
  [flagged]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• dekhn 3y ago
  I agree with the folks saying that caramelized is poorly defined in popular cooking. What I think most recipes really mean is "sweat the onions until soft". What many people end up with is "dried-out onions that are burnt in spots". While caramelize is definitely a slow process that has several phases. I think the real point is- there's a lot of stuff where people are stirring things in a pan on a stove. Try the toaster oven- it's much more set-and-forget, has better heat control, and if you're lucky, it has a fan that recirculates the air, which greatly improves the results. Properly caramelized onions are more like fruit jam than anything else.
• lumb63 3y ago
  Recipe writers in my experience lie about the duration it takes to accomplish anything. I have yet to follow a recipe and finish it in the prescribed amount of time. It’s very frustrating because it can ruin planning entirely. For example, in Stella Parks’ Bravetart, she says her cherry pie can be made in “45 minutes active time, 45 minute roast, 2 hour rest”. The instructions mention a two-hour refrigeration period, another 30 minute refrigeration period, a 75 minute bake, and a 4 hour rest. A 3.5 hour recipe, in no less than 8.5 hours, assuming the active time is correct.
  • o1y32 3y ago
    For this exact reason I lost much of my interest in cooking. I know I am not a professional chef and I can't do things as efficiently as possible, but I almost always spend more than twice the amount of time finishing those recipes. Right, excluding the time for preparation or cleaning, just the cooking part. So a "20 minute quick meal" becomes one hour, and by the time I finish cooking I am already very hungry. Another bad thing is that sometimes pictures that come with a recipe don't even use the same ingredients. You wonder why your dish appears different until you take a close look at the picture and realize that that's not even the same dish using the same ingredients or steps. That's just a scam.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• LazyMans 3y ago
  Baking soda will modify the Ph enough to speed the maillard reaction. A few pinches per onion should do it. Thank me later.
• lucisferre 3y ago
  A lot of people in the comments saying that it comes down to an over generalization of the word "caramelize". I would argue that this is instead representative of the very low quality of the vast majority of most recipes which are produced by rank amateurs at best (not to say there are not some pretty impressive amateurs). There are many higher quality sources of recipes out there today. Serious Eats being one site that rarely fails to get the details correct (though I managed to find a dough recipe that had 1% salt instead of 2% which seems like an error). ATK/Cooks Illustrated rarely has glaring errors on times or quantities. NYT is also pretty reliable. Also many current YouTube chefs are quite diligent. Joshua Weismann is a regular go-to for me.
  • dangerboysteve 3y ago
    I always use 2% kosher or sea salt for my sourdough.
• uconnectlol 3y ago
  the whole point of the internet is knowledge sharing. the web is the antithesis of knowledge sharing. the web is based around censorship[1] and monetization. you cannot know something as basic as how to caramelize onions because the natural way to spread this info would be to send each other an ebook on cooking or a quote from it, which would be copyright. blame the boomers who made it impossible to trade basic information because of the small downside that some company might lose some sales due to piracy. someone has to explain how to caramelize onions first. you could create an explanation from scratch, but it would be easier to just send a quote from whatever book you remember reading it in. 1. writers on the web who get paid to write know nothing about what they write about (was the same for magazines and such media before the web). they only get paid to get your attention, not to be correct. even when it comes down to being paid to be correct it only means being slightly more correct than the competitor, both of which were nothing near correct in the first place. it's literally a bunch of high school kids writing stuff they did 10 minutes of research on 2. recipe spammers want to make the most impressive recipes so you click them, but nobody will make them if they take actual work. 3. this is the reason why all recipes on the web are mostly garbage and deliver false promises. 3a. even the article in discussion is full of false promises if you enable ads: """ Average Retirement Savings By Age: Are You Normal?SmartAsset| Sponsored Heart Surgeon Begs Americans: “Stop Doing This To Your Fruit”The top 3 common foods that you would have never guessed were the cause of your fatigue.Gundry MD| Sponsored Nicole Kidman's Must Have Beauty Serum For Mature Skin """ 4. this is how magazines for morons worked in the 80s and 90s, the web is just an instantiation of that. it costs money to write and publish something on the web, due to the need to host it on an active server, which costs more as your website becomes more popular, so it makes sense that only money driven "advice" would appear more than anything terribly useful. (yes you can use some free blog site but your content will be removed for legal or "moral" reasons if it's actually useful) 5. the journalist will invoke plausible deniability, or try to weasel themselves back onto the high ground or change the subject when you hassle them on their knowledge / malpractice. as seen in the article: "I emailed Sam Sifton, the Times food critic turned national editor, to ask if the Recipe Writing Guild had some secret agreement to print false estimates of onion-cooking time. He wrote back: “I can reveal that onion caramelization takes longer than the Guild believes. But it need not take as long as you believe it to take! You can speed it up with butter, so long as you are careful not to burn.”" 6. you could just buy or download some good book on cooking, written 300 years ago, but you could not find such a book on the web because any discussion of this on the web is drowned out by corpo spam garbage. every recipe website is just a bunch of new things. you will not learn to cook from them, just to use the latest fad tool or ingredient this is why stuff like napster and freenet should have become the norm 20 years ago, instead of this boomer dot com garbage. i still remember the day the web came out, it was just like when smart contracts came out - i could not imagine any real use case for it other than some boring commercial garbage like a fake journalist outlet. 1. because it naturally gets structured around large companies (due to the fact that the more readers something has the more money it costs to host) which are held accountable socially and legally for any slight misstep they take, as well as intentionally lying and censoring for their own benefit
• victor106 3y ago
  I just follow this https://youtu.be/Ovqhzil3wJw https://youtu.be/Ovqhzil3wJw
• chriswait 3y ago
  The author wrote a follow up in Gizmodo - apparently Google's answer boxes were also claiming that it took "about 5 minutes", and they were listing OPs article as the source. Incredible. https://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-lying-to-you-about-onions-and-blam-1793057789 https://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-lying-to-you-about-...
• lcuff 3y ago
  One of the main points of the article that I totally agree with is that recipe authors fudge times by massive amounts to make the total time for a recipe "acceptable". A favorite recipe from years ago in Cuisine magazine for a way-better-than-ordinary Spankopita called for washing and chopping the spinach. In 1982, fresh spinach was almost always very sandy, and needed multiple washings. The recipe allocated less than 5 minutes for the task that probably took me 20 minutes the first time. (Yay for the advent of pre-washed spinach!). Similarly for doing phyllo (aka filo) dough the first time. Very fussy, very time-consuming. A more truthful phraseology might be "after you get good at this, it can be done in as little as x minutes". We do get faster at repeated tasks ... The cynic in me sees at as part of a pattern where we're constantly lied to in advertising blurbs, headlines and summaries, but that's another rant ... :-)
• Shorel 3y ago
  What I want are recipes in metric measurements. I literally don't understand anything about the recipes I can find online.
• supertofu 3y ago
  I learned to caramelize onions at age 14 from Julia Child's "Art of French Cooking". I learned to make her French Onion soup. Medium-low heat, lots of butter, onions, and a solid hour of stirring creates a jammy, sweet, milk-chocolate-brown onion paste which forms the base for extraordinary onion soup.