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

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

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414 pointstosh299 comments

The Aha moment for me came when I was watching Chef Jean-Pierre's video on the topic. His terminology is unfortunate, he uses 'caramelizing' to refer to what we call 'browning', but otherwise he's taught me more about cooking than any other YouTube chef.

There are two steps to caramelizing onions. Cooking, and browning. Cooking, that is, making them soft enough to eat, is what takes the most time. Most of the time when you use onions in a dish, they're browned first, then they finish cooking with the rest of the dish.

But when you make caramelized onions by themselves, if you don't spend the time to cook them properly, they won't have the right texture, even if the flavor is close. Since texture carries flavor, browned onions just don't taste the same as caramelized ones.

So Jean-Pierre separates the process of making caramelized onions into two steps. Cook the onions by leaving them tightly covered in a pot on very low heat, they poach in their own liquid. Leave them at least 45 minutes but since the heat is so low it's almost like sous vide where you can cook them as long as you need.

Finally, you brown them in a skillet to desired color.

Video for the interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o-u7zjlShQ

I second Chef Jean-Pierre's YouTube channel. His humble nature, humor and enthusiasm make the videos very entertaining and educational. All substance, no fancy editing or hype.

Home cook tip: You can approximate the cooking step by microwaving the onions. Not the same, of course, but takes a lot shorter.

That is what I do. About 8 minutes covered in the microwave, not packed too tightly. It still takes a little over 10 minutes to caramelize, pan preheated and ready for them, but it cuts down a little bit and I can still do other prep work at the same time.

Also important to note that about 70% of the onion goes away. If you start with 2 cups of chopped onions, what you end up with can fit into a little over half a cup. Onions are mostly liquid, and that gets cooked off in the process. If I'm caramelizing onions for burgers, a single medium onion will yield enough for a generous portion on two burgers with maybe a little left over. Pre-cooked onion size is a lie.

Here's a tip:

Shred a whole bag worth of onions with a mandolin and carmelize in a slow cooker overnight (10h on low). You don't need anything fancy; the $5 slow cooker gathering dust at your local Goodwill is fine. Separate the juice with a strainer and store separately for soup or whatever. Put the onions into bags and freeze them. Now whenever you need carmelized onions, thaw a bag of them in the microwave or a tub of hot water, brown in a skillet (5-10 mins) and you're done.

I’ve done something similar with better results in a Dutch oven inside a low oven, so as long as your over can really hold a low temp this is an option if you don’t have a slow cooker.

You are also better off cutting pole to pole in small wedges but mandoline is faster. Something about the amount of cell wall damage, I forget why.

After reading a lot of recipes and watching pictures/videos from same authors I learned that the description of browning is very subjective to the author.

Very few recipes actually required onions browned through (as in entire volume) and if they actually do, the author will for sure mention it. Onions that are completely browned have very overpowering sweet aroma that is undesirable in most recipes except the ones that are built around it (like, famously, french onion soup or various caramelized onion dips).

Vast majority of recipes actually require the onion to just get little hints of being gold in places or some gold just on the surface of it. That is enough to add flavor that will distribute once you add some liquid to it.

From my experience most cooking book authors seem to be testing their recipes. Many times I have been frustrated by being unable to get the desired effect only to find some missing technique that the author very likely did not think important enough to mention or maybe difference in ingredients or measuring methodology.

I have learned to prefer books that describe the methodology used by the author (for example how they measure things, how they make broth if they use one in recipe, etc.)

I have also learned to search the book for a recipe that I already know and figure out if it agrees with my experience and if I would be able to make the recipe from that description.

Another important point is that usually you need to understand particular cuisine from which the recipe comes to be able to make it faithfully. Every cuisine is a little small system of thinking about how to choose, process and combine ingredients. Recipes tend to be silent on a lot of stuff that is completely trivial to natives of particular cuisine.

For example, I have been practicing Italian, Indian and Thai cuisines for the past 20 years. I can make Italian, Indian or Thai dish on a pinch from whatever I can find in my fridge and pantry but I still can't make convincing Creole dish even if I tried.

(edit)

If you are asking for best books for beginners, I suggest to skip books and rather research the recipe on Youtube. Watch couple of people doing the same thing -- this is going to provide much more valuable information than you could ever read in a book. This mostly because having visual reference of how it actually looked when the person was cooking it will give you immediate feedback when you are getting something wrong.

It is still my preferred way of learning new kinds of dishes.

What books have you liked that met your criteria?

Half a dozen bookshelves filled with just cookbooks, so apparently I am not too strict.

I think that cooking from recipes is kind of catch-22. Recipes seem to be most useful to people who already are adept at cooking (in particular cuisine and in general) but when you don't know how to cook recipes seem to be practically only source of information.

I think if you are already adept at cooking, know techniques, cuisine etc. then you will be able to judge the book on your own.

For example, if you are just starting up with Italian cuisine, you will be thoroughly disappointed by The Silver Spoon.

It is huge compendium of recipes, but it is very light on any kind of explanation of technique -- assuming the reader is already steeped in the Italian culture.

On the other hand it is very useful to me as one of the books to look for a little bit of inspiration when I just want to throw in something new. Just going through the list of ingredients is usually enough for me to imagine the process and reading the description is more of a confirmation that I actually understand what is going on.

Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking is great.

It can’t be your only cookbook—-the amount of butter will literally kill you—-and some of the recipes area bit dated (so many aspics!). However, the first part of the book focuses on techniques: chop an onion, roll an omelet, etc. The other part I like is how it demonstrates that you can “fork” a master recipe into many different dishes by swapping out sets of ingredients.

A lot of other cookbooks disguise the fact that most recipes are variations on a theme, and understanding that makes it easier to improvise with whatever you have left in the fridge.

"the amount of butter will literally kill you"

Abuse of the term "literally".

Many recipes, especially classic french recipes, benefit from butter. It may be bad for your health, but it sure makes for nice sauces.

Julia Child is fun, because of all the background she gives for her recipes. She's an engaging writer.

My mother had a copy of Le Guide Culinaire by Escoffier (in english translation). It's a recipe book for pro chefs; many of the recipes are just one paragraph - you're supposed to know what "make a roux" means.

My mum was not a great cook - I have no idea what she was doing with a book on Cordon Bleu cooking on her kitchen shelf.

Mark Bittman's books How to Cook Everything and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian

I love "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian". It's a fantastic cookbook, especially if you don't have a lot of cooking experience.

