https://nitter.net/jkimballcook/status/1744071179483177352
This is an actual recipe though, my aunt made something like this. You basically make a ""soup"" by just cooking onions like this until they are completely broken down and mushy. You don't even add broth or water or anything, just onion, seasoning, and maybe cheese. It was so gross. I tried my best to be polite and eat enough of it to not be rude, but I guess I did a bad job since my mom later made fun of me for how obvious it was that I was disgusted by it.
I mean, you can really caramelize onions for as long as you want. You'll just lose that fresh onion flavor in the final dish if you don't add some more in at the end.
45min-1h is standard, but going longer for a French onion soup won't really hurt.
You can reduce that time with baking soda.
https://www.onions-usa.org/onionista/faster-caramelized-onions-with-baking-soda/
Onions are one of the few things you cannot trade futures on in America because 100 years ago 2 guys crashed the onion market.
Everything is finance imperialism, except onions because of one specific event.
I'll remember that when I'm in a rush lol, I usually don't mind because it gives me time to do other prep and chores. Caramelizing is great because it's basically fire and forget
Well, there is a lot of stirring involved. I like to reduce that as much as possible.
This is just classic internet "wisdom". He definitely saw it on Reddit or something.
I think that's just a more "amateur cook revelation" which, incidentally, also happens on reddit. If you get into cooking you just notice a few, very common bullshit things. Caramelizing onions taking about 15 minutes for example. Either they mean sauté and think it's a fancy synonym or they're acutally just lying to you, but it happens so often.
Same with like "quick 30 min meal" and it's pasta. Man my stove used to take like 30 minutes just to boil a pot of water for pasta because it was shit, I'm not Jamie Oliver and I don't have access to like 30,000 BTU burners. Sure, I don't have to do much during it, but it's also not like it's a ricecooker and I can just forget all about it 'till I pop it open.
Baking times that are given as "30 minutes or until browned to desired point" or w/e are also very, very commonly so off base that you'll do 60 mins until it even begins browning, even if you have a convection oven or whatever.
You ever try to get into kneaded bread? By god so many of the recipes fucking suck because they presuppose I have any fucking idea what "firm enough" or "until it's pliable enough" or whatever means. Like I get there's some experience involved, I'm not even being a STEM-Lord about it but give me like some pointers here
Either you have an extremely weak stove, or you are using way too much water to cook your pasta
Extremely weak stove, kitchen came with the appartement. I notified my landlord once about the inbuilt freezer door breaking off from his 20 year old piece of cheap shit fridge / freezer combo and wouldn't you know it the fucker looked for a replacement freezer door for 3 months instead of spending like 300 eurodollars to update the fucking thing.
It had cast iron (no, really) hot plates with electrical coils to heat them so despite having a range of heats it did only have binary on/off switch for all purposes and if you have to heat a small cast iron pan to heat your actual pan that just takes a fucking while. also you have 0 temperature control. It's hot, and that sticks, eventually, it may not be.
But similar stories as per landlord special kitchen appliances aren't exactly uncommon.
Jesus dude, you might actually get better results buying a pair of trangia's to cook on. At least then you could choose between high and low heat.
I've long since moved out and I could deal with it on account of my mom making me into a pretty good home cook but I despair at the thought of a time strapped adult trying to learn to cook on that piece of shit.
Imagine reading "let simmer at medium low heat for 10 mins", cranking the dial to 4/10, return 10 minutes later and have all your shit burned. You'd fucking call it quits immediatly and think you're like Homer Simpsons levels of bad cook, meanwhile, the problem was the cookbook presupposes some sort of halfway functioning cooking equipment and you get the landlord special
Boiling water shouldn't take that long, plus you can use an electric kettle to boil water faster than your stove then dump it in.
I wouldn't really blame the recipe for not accounting for people with broken stoves not fixed by their landlord lol.
With baking stuff you gotta look up a video, it really is hard to be more descriptive than what they wrote with baking. I never get baked goods right without a video or good pictures, because you can both over and under mix a lot of recipes so you can't err on either side really.
I wouldn't really blame the recipe for not accounting for people with broken stoves not fixed by their landlord lol.
I would, actually. Much of the cookbook stuff, both professional and amateur, tries to sell itself as the healthier, cheaper, better, faster option. Which indubitably it will be, on some of those parts at least, but like half of it is aspirational bullshit. If you need a 30,000 BTU burner to make Jamie Olivers "I will fix the nation with my grand cooking" meal, that is not a solution, that is pandering to rich people to look down on poor people.
Now don't get me wrong, I cooked, even before I even moved out from my parents place. My mom, who is cool as shit, forced me to learn it, and thank god for that. And that was pretty good equipment, and she was a phenomenal teacher, so I didn't have to rely on bullshit as noted above. Which is why it irks me so much, I'd'a be fucked if I wasn't born very privileged on both monetary and cool parents basis.
