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Hey guys. I am no cook and I don't speak English natively. What the heck is caramelising onions?
I thought caramelising is when the sugar liquifies and you get caramel. So caramelising onions would be to cover them in lots of sugar and cooking them until they are covered in caramel.
But it sounds like you are just deep roasting them.
The sugar in the onion is caramelising
It's just a process of slowly cooking them on a low heat, they'll naturally go quite sweet after a while without having to add sugar.
It's just slowly cooking chopped onions in a pan until they are a deep brown and very soft and sweet. If you've ever had french onion soup, that's basically just caramelized onions in broth.
Caramelization is the process of sugars browning due to high heat. The actual reactions that are happening is a combination of sugars and their chains breaking down into smaller compounds and those smaller compounds recombining into other compounds, all these new compounds gives caramelized foods their distinctive colour and taste.
When making caramel the sugar liquification happens often in high enough temperatures for caramelization to occur. The process of sauteeing/high temperature cooking onions long enough involves the same exact reactions. In onions the bit longer chain sugars that dont taste sweet are broken down into simple sugars thus producing the sweet taste of caramelized onions and the further reactions produce the caramel colour and taste.
Tldr: caramelization is a group of chemical reactions and 'caramel' is basically a taste and colour that results from it
Thanks. So I thought correctly, but didn't think of the longer chain sugar in onions, since they usually don't taste sweet.
Eating onion raw is the only way to mask its sweetness. Or maybe boiling the crap out of it until it tastes like nothing at all. Otherwise, onion is very sweet.
Many things can taste sweet if you caramelize them. Carrots will caramelize in butter if you sautee them on low heat in a cast iron and you can make them taste candied with no added sugar
caramelization is a group of chemical reactions
They're known as Maillard Reactions
The Maillard reaction is different from caramelization
Caramelization may sometimes cause browning in the same foods in which the Maillard reaction occurs, but the two processes are distinct. They are both promoted by heating, but the Maillard reaction involves amino acids, whereas caramelization is the pyrolysis of certain sugars.
I had someone arrive at a BBQ, saw me frying some onions, and ask "Are you going to caramelise those onions?"
Yes mate. The onions I'm frying for a few minutes while the burgers cook, gonna be nice and caramelised in seconds, just you watch.
Every time I do a Bunnings BBQ for the community centre, it's women run, we get the onions on ASAP because they need time to cook, and we'll have people buying a plain onion sandwich in addition to a snag, because caramelised onions are so good!
Every time I volunteer to help my partners football club run a sausage sizzle, I'm saying "put the onions on, they take longer" and I'm told by the guys "I'm a man, I know how to BBQ, go away little girl, go hold the sign and be pretty"
Then everyone buying a snag is complaining about crunchy raw onions, and the guys are saying "why did we buy so many onions?" (because you were supposed to cook them down so they shrink!)
These same men will unironically say "women belong in the kitchen" then won't take cooking advice from a woman.
(also, the footy guys always giving me flak for deglazing the BBQ plate with water to help the onions cook down faster. They'll just keep adding oil, once saw a Rotary Club use 1L of canola oil to half cook 5kg of onions, when we've never needed more than 200ml to fully cook onions, because onions need water to cook down!)
Ngl, you just taught me some thing, I thought I was cooking them down quick, frying them in my bacon fat, before adding eggs to them, I'll have to try adding some water, maybe that will make them come out better.
And cook it slow. Time is your friend here. Actually, I didn’t know water was sufficient either: I thought your choices were lower temp or more oil
Remember, it takes at least 45 minutes to caramelize an onion. If you're doing it for less than 45 minutes, then you're just cooking it.
I know you're joking, but the only way I can see it taking that long is if you put whole onions into an oven set to 180° to 200° F.
In a frying pan, one can easily caramelize an entire large frying pan of onions in about 30 minutes, or even faster if you decide to use physics to your advantage, and add a small amount of water to your pan and caramelize your pan of onions within 14 minutes. This is an advanced technique that requires some experience to try to use. Much like making a Dark Roux in 15 minutes.
I'm absolutely not joking. If you're cooking it for less than 45 minutes, you're not caramelizing the onions. Frequent stirring, adding water, whatever, you can get the color and texture of caramelization, but not the flavor.
I spent a couple of years making slightly disappointing meals because I was focused on the color and texture of my onions instead of the flavor. When I finally took the time to fully caramelize them again, I remembered what I had been missing.
Try it and taste the difference if you don't believe me.
45 minus to fully caramelize.
If you don't want them that dark you don't have to cook them that long.
I know it's not exactly the same as a low temp for a while. But you can get pretty good results with a high temp, just need to deglaze more frequently, usually with water until they're almost done. Then wine and/or balsamic is good.
I always say if you want to seem like a genius in the kitchen just sauté some onions
I usually start my meals by sauteing onions and without fail whoever is in the house will say "Ooo, that smells good what is it?"
Literally just onions
There's a reason why cooked onions are common across almost every international cuisine on earth.
I saw somewhere there exists a saying along the lines of 'start sauteing onion, add some garlic, then you figure out what you are going to cook.' When my wife and I have time to actually cook, this is basically what we do. everything is better with garlic and onions, from German to Korean. The rest is just details.
30 minutes
https://youtu.be/Ovqhzil3wJw?feature=shared
We start our caramelized onions in a covered nonstick skillet over high heat with ¾ of cup water. The water and steam help the onions quickly soften. Then we remove the lid, lower the heat to medium-high, and press the softened onions into the bottom and sides of the skillet to allow for maximum contact with the hot pan. Instead of finishing with sugar or honey as many recipes call for, we add baking soda, which speeds up the reaction that converts flavorless inulin (a polysaccharide present in onions) to fructose.