You have eloquently elaborated on a truth I came to realize many years ago:

Cooking well (from a recipe) is the art of having enough experience to know what unwritten assumptions the recipe author has made.

You have put it very well. I am stealing this one:)

That is true for any concise set of directions.

I mean if I give a developer some instructions, or read some from stackoverflow , they only work the best if I already somewhat familiar or expert knowledge to understand it.

Cooking shouldn't be any different.

Writing small user apps doesn't translate to building apps for millions of users, the same way cooking for your family doesn't translate to cooking in a restaurant or wedding, or to how McDonald's ( google of the cooking world ?) should cook.

> McDonald's ( google of the cooking world ?) should cook

Having worked at a cook at McDonald's, I don't know if I would call it "google of the cooking world". From my experience, McDonald's cooking is highly streamlined and focused on reproducing the same experience at some level (for example French McDonald's is not the same as American McDonald's but the fries and Big mac are still relatively the same).

I'd add. Its also the art of understanding how to cook a recipe to your own palate.

Or in other words; those assumptions are often very personal and therefore you need to develop and refine them for you as well.

Sounds like programming. :)

...having enough experience to know what unwritten assumptions the O/S author, language author, spec writer has made.

To add to that excellent point, I’ve personally found while I’m learning it’s easier to stick to a small number of authors for recipes. Since the same author will tend to make the same assumptions, you kind of perfect their style (or your take on it at least). Like all things cooking, ymmv of course.

I find Felicity Cloake in the guardian a useful resource.

She takes a recipe and try's out various different recipes to work out the best version eg CTM (Chiken Tika Masala)

Cloake suits my way of cooking!

Her "How to cook the perfect..." series is my go-to for classic dishes. She takes advice from multiple cooks and books, and distils her "perfect" recipe from there. That is how I cook; I read multiple recipes, and take the advice I like best. Cloake makes that easy.

She had a recipe for croque monsieur up recently; it's spot-on.

Cooks Illustrated is good for this too. They try a bunch of recipe permutations and them explain why they designed the recipe to function in a certain way.

And having the knowledge to correct when something isn't as expected. Example would be vegetables leech more water and you need to reduce or increase heat to dry it out. Maybe the tomatoes aren't as acidic as usual in the soup and you need to add more acid.

Yup.

Shows like "good eats" are also super useful for cooking IMO. Treating cooking like the chemistry experiments it is gives you excellent results without a lot of the faff.

Didn't mean there aren't legitimate techniques, but rather it helps to know what those techniques are accomplishing so you know if you've messed up.

Onion browning is a good example. In most recipes I've dealt with, onions are browned as a near first step and then further cooked in later steps. That strongly suggested the author isn't going for "fully brown" onions and rather just browned onions. Why? Because those onions don't stop cooking just because they are added to additional ingredients.

Good Eats is perfect for telling you how it’s supposed to be done and if possible a home cook friendly way to do it.

Kenji Lopez’s POV cooking vids are fantastic as well. Perfect for the home cook and he’ll tell you how a restaurant does it and how a home cook should do it.

That's probably true of most things that require working in the physical world. While I generally hate videos that take 5 minutes to explain something that could be described in a paragraph, if you're a complete noob at something, a video that actually shows how to do something can be much more useful than descriptive text. (Sometimes if only to show some "tricky" step that you're likely going to have to practice a lot before you'll have a chance of getting it right.)

Jump cuts can make a video quicker to watch but for things like recipes you often want to see exactly what’s being done, so you can find out what went wrong if it didn’t work.

Wholeheartedly agree about process vs. color-by-number recipes... For those who do like to read offline, I do recommend Ruhlman's "Twenty" [0]. It is well written and illustrated and provides a lens into process via carefully selected recipes.

[0] Full title being ``Ruhlman's Twenty: 20 Techniques, 100 Recipes, A Cook's Manifesto (The Science of Cooking, Culinary Books, Chef Cookbooks, Cooking Techniques Book)``

> some missing technique that the author very likely did not think important enough to mention

That reminds me a funny story I've read: A scientist failed to reproduce a paper which says "room temperature". They later successfully reproduced it in the freezer. The paper was from Russia.

Have you heard of room temperature? Welcome to the room. The room temperature room.

Now I’m imagining a “standard room” in France held at the reference temperature (and which the meter long rod and the kilogram weight would be stored, of course).

Of course, they haven't measured it since the 1960s because the body heat of a scientist going in to measure it changes it a little bit.

However or whenever they measure the prototype kilogram, it weighs[0] exactly 1kg by definition.

[0] Well, not any more as the kilogram was redefined in 2019

Does the length of the metre long rod not vary with temperature?

It does. If you are using that rod to measure something else, or calibrate another rod, you are supposed to keep it at a given fixed temperature.

Also, the standard of length was changed quite a while ago to one based on the definition of the second, and the speed of light.

Edit: here are the latest standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_redefinition_of_the_SI_ba...

That’s why they put the meter in the room.

I'm pretty sure that was a pop culture reference that nobody should be expected to get.

Protip for GP: not all nerds watch shows about nerds. Standalone humor comments don't play well here to begin with.

This was a joke on the TV show Community, but it was exactly what you picture.

AFAIR in physics and chemistry, room temperature is a short hand for 27°C in 1 atm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_conditions_for_temper...

After checking the reference, I feel like this was probably an assumption in all the textbooks that I had to follow in school. I suppose if each standards body had their own definition, it can get frustrating.

That is a convention mostly used in school problems, because manual computations with a temperature of 300 kelvin are easier.

In most technical contexts, room temperature means either 25 Celsius degrees or 20 Celsius degrees or more seldom various other temperatures between 15 Celsius degrees and 25 Celsius degrees.

Also I think it hugely depends on your equipment.

I have an induction stove and pans heat up almost instantly. I can easily get onions browned to the effect of the picture within 10 minutes on high heat.

Here's the thing -- onions won't brown until a certain amount of their water content is evaporated. And what matters to evaporate water content is the amount of actual heat energy going into the food. Induction stoves are particularly excellent at shoving watts straight into your pan.

I imagine many of the pros writing these recipes are using either a professional gas stoves (which are inefficient, but also very powerful) OR induction.

If you use a household gas or electric stove, it's going to be a LOT slower, these just can't get that many watts into your pan.