I don't care if your coq-au-vin with truffle pan sauce assumes whoever is cooking it has access to nigh professional grade cooking equipment - it'll probably be true. But all the "cheap quick super easy worknight meals you can make between your 18 simultaneous jobs" (excuse the hyperbole, I am quite mad) assuming I have access to the kind of kitchen whoever wrote the fucking book has does nothing but further the argument that home cooking is expensive, either in time, or ingredients, which I do believe is wrong, which just turns people off it.
Whatever leftist theory you ascribe to, I'm sure it doesn't start with "be born privileged", aye? You wanna write the "Healthy poor people meals for poor and or time poor people meals" - you best be fucking considering more than "they're all just too fucking dumb" as a factor
I've used the cheapest stove at a place with a cheap (but not terrible, he fixed stuff quickly at least) landlord, you don't really need that good of a stove burner to cook stuff. That oven was pretty bad and uneven though, for casseroles it was fine but I wouldn't do any desert more complex than cookies there. Even frozen pizzas sucked because of the hot-spots. But if you have a shit stove you don't know the ins-and-outs of then you'll have a bad time regardless of recipe.
Reading your other comment it looks like you had to preheat your burners, which definitely makes pasta more annoying and not a quick thing to cook (I didn't even know cast iron hotplates were a thing, the cheapest stoves here are just bare resistive coil with no hot-plate cover). My go-to cheap/quick meal is pasta and whatever thing I throw together in a sauce, or pasta salad cold for later. I usually boil most of the water in a kettle, and boil a tiny amount in the pan to preheat it, it doesn't take that long doing it, and kettles are cheap.
Looks like on your bad stove it makes more sense to make a meal where you do prep while the burner/pan pre-heats like a stir-fry or something.
The recipes you talk about that fake being easy annoy me more because they never account for people not having good knives or knife skills and needing twice as long to prep, the difficulty of cleaning afterwards. Also Jamie Oliver always having a stupidly expensive niche ingredient, and over-relying on fresh foods (not canned or frozen) when he went on his anti-poor health-tirade is annoying.
I've done fine cooking, I was a pretty good home cook by then, but I can absolutely see how if you want to learn it as a time strapped adult, and those are who those 30 mins recipes are for, you're just gonna quit after the third time of following directions that take you 1 hour 15 instead of 30 minutes.
What was the quickest recipe you can make on that stove? Aren't you fucked no matter what if your burner takes that long to heat?
Rice takes like 15-20 minutes to cook, probably longer on your stove not using a rice cooker, potatoes take longer because you boil them from cold water so it's heavily stove dependent, I'm not sure what cheap starch makes sense for your stove tbh.
Pasta/noodle is still probably the best option if you have an electric kettle, that tip should be on every recipe where you throw something in boiling water. It really does save time, especially in Europe where the kettles should be faster because higher voltage.
But most recipe books are bad and seem like they're by a person who just copied it from somewhere else and never cooked it, and chatgpt is going to make this worse.
Cooking should probably be taught in school, but I was still specifically perplexed by your pasta tirade because that should be the quickest starch to make other than asian-style rice noodles or ramen, which idk if those are common in Europe, and still require boiling water quickly.
What was the quickest recipe you can make on that stove? Aren't you fucked no matter what if your burner takes that long to heat?
Incredibly large amounts of food for multiple days, because the cast iron plates did hold the heat insanely well. Use the time while they heat up for misé en place, cook once for like 2 hours and eat that for 4 days or so.
Quick starch if need be was usually Gnocchi via boiled water by the kettle
I'm not sure what cheap starch makes sense for your stove tbh.
Again, former stove.
but I was still specifically perplexed by your pasta tirade because that should be the quickest starch to make other than asian-style rice noodles or ramen, which idk if those are common in Europe, and still require boiling water quickly.
Ramen is common, rice noodles not so much. OTOH you can get cheap cooked lentils in a can here, that's been helpful back then.
By god so many of the recipes fucking suck because they presuppose I have any fucking idea what "firm enough" or "until it's pliable enough" or whatever means.
While this used to (well, still does but less so) really get on my nerves, and is legitimately unhelpful in some cases (my biggest beef with any recipe is the measurement "two good handfuls" for tomatoes), there's a bunch where "until the vibes are right" really is the most accurate instruction. You either have to find someone with the experience to do it with you and show you the right vibes, or experiment to find them on your own. Dough is the probably the worst offender, too.
