Melted Onions Recipe on Food52 (2024)

FAQs

Can you melt an onion? ›

Melt the butter in the stockpot over medium-low heat. Add the sliced onions. Keep your eye on the onions and stir often at the beginning to allow all the slices to have contact with the bottom of the pot so they start to release their liquid. In about 45 minutes they should have released a good amount of liquid.

Caramelized Vidalia onions are easy to prepare - they just take a little time. The trick is to cook them low and slow until all their natural sugars are released and they become sweet and delicious.

The mild flavor of sweet onions makes them perfect for using raw in salads and relishes or chopped as a garnish. Want to cook them? Sweet onions are lovely when turned into onion rings or when simply roasted.

Onions release amino acids that react with sugar as they heat up. It's this chemical reaction that creates wonderful flavors and changes in color. And if you've tasted caramelized onions before, you've experienced this magic first hand.

Once you've finished cooking the onions to desired doneness, deglaze the pan with 1/4 cup of water (for extra flavor, you can also use vegetable or chicken broth, balsamic vinegar, red, white or Madeira wine, beer or brandy).

Our Test Kitchen likes to use butter when caramelizing onions, as it offers the richest flavor. If you avoid dairy or don't have butter, you can caramelize onions in other fat such as margarine or olive oil. Add the onion slices. It's okay if they overlap a bit here because they'll shrink as they cook down.

You can use either oil or butter to caramelize onions — but ideally, you use a combination of both! I like to use olive oil, and this cooking fat tolerates heat particularly well. Meanwhile, butter adds a distinctly rich flavor to the caramelized onions.

As soon as the onions start sticking to the pan, let them stick a little and brown, but then stir them before they burn. The trick is to leave them alone enough to brown (if you stir them too often, they won't brown), but not so long so that they burn.

Unlike mushrooms, which shouldn't be salted until after they've browned, you should always salt onions before you start cooking them. Onions won't begin to caramelize until all the water in them has evaporated, and using salt will speed up that process, Caicedo explains.

Do you cover the lid when caramelizing onions? ›

Yes, you should cover the onions when caramelizing them. Covering the onions helps to trap the steam and heat, which aids in the caramelization process by softening the onions and allowing them to release their natural sugars. This results in a sweet and flavorful caramelized onion.

Vidalia, Walla Walla, Cipollini varieties are inherently sweet onions. These varieties have become extremely popular and for good reason. They are good cooked but they are very mild and are excellent eaten raw. These varieties of onion have a thinner husk and therefore don't store as well as wintering onions.

White Onions: A stronger, spicier, more pungent flavour than yellow onions. More oniony, for lack of a better term, than yellow onions.

Submerge Them in Cold Water

Soak them for at least 15 minutes (longer is even more beneficial), properly drain, and eat away! Submerging them in cold water takes away that intense, sharp bite from the raw onion. The cold water helps the enzyme that causes onions to have their pungent flavor to leach out.

To get the melt-in-your-mouth texture, the onions need to be covered tightly and need a heaping helping of the secret ingredient: time. The combination of the long cook time and securely-wrapped onions will make them fall-apart tender and irresistible.

They can be eaten cooked or raw and are a staple food worldwide. In addition to their flavoring abilities, onions are a rich source of vitamins, minerals, and fiber and offer several health benefits. But these properties can sometimes change depending on whether you cook your onions or eat them raw.

Onions are almost always cooked in some kind of fat, although they can be softened in a small amount of liquid.

Use your thumb to press on the “shoulder” of the onion (the area near the stem), to make sure that it's firm. If it is soft or mushy, the onion will likely contain some internal rot. Employ the sniff test: An onion that is decomposing may smell like rotting food.