It wouldn't hurt for all recipes to convert over to grams except perhaps for very small measures. "Four cups of flour" can have a substantial swing by weight, making a real difference in something like a loaf of bread. If you aren't an experienced baker or never made a particular loaf before, it is really hard to know by feel if the hydration is right or wrong. Every kitchen should have a scale so cookbook authors can count on this. And please please please don't use ounces instead: they are too coarse, and they are inexcusably used for both weight and volume.

I'd also like the phrase "medium heat" outlawed but I know that is a bridge too far. My stove has four burners in a ridiculous range of heat output. Each has a "medium" setting. My pancakes are much better off now that I've got an IR thermometer and can keep the pan around 350 - 375F.

Medium heat is the worst - and having at least some references for what temperature you’re looking for would help tremendously.

I’m surprised oven manufacturers don’t sell cookbooks designed and tested on their actual ovens.

Ovens used to come with pamphlets of recipes. Microwave ovens, too.

The original ones are amazing - put the venison in the microwave on high for 40 minutes.

What does that do to the venison?!

I think it brings it back to life!

Turns it into a useful material for making tires.

I agree so much about “medium heat” or really any subjective measure of heat. When I was learning to cook I smoked up my apartment so many times before I learned that what recipe authors called “high heat” was really about 50% up my range’s dial, and anything above that was mostly suitable for boiling water.

Using a simple infrared thermometer changed how I cook so much for the better.

What would be interesting is if stove burners would be required to have their watt-equivaleng heat output as markers, instead of 1-2-3-4-5. That way would know that 3 on the middle burner is equal to 5 on the small burner, and recipe books can now mention you need ~800 watts of heat output, which is neatly usuable for induction and coil cooking as well.

Thank you! It's one of the things mildly infuriating about learning to cook, especially from recipes. They don't quantify everything. What's "high heat" exactly? What is a "pinch" of salt, and how does it differ from a "dash" of it? Are these volume measurements or weights? When it says "sprinkle some X" how much should you sprinkle? What's a spoonful? Are they referring to a US teaspoon (approx. 5mL), or somebody else's spoon? How much oil is in a "drizzle"? What about a "drop"? Are we talking about the metric drop (0.05mL)? How many grams is a "medium potato"? Or an onion? I can get onions in sizes that vary by 3X, but the recipe just says chop up an onion. Maddening!

The answer is that a recipe is a seed idea for a creative process, not a fixed set of steps that you have to follow exactly or ruin the magic.

> What's "high heat" exactly?

A suggestion that you want caramelization and/or browning

> What is a "pinch" of salt, and how does it differ from a "dash" of it?

Doesn't matter, you should salt to taste anyhow, this is merely a reminder to do so

> When it says "sprinkle some X" how much should you sprinkle?

Smell it or taste a little and guess

> How much oil is in a "drizzle"?

Enough to tell that it's there, not enough to soak it through

> How many grams is a "medium potato"? Or an onion?

Doesn't matter, you'll wind up with a range of vegetable quantities and they all roughly work, just end up in slightly different places.

> a recipe is a seed idea for a creative process, not a fixed set of steps that you have to follow exactly or ruin the magic.

No! It is not a creative[0] process! I am attempting to make food, to eat, not a bloody painting, and pretentions of artistry are, as ryandrake just said, infuriating[1].

0: I assume you mean "involving creativity", not "that has the effect of creating something", since the latter applies equally well to, for example, working in a assembly line.

Edit: 1: case in point, apparently.

I think you're right to be infuriated and the OP should not have complicated things that much. If you are simply attempting to make food to eat, then you can very easily do so. If what you want to eat can be eaten raw, eat it raw. If not, boil it.

Boiling may need a bit of experimentation to get right for some foods, but in general you need to have a pot big enough to take the full amnount of food, a sufficient quantity of clean, potable water to fill the pot until it's two cm over the food once the food is in the pot, and a sufficiently powerful source of heat to bring the water and the food to a temperarture of 100 degrees Celsius within a period of time of no more than 10 minutes. Once you have those things, the pot, the water, and the source of heat, put the food in the pot, add water to fill the pot to two cm over the food, put the pot on the heat source and turn the heat source on. At this point it would probably be useful to have a thermometer so you can directly measure the temperature of the water, but you can usually observe that the water in the pot is vaporising and confirm that it is at boiling point. Leave the food to cook until all the water in the pot has evaporated, but not more than that or the food will burn. Then eat the food. Remember to turn the heat source off before eating! You may also want to consult a set of instructions concerning how to clean the pot once it's used.

There may be variations of the procedure, for example if you have a very big amount of food you may want to adjust the levels of water, but that is something you can experiment with. In any case, if you can master this technique (but don't be discouraged if you can't) then you will always have a way to make food to eat that is, indeed, not a bloody painting.

I meant "creative" way less pretentiously than you read it - perhaps more accurate is more like "personalization". People like different things in different amounts, so recipes paint a broad target and let home cooks hit whatever particular point in it that they want.

Like, making a peanut butter sandwich has this factor - different people like different breads and peanut butters in different amounts, so it's up to you to pick something and make it a food. The underspecified quantities and characteristics in a hypothetical peanut butter sandwich "recipe" are just a hint that you have wide latitude to make choices.

> perhaps more accurate is more like "personalization".

I agree that seems much more reasonable, but the vagueness doesn't help here: I can't personalize something if I can't even reliably reproduce it in the first place.

> a hypothetical peanut butter sandwich "recipe"

That's kind of the point - there is no peanut butter sandwich recipe, because you don't need a recipe to make one. If something is fiddly enough to need a recipe, you need the recipe to be at least precise enough that you can actually get the fiddly parts right, and any 'problems' stemming from excess precision can be obviated by an * or ±8grams.

*: increase this to make it fluffier, decrease for chewier.

But a peanut butter does need a recipe if you want to make the same sandwich again and again. And want someone else to be able to make that same sandwich on the other side of the country. I had to deal with this with a friend who had anxiety about cooking. Choosing between 2 and 3 on the stove was an ordeal, what if the 1" cubes of beef are 0.75" instead? I am in the camp where recipes are a guide for an idea or a special occasion. Most of the time I cook whatever vegetables look good at the store and fit a rough sense of what sounds good to me.

What kind of bread? (Whole wheat, sourdough, white, shokupan, raisin, olive, berry) Presliced or do you cut your own slices and select your own the thickness? Toasted, fresh, or days old bread? Then you have your peanut butter. Chunky, smooth, really chunky? Pure peanut butter or is a swipe of almond butter good. And do you use jam, jelly, preserves, marmalade? What kind of fruit? Or do you prefer fresh fruit, maybe with some honey on top?