Also, it sounds like you have a tremendously shitty oven. If preheated, a convection oven definitely has no problem with browning most dishes in half an hour. A gas oven might not be as good, but it shouldn't double the cooking time.
the "steam" method helps but even then its still going to take 30-45 minutes depending on how fast and loose you want to play with the burner temperatures
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ovqhzil3wJw
she doesnt mention it here but this method also has the benefit of creating like a broth the onions cook in and the evaporation of the water concentrates that broth. now youd think the same thing would happen when you just do onions by themselves but no there is like some magic that happens this method seems to create a stronger onion flavor which a number of youtubers who have tested this method notice (and i noticed as well when i first tried it)
I'll try that at work when I do onions next time and see how well it holds up on an industrial scale of onions. Generally we just leave a big ass pit on fairly low heat for a couple hours, just the onions, no oil or anything. It's our caramelized onions for the week and setting and forgetting them is no issue but it seems neat
ah yeah in that case it probably wont matter but honestly i think it makes them more flavorful to me at least and it wont fuck them up or anything so might as well try it at a bigger scale
Asking this because I don't eat onion in my dishes - is "caramelising onions" just cooking them in a pan?
Yes and no - you want to cook them to between 120 and 180 degrees celsius to cause them to brown, which is usually done with oil in a pan.
You can also oil things and roast them (roasted garlic for example) in an oven to get the right browning/caramelization reaction.
Oil is used because it can be heated above 100 degrees (unlike water) and because charring food is quite difficult to do without burning it (except for corn which is very easy to char properly).
Mostly cooking them so the sugars in them turm brown and it makes them kinda sweet. They're really delicious this way and have totally different flavors than onions do raw or lightly cooked. Caramelized onions take a while to make but not 90 minutes. Just do them on high for like 15 or until they're all brown and mushy and they'll be fine, people who think they need to take all day to make are just wasting their time.
15 minutes isn't caramelizing them though, it's browning them. It's the same reason you can't cook a cake at 450° for a shorter time when directions are 350°
You might bring them to the same end temperature, but there are reactions occurring which take time in both examples that higher heat will not make happen faster.
A French onion soup with 15 minute caramelized onions would not be good
This isnt correct lol. You're browning them, which can be fine, but taste and texture are significantly different. With the amount of onions in the OP, and with the pan being too small, I could easily see it take a couple hours, on low.
Like what you're describing is fine for stir fry, but not if it's an onion forward dish like French onion soup
Sure, and this is why French cooking is fucking garbage. The only thing people can think that a hot 15-20 minute cook won't work for is Highly Sophisticated French Cooking. I don't make french onion soup because it's a humongous pain in the ass, and for pretty much anything else that you want a nice sweet mush onion for this is more than good enough. French food isn't meant to be cooked in a home kitchen by a home cook, it's too much work. Making a good French onion soup requires a ton of other work too, it takes hours to do properly. Who is doing that with any regularity that it's worth saying shit like ALL RECIPES THAT SAY IT TAKES LESS THAN 90 MINUTES TO CARAMILIZE AN ONION ARE WRONG
French cooking is good cooking tho, i'm sorry it's hurt you
I make caramelised onions for work in a professional kitchen and trust me, if the owner of the establishment could reduce the cooking time (and man-hours) required for caramelizing onions down to 15 minutes, he'd force us. He's read these internet articles and tried to get the chef's to do that, and then tried to do it personally. We went back to the old method. This man has us pre-cook burger patties in preparation for lunch, and even he knows it takes longer than 15 mins to caramelise onions (well, now anyway). It tastes sweet and mildly onion-y.
We also prep browned onions, which similar to what you describe. Tastes different. It's a different thing.
Like, risotto and paella are similar but you can't just use them interchangeably.
I mean, especially if he’s using a glass top electric on low instead of induction or gas (kinda assume so, since some of the benefit of cast iron is turning the weaknesses of coils into strengths) and cooking on low, yeah.
That’s a good amount of onions too. Without the ability to really slosh em around in the pot like the classico style, you’d have to cook em on low to not be throwing onion curlzMT all over the place when u stir.
o.k. so I have never caramelized onions, but after 2 hours wouldn't they just be ash?
Not if you use low enough heat and/or keep flipping and messing with them. Plus like look at how much onion is involved here.
At low heat after 15-30 minutes they'll start expressing all their liquid, and after that evaporates away you're just slowly breaking the onion's content into sugars and then caramelizing those sugars until you've got a nice brown jammy thing with 1% of the volume of the original onions
French Onion Soup | The French Chef Season 1 | Julia Child https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU8BhMYpJaQ&ab_channel=JuliaChildonPBS
Last time I tried to caramelize onions, it took 4 hours. Someone tell me what's wrong with me.
Nobody here is mentioning the real hack, which is using a pressure cooker
Pro tip: cut onion cook time in half by adding water at the start and boil it out. After that, high heat and constant movement can have it done in about 20-30 minutes