There are many options, if you want to reliably reproduce a dish you need to cook a lot and track what you cook in detail. A home cook likely doesn't have the opportunity to get to the point where they can crank out a number of dishes repeatably the way someone in a restaurant can. The scales are just wrong.

For my friend, they decided to record exactly what they did while cooking for a while. To me it seemed crazy detailed, I cook by smell and taste and feel. For them it was confirmation they'd rather pay for or otherwise eat food prepared for them.

Cooking is as creative a process as writing code. Now, most of the time, we have a well-defined end goal ("something edible", "implement feature F") and a starting point )(raw ingredients; the existing code base). But, how we get from the starting to the end point is not wholly prescribed and what goes in the middle is creative. And most of the time, the actual level of creativity is pretty low.

Now, in one of those cases, you probably have sufficient experience that the lack of exact roadmap doesn't faze you. And apparently in the other, it does.

There are more detailed and less "leave this out" recipes there. I don't, genuinely, know where to find them, but that's what I used to use when I learned to cook. It MAY be worth investigating recipe collections designed for home ec classes, as presumably they are designed for the less experienced food maker.

It isn’t artistry. It is that there are too many variables for a recipe to hold your hand and tell you every tiny thing to do to get a desirable result. Just cooking a piece of meat will vary based on the power of your stove’s burners, the thickness and composition of the pan you are using, the thickness and surface area of the meat, internal variations in the meat like fat content, etc. So a recipe gives you general guidelines (med heat, about 6-8 mins) and a desired end state (until browned and cooked through). Cooking requires you to use your own senses and your own brain to evaluate your progress and outcome.

"Desirable result" isn't particularly well-defined due to the variability of personal taste. Like, one useful skill for a home cook is to read a recipe and think something along the lines of "I think I'd like that more if it had more garlic".

What I get from this whole discussion is that I would love a recipe book with measures in weights, temperatures specified such that you can use an IR thermometer, and a set of questions at the end of the recipe for assessing how I think the flavour could be improved.

I think what you should take away from this is that cooking is a skill that requires you to assess what is going on, and adjust as you go. There are too many variables for any sort of “exact” weights or temperatures. Baking can be exact because almost all your main ingredients are totally uniform (water, flour, salt, sugar, butter, milk, yeast) and even then, there is often a requirement for variability to account for things as basic as the water absorption rate for your flour. But with cooking, you are using primarily whole ingredients that are nothing but variable. It would be like trying to read a book about how to shoot a basketball. No amount of detail about newtons of force or velocity is going to help, but descriptions about how it should feel and how to stand will, and at the end of the day, you have to practice the technique and learn and improve by looking at your end state.

Most recipe books are not going to teach you how to cook in the way blueprints aren’t going to teach you how to build a house. Youtube videos that teach you techniques are going to be the fastest way, as you can see and hear what is happening with the meal as they describe what they are trying to do and hopefully why they are doing it.

Quantifying any of those values would be completely pointless.

If you really want to know, "officially" a pinch of salt is ~0.35g and a dash is ~0.7g. Accurately measuring quantities that small is a trained skill using specialized equipment. Anything you can buy on Amazon for under $1,000 would get you +-100mg when used correctly at best - used in a kitchen with a 50g measuring spoon for 0.5g of salt you'd be lucky to get +- 1000 mg.

A cheap precision scale will accurately measure up to 0.01g precision, with the caveat that most will only measure things weighing less than 100g or 200g. I currently use one like that (0.01g precision, 200g limit) for coffee beans, I was originally looking for a 0.1g precision scale, but there was no price difference. Although, I fully agree that it is overkill for the kitchen - I have never used it for cooking.

Under no circumstances should you buy anything by Elisabeth David (which is a pity, they're great).

Bread sure, bust out the scales, but most recipes don't actually need anything more than a vague outline of what you're trying to do. Tolerances on soup, for example, are extremely wide, and any measurement is picking an arbitrary point in flavor space and declaring it "correct" when much of anything will do. And the idea of a "correct" way to do it encourages home cooks to treat the process like a black box where any misstep will ruin things, rather than having levers to adjust things to taste.

Learning to “let go” has really helped out my mediocre cooking skills. We really need a Bob Ross for the cooking world; someone to help us embrace all of our tasty little accidents.

Sam Sifton (mentioned in the article) has a "No Recipe Recipes" book that I just received for Father's Day. Perfectly suited to how I like to cook.

>350 - 375F want gram, still use freedom units instead of celsius :)

Actual units are less important than the mass vs volume distinction.

That did (from the UK) strike me as odd the way cups are used in us recipes.

I use a conical cooks measure for speed now - for things like rice flour etc

I’d be happy with flour measurements being given in ounces or grams, my scale has both. I don’t care as long as it is by some unit of weight instead of volume.

Not surprisingly, Serious Eats gets it right: https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-caramelize-onions-classic

Excellent article. Single handedly dispatches most of the counterpoints raised in the comments here.

I learned to caramelize from Mark Bittman who wrote for the NYT for years and he also said 30 min. 15 in a dry pan, then add a load of oil and go 15 more. One thing few recipes mention is that cook times vary based on cookware. Cast iron or carbon steel will do this job faster than nonstick.

Since you’ve been doing this a long time and you are not a professional, please record a video and put it up on YouTube, it would help out a lot of people.

You can watch Bittman making kasha varniskes here. He's not a stickler for timing which is the correct approach. He says, 20 minutes in a dry cast iron pot with a lid just to get them soft enough. Then lid off, add a bunch of fat and go until they look right.

https://youtu.be/ugeNF_WrUPU

Bitty is the best!

Counterpoint from Kenji:

https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-real-french-onion-d...

That’s not a counterpoint, it introduces 3 additional techniques that reduce the time from 45 minutes to 20. None of these techniques are commonly called for in recipes that claim you can get carmelized onions in 5-10 minutes, nor do they get one to that promised land.

(And as an aside, his techniques do reduce the time required but result in a vastly inferior result imho. Probably fine for onion dip, but I’d never put those in an onion soup, a flatbread, or even on a burger - the texture is all wrong)

If I remember right, he no longer believes in this approach, or at least the baking soda part.

In my experience it totally works, but you are left with an undesirable bitter taste introduced by the baking soda.

right, that's why it's not such a good idea.

I don't think recipes lie, I think most people don't understand what caramelizing is versus softening. Caramelizing is great for onion focused recipes like French Onion Soup and creates a rich flavor profile. But for everyday recipes using Mirepoix-like flavor base, 10 minutes is enough to cook out the water, lessen the Sulfur flavors, and soften the onions. A stock concentrate can help boost the flavor profile without needing an hour. Softening is enough for most people, and recipes are starting to use that term over Caramelizing.

Here are three quoted recipe instructions:

] "Add the onions to the skillet and increase the heat to medium-high. Cook until they begin to turn dark brown and somewhat soft, about 5 minutes."

] “Stir and fry for about 5 minutes or until the onions turn a medium-brown colour.”

] “Add the onion and cook for 8 to 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until golden brown.”

How do you get "dark", "medium-brown", or "golden brown" in under 10 minutes, and without caramelizing?

Add a pinch of baking soda.

First DDG link: https://www.onions-usa.org/onionista/faster-caramelized-onio...

So it's a lie of omission?

Those quoted recipes don't mention baking soda.

The quoted recipes were written by people who don’t know what they are doing.

Ah, you're making a Hanlon's razor sort of argument.

In which case the layer of deceit is the conceit that the editors of popular cookbooks can spot and will correct obvious BS.

The "layer of deceit" is that they claim you can do something in a particular way within a certain time frame and that this is not actually possible. And cook books aren't written by editors.

I'm responding to moistly's comment, not the essay.

Certainly editors don't write cookbooks. But they decide what to publish. I personally think the essay is correct. My followup on this thread is that even if the essay isn't correct, there are still other "layers of deceit" to consider.

The top-level of this thread was dexwiz's statement "I don't think recipes lie". I pointed out how that statement doesn't jibe with the presented evidence. moistly followed up that it wasn't a lie, but ignorance "by people who don’t know what they are doing."

My observation is that if we accept that the authors aren't lying, but are simply incompetent, then a different layer of deceit arises - the belief that cooking columns in national newspapers and cookbooks by reputable publishing companies will have enough oversight and not publish recipes 'by people who don’t know what they are doing'.

But editors are likely to be the type to change “brown” to “caramelize” because it sounds more upscale.

1. I've seen lots of recipes that mention if describe caramelization and not one has mentioned baking soda so it's besides the point.

2. None of them will ever list baking soda because it will affect the taste in a horrible way.

Baking soda speeds up the process but it also affects the texture in a way that isn't really pleasant unless you're pureeing the onions for soup.

It isn't really worth it unless you are making a good amount. It is adjusting PH, which might get you color faster, but it is pretty easy to get too much in and have your onions taste of chemicals. The linked article went with 1/8 teaspoon (.625 grams) per pound (about 450g) of onion. It makes it really easy to get too much, especially when you are just doing 1 or two onions.

Unless the dish relies on the flavor of caramelized onions, I just go with lesser cooking time.

All true: I do mean a literal pinch. I use it for batches of French onion soup so, yes, a lot of onions (most of it goes straight to the freezer, to mature like a fine wine.

https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-caramelize-onions-classic

These guys say baking soda turns it into sludge.

Here you go: https://www.thespruceeats.com/how-to-brown-onions-913397

There is browning and there is caramelisation.

They get brown within 10 minutes. I never cared about caramelization, but onions can change color rather fast.

If we just want them to change color we can do that a whole lot faster than 10 minutes. But you wouldn't like the taste. :)

Sure but they get brown in a tasty way in ten minutes.

Browning, unless we're talking about burning onions, is caramelisation. Just a small amount.

> Browning, unless we’re talking about burning onions, is caramelisation

No, its not. Heck, even “caramelizing” onions mostly isn’t caramelization, its Maillard-reaction browning combined with slower cooking so that the cooking is more complete, retaining less of the firm texture.

https://www.thespruceeats.com/how-to-brown-onions-913397

> How do you get “dark”, “medium-brown”, or “golden brown” in under 10 minutes, and without caramelizing?

Thin cuts, a decent pan, avoid sweet onions (which take longer to brown), and use a little higher heat than the center of the medium-high range, IME.

Browning is much quicker than caramelizing (see, e.g., https://marxfood.com/caramelizing-onions-vs-browning-onions/ which gives 15 minutes for browning, and an hour for caramelizing; you can push browning more easily.)

(The quoted 5 to brown + 5 to caramelize in TFA is bullshit, though, no question, but most of the quotes in the article aren’t about caramelizing, they are about browning – often lightly browning – in a fairly reasonable time for the level of browning described.)

Sweet onions take longer to brown?

Whatever kind of sweet onions we get locally start to turn brown after 7 minutes on medium high (keeping the skillet around 350F).

> Sweet onions take longer to brown?

I’ve read that the lack of sulfur compounds has that effect, and my subjective impression is consistent with that, but I haven’t done structured trials. (And I don’t prefer sweet onions in those applications, in any case.)

This makes a lot of sense and goes a long way to explain the time discrepancies. It's sad that I had to scroll down the page and find these comments buried at the bottom when they should be at the top.

Perhaps they have higher stoves.

I would not say caramelized, but I certainly get significant browning in less than 3 minutes in a wok on a 7 500 W work burner.

Most ordinary stoves are about 2 000 W, but apparently professional stoves go to 4 000 W, and the professional “jet engine” work burners in many restaurants achieve 20 000 W.

I have a fairly high output gas range and my observation is that a lot of recipes overstate the settings I want to use.

On the flip side, to your point, the large burner on my stove is fine for a wok (I'd have to look up the output) but it's a lot more than a typical electric stove would put out (and hears up the sides)--which is why America's Test Kitchen recommends people use a skillet rather than a wok.

And the pan matters too - a wok may heat up faster on the same burner compared to cast iron.

And “professional kitchens” often have everything at temperature already - the wok was just used moments before so there’s no preheating.

I recently put in a 36 kW (125 kBTU/hr) wok burner, outdoors of course. It’s insane how hot it gets.

https://youtu.be/O-Y5XJwBPvw

I don't think the Madhur Jaffrey recipe actually calls for caramelisation but I don't have the original in front of me. It would also use red onions and be done in a pan that is more like to a wok than to a western pan, iirc.

The quote is on page 52: https://archive.org/details/madhurjaffreysin0000jaff_r5e9/pa... .

> Heat the oil in a wide, heavy pot over a medium-high flame. Brown the meat cubes in several batches and set to one side. Put the cardamom, bay leaves, cloves, peppercorns, and cinnamon into the same hot oil. Stir once and wait until the cloves swell and the bay leaves begin to take on colour. This just takes a few seconds. Now put in the onions. Stir and fry for about 5 minutes or until the onions turn a medium-brown colour.

For some other quotes along the same lines: page 51 at https://archive.org/details/madhurjaffreysin0000jaff_r5e9/pa... :

> Heat the oil in a wide, flameproof casserole-type pot over a medium-high flame. ... Put the onions and garlic into the same pot and turn the heat down to medium. Stir and fry the onion-garlic mixture for about 10 minutes or until it has browned.

(The introductory text on page 50 is clear this is supposed to be a "heavy pot", not something thin like a wok.)

Page 46 at https://archive.org/details/madhurjaffreysin0000jaff_r5e9/pa... :

> Heat the oil in a wide, heavy saucepan over a medium-high flame. When hot, put in the finely sliced onions. Stir and fry for 10-12 minutes or until the onions turn a nice, reddish-brown colour. You may have to turn the heat down somewhat towards the end of this cooking period.

Page 55 at https://archive.org/details/madhurjaffreysin0000jaff_r5e9/pa... :

> Heat the oil in a large, wide, and preferably non-stick pot over a medium-high flame. When hot, put in the onions. Stir and fry for about 12 minutes or until the onions are a reddish-brown color.

I don't believe this refers to caramelized onions, which are sweet and slowly cooked. It refers to onions fried at a high temperature until brown or turning brown. This can certainly be done in under 10 minutes and is common in Indian cookery.

I cook a Madhur Jaffrey recipe or two most weeks.

There is no explicit call for caramalisation here. As the sibling post points out, that is not what you would normally do for Indian cuisine. I found it a bit amusing that the article leveled the accusation of lazy writing, with a pretty lazy example.

Made all the more amusing since the author is absolutely right and there are many, many good examples available to support their argument.

Seriously? Onions easily brown in 10 minutes.

They're not caramelized, but the vast majority of recipes mean browned when they say "10 minutes."

Very few recipes actually want caramelized onions. For instance, almost zero Italian recipes involve caramelizing.

There just isn't a culture around cooking (non-professional setting anyway) of doing experiments to validate your claims so myths, inaccuracies and just-so stories are rampant, even when experiments are very cheap and practical to do.

I'm not sure how you change this. I find it really grating how much contradictory cooking advice there is and how complex some recipes are without justifying the extra steps make any difference.

If you're making bread for example, some recipes will say don't add the salt with the yeast because it will make it rise slower and some recipes say it won't make a difference - it should be simple to confirm this with an experiment in a day to settle it for good and move on but for whatever reason this doesn't happen.

Is there a good reason why you couldn't settle how to caramelise onions with a few experiments?

Modernist Cuisine and Modernist Bread by Nathan Myhrvold.

And pretty much any formal chef education.

I'm not familiar with formal chef education, how much more experiment based is it compared to amateur cooking? With the latter, it's rare you'll find an online discussion about cooking that's settled with an authoritative reference, it's mostly people sharing anecdotes and their favourite recipes.

Formal chef education has the student in the kitchen with the instructors - and I suspect often the book is ignored until the basic principles and methods are known (at which point the book doesn’t need to detail them).

The most basic formal chef education in Norway is two years mostly of theory (yes, books) and then two years working in a kitchen. If you have ambitions you are now barely above the busboy on the pecking order.

You can get the same accreditation if you are able to document 5 years of relevant experience and are able to pass the written exams.

But most of those discussions are between people who haven't got a culinary education.

My point was that there are chef educations where you actually learn things that most amateurs only guess at. But, as Myhrvold's work shows, there are plenty of things that are not necessarily at the level of scientific certainty.

I agree with your point that there is right answer for a lot of these things. I'd love to read a blog testing the contradictory cooking claims ;)

My suspicion is that most of the contradictory advice is for things that don't matter that much.

I'm not sure about salt in the dough. I'm sure I've done it both ways, and both times it was fine so I don't care that much.

When making a stew: meat-before-onions or onions-before-meat? I think the "right" answer is meat-before-onions, but if you do it the other way... it's not going to really affect things too much.

Things that really matter have mostly universal advice (preheating the pan, salting pasta water, etc.)

> My suspicion is that most of the contradictory advice is for things that don't matter that much.

I agree, I think game changing advice would get noticed and passed around quickly, and for things that make no difference or minor difference you'll see lots of people sharing contradictory anecdotes.

Also holds true for many other things, e.g. parenting.

The answer for typical French/American (broadly) stews is meat before onions to get a good sear, and a good fond, to base your stock on. Doing this properly (including not crowding) will always give better results. You should really remove it before the onions also, but that’s an extra step.

I thing with a lot of things like this the better technique is known, but often more work and the lesser technique isn’t a disaster so people use them. Also doing all the steps “right” will give you a better result , but missing sometimes even one will leave you about where you would have been not bothering.

And some of these things compound. In your example, there is literally no way to really recover from an improper sear in a beef stew that calls for it; it's probably the number one cause of mediocre versions of these.

(I'm trying to be careful here because there are equally valid was of doing this - an American stew using Moroccan techniques, or vice versa probably won't work as well)

Agree with you for most recipe books and websites, however a few rise above the crowds. Serious eats, Cook's Illustrated, and most likely more.

It's not formal experiments as such but I quite like Felicity Cloake's How to Cook the Perfect ... column: https://www.theguardian.com/food/series/how-to-cook-the-perf... which has both a home cook feel and a 'let's go and test this out' feel about it.

That series has always been a joy to read. Whenever I want to know what the established wisdom in making a classic dish are I'll check to see whether she's covered it first and use that as my starting point.

Usually salt is not added in the beginning when recipe has step of activating yeast. Then you don't drop pure salt into just activated yeast - kind of make sense.

There are good experiment/evidence based writers out there, they're just mostly drowned out by all the noise.

Harrold McGee

J Kenji Lopez Alt

Nathan Myhrvold (yes, the one and same)

As some of the other comments explain, the problem is a lot of authors use the word "caramelize" when what they actually mean is "brown." This happens on restaurant menus too, as a sort of term inflation thing to try to make things sound more dramatic than they are.

Although I am not good at making bread by any means, I've tried salt/no-salt with pizza dough and it clearly made a difference.

I feel the same exact way.

I wish there was a website or app that solved this issue once and for all.

There's obviously variation with cooking and no humans taste are exactly the same, but they're pretty damn similar enough to narrow the variation considerably.

Instead, you get thousands of blog posts that are inaccurate with 1,200 star ratings here and there, spread across an infinite, desolate web landscape.

It's not right.

There is a french guy that has a YouTube channel in which he does exactly that: he learns to cook a kind of food by doing experiments. He's also a maker that builds some of his tools. And he is funny and entertaining.

https://www.youtube.com/user/FrenchGuyCooking

I'm convinced that the reason there isn't good science around cooking advice is that a lot of food will go to waste while finding the right answer, and people don't consider the answer worth the waste. Even self-described experimenters will often just make one version of the experiment and one version of the control, and that settles it for them.

>If you're making bread for example, some recipes will say don't add the salt with the yeast because it will make it rise slower and some recipes say it won't make a difference - it should be simple to confirm this with an experiment in a day to settle it for good and move on but for whatever reason this doesn't happen.

The book you are looking for in general is called "On Food and Cooking" by Harold McGee. As are many of the recipes from Serious Eats and by extension J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.

Salt does make yeast rise slower, but usually your bulk fermentation has to be done with salt so it doesn't really matter exactly when you add it. The real reason this discussion happens is due to how salt affects the formation of gluten through enzymes in the flour which is why some breads benefit from an autolyse process that purposely omits the salt for an initial fermentation.

There is actually a ton of semi-scientific testing out there regarding bread baking in particular, so if you want to know something there is a good chance of finding an in-depth blog post about it.

The author points out that you can caramelize your onions properly over the course of 40 minutes while preparing other components, washing dishes, etc.

But that doesn't make for a nice tight recipe the way "Stir onions over medium heat until caramelized, about 10 minutes" does. Some people are going to read "Meanwhile, caramelize onions over medium-low, about 40 minutes" and think "Oh boy, what a complex and loooong recipe, forget it!" Inexperienced cooks may not be comfortable leaving the onions unattended, and if you get caught up in the football game you could end up burning them and wasting half an hour's work.

So if you lie and say ten minutes, people are going to do one of two things:

* Cook the onions for ten minutes and use them however they turn out. The recipe might be kind of disappointing, but I bet if you did the rest right, it'll taste pretty decent in most cases. Lots of people are bad cooks, too, so properly caramelized onions may be the least of their worries anyway.

* Keep cooking until the onions are done properly. I end up doing this sort of thing all the time anyway, when a recipe says things like "cook chicken breasts to 165 degrees, about 3 minutes on a side" and other nonsense (you'd think boxed macaroni and cheese would at least get it right but even at sea level it comes out inedibly hard if you boil for the lower end of the recommended time). The recipe comes out right and if you know to do this, you're probably already used to the fact that recipes lie so you're not much bothered.

In short: the incentives probably weigh more toward making the recipe look quick and easy. When your readers are skimming over half a dozen recipes online, you don't want to be the long and complicated-looking one.

This is the "it's a bug in the compiler" of cooking. If you think hundreds of years worth of collective professional experience is wrong and you're right, well, maybe you're not.

My guess is the wrongness is either a lack of fat or overcrowding, or both. Fat (butter, margarine, oil, whatever, I prefer butter) acts as a flux to spread the heat. Use enough, plus use proper tools.

"Butter seemed a little risky at that temperature, so I went with olive oil, in a cheap, lightweight nonstick skillet. In five minutes, a few flecks of brown had appeared". Olive oil is good for many things, but not for frying things. The "few flecks of brown" sounds like there's not enough of it either, so the heat oil gets applied where the onions touch the skillet directly. Add more flux until the flux generators cannae take it any more, Cap'n!

Just to prove my point, here's a timelapse of half an onion done in butter, the way I usually do it. Quality skillet, induction stove set to my favorite level, 7 of 9. 5 minutes and they're good: https://photos.app.goo.gl/tpfAy5uqc6NRRFsB8

If you want to be more careful, you can lower the heat - here's me cooking the other half onion at 2.5 out of 9, which is really very low (though done on a warm skillet, so it's a bit warmer): https://photos.app.goo.gl/QLaW7YkqijxF7K95A

The video shows fried onions, these are not caramelized. Maybe you like them that way and it's fine. For some eggs and bacon you don't need any more than that. For french onion soup it takes me about 30-40 minutes to fully caramelize a pan of onions, no way this can be done in 10 minutes.

It looks like different people (probably including recipe writers) mean different things by "caramelized onions", which could be the origin of the issue. I'm not saying one is wrong and the other is right, just that there's obviously disparity.

Many people confuse fried and caramelized onion. What the op showed is definitely not caramelized. Any recipe book in the market wouldn't confuse them.

I will tell you which is wrong and which is right. Caramelized onions are caramelized. It’s not a vague definition that varies across cultures, it’s right there in the name. Caramel, it’s deep walnut brown and almost candy sweet. Just look up any photo of French onion soup.

This guy is frying onions, might as well prepare a bowl of Froot Loops and you’ll be just as close to caramelized onions.

Except caramelized onions aren't caramelized. Or not meaningfully anyway. The color comes from Maillard browning. The sweetness comes from breaking down larger sugars into smaller, and concentration through evaporation of water.

Caramelization products aren't sweet, they're primarily bitter. Sweetness in caramel products comes from residual sugar that hasn't been caramelized.

> different people (probably including recipe writers) mean different things by "caramelized onions"

No, ‘caramelized onions’ is a standard term. The issue is not one of confusion.

“Exponentially more”, “decimate”, and “increased by 200% [to mean doubled]” are also standard terms which are used in a variety of contexts, often (usually?) incorrectly as compared to their actual definition.

Are those words used loosely, in cookery? No, because it's a field in which the technicalities matter.

If I'm a Roman general, and I have two captains, each with 1,000 soldiers, and I tell them their troops lacked discipline in the last battle, and I order them to decimate their troops, and one of them comes back with 100 soldiers and the other comes back with 900 soldiers, I am going to have a long conversation with them about how words have meanings.

If I'm a chef, and I have two line cooks, each with an onion, and I tell them that their onions will need to be prepared for French onion soup, and I order them to caramelize their onion, and one comes back in 10 minutes and the other comes back in 45 minutes, I am going to have a long conversation with them about how words having meanings.

This isn't a random context, this is the context where the term "caramelize" is technical jargon.

That’s exactly my point. Far more cookbooks and subscriptions can be sold to “people who cook” than to “professional chefs who rigorously and precisely follow the literal definition of terms which once had a specific meaning and now colloquially encompass a much broader range of meaning”.

(Imprecise language bugs the hell out me as well, but it seems like it’s easier for me to bend than to attempt to fix all the humans.)

I don't understand your point at all.

I can be mowing my lawn when it's 110F outside and say, "Gosh, I'm boiling." But if a recipe tells me to "boil" something, and it means anything other than put it in 212F water with heat applied in such a way that the water is bubbling, then the recipe is a shitty recipe, and I will diagnose the author with a confusion of the mind. The fact that the term now encompasses a much broader range of meaning in other contexts is completely irrelevant: I am not in those other contexts, in this context, it is a word with a very specific meaning.

The Slate article and this very HN discussion (broadly, not this sub-thread) are evidence that the phrase “caramelized onions” does not appear to have a singular, very specific meaning in this context. If it did, cookbooks wouldn’t make the claim and the Slate article and this discussion wouldn’t exist.

I suspect half of cookbooks are badly written and worsely edited - especially if they’re trying to make it sound fancier.

> to “people who cook” than to “professional chefs

You have a point here, there is a "context collapse" happening, when this definition is necessarily precise for professional chefs, and less so for "people who cook to eat".

However such recipe books typically claim to bring some of the professional techniques and results to the home cook, and as such are sowing confusion if they encourage "semantic drift"

https://interparestrust.org/terminology/term/context%20colla...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change

No, it's precisely the opposite. The issue is exactly that recipe quotes frequently write "caramelized" when they mean "browned."

Yes, there is a technical definition of "caramelized." No, not every recipe writer uses this definition.

Look, when a recipe says "caramelize the onions for ten minutes" then there is something wrong, right? It's either the time or the word. Why does everyone learn the "true" definition of "caramelize" and then start assuming that the author must have used the right word and the wrong time, and that what they actually want you to do is sit there tending to onions for 45 minutes?

The VAST majority of recipes, particularly Italian or French, neither require nor want caramelized onions. Unless it's a recipe like French Onion Soup, the vast majority of such recipes want softened or browned onions. Take this from someone who has cooked in Italy and France for nearly 35 years.

> I'm not saying one is wrong and the other is right, just that there's obviously disparity.

As other replies hints at, "caramelize" is not a judgement call or varying definition; it's specific thing, a particular chemical reaction on sugar. if it hasn't happened then the onions are not "caramelised" and they actually are wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caramelization

The fact that there’s a long debate about the definition of caramelize might be a hint that people don’t agree about what it means.

The Wikipedia article isn't long.

if you're referring to the "long debate" here on HN, then no, it doesn't mean very much about the facts of the matter.

original article doesn't debate the definition of caramelize, rather is about how it can be achieved.

Some things such as "pleasant music" or "good food" do not have crisp definitions. However, chemical reactions are far more clear-cut. They can be described and measured accurately, and debate settled. It doesn't matter how "long" the debate is, there are correct answers.

The only debate that IMHO I can see is "what percentage of the sugar has to be caramelized before it counts as a caramelized onion" ? Are there terms for partly and totally caramelized onions?

It's similar to the debate about "begging the question.". Enough people misuse/misunderstand the phrase that the intended meaning becomes vague: did the author really mean "beg" or "raise"?

It doesn't make the incorrect usage correct, but it does mean correct interpretation of _intent_ requires acknowledging incorrect _vocabulary_.

That reminds me of the pronunciation of GIF. There's enough people pronouncing it incorrectly that the incorrect version became an acceptable alternative.

There are differences. Linguistics is more "descriptive" than "prescriptive", meaning that "it seeks to describe reality" of what people say - if we actually pronounce a word one way and are correctly understood, then that is a valid way that the word is pronounced, whatever it is.

In chemistry, validity is not so subjective. it seeks to describe reality by measuring presence of clearly definable chemicals. The question of "what percentage of the sugar in this food item has been converted via caramelisation (or the Maillard reaction)" is not something that we can choose different but equally correct measurements of.

There's probably little if any actual caramelization of sugar happening in "caramelized onions" despite the name. "Maillardized onions" would be more accurate, if awkward sounding.

This is what caramelized onions look like: https://jessicainthekitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/H...

OP's video looks like fried onions with slightly burned sides.

Just like you can't bake a cake at 1000 degrees for 5 min instead of 200 degrees for 25 minutes, you can't caramelize onions in 5 or 10 minutes no matter the heat

Haha. I read larsrc's confident comment and thought, ah, the blogger must have been wrong. Then got to the equally confident replies and realized everyone's confident and coherent on HN (vs confident and ranting looney on the general internet) and I need to calibrate my gullibility :P

Assume 99% of everyone on the internet is wrong and incorrecting each other.

And yes this means if half say C and half say Not-C they both are 99% wrong. :)

No. This is exactly what the author is arguing. This isn't word problem. These recipes call for slow cooked onions. Rogan josh, onion soup...

Try cutting an onion into slices top to bottom (not across the stripes) and then cook it slowly for an hour in a tablespoon of sunflower oil at 4of9.

You will end up with barely a teaspoon of completely broken down onion matter that looks like apple butter or quince paste.

Your onions look delicious, but they are a different outcome to what the article describes.

Those don't look like caramelized onions to me, more like sauteed/fried.

Would you mind doing this again, but for 30 minutes for comparison?

Compare your result, with the end result seen here [1]. It is a completely different color as well as texture.

[1] https://youtu.be/kEfJTmf9hDs

> If you think hundreds of years worth of collective professional experience is wrong and you're right, well, maybe you're not.

Often, but that’s not what is happening here. Here you have real world cooks and the collective experience of them telling recipe writers that you can’t caramelise onions in 5-10 minutes.

In your own video examples, the onions aren’t caramelised, they aren’t even cooked. You can tell because you can still see the green/white colour of the onions.

This is what they should look like: http://rachel-cuisine.fr/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/ob_598de...

What you’ve made is halfcooked onions that have been fried in butter and sugar. Which may taste perfectly fine, but also nothing like the real thing.

> Here you have real world cooks and the collective experience of them

This. There's plenty of people backing this up.

Cosigned. Fried is not the same as fully cooked. This is important to me because my gut is just fine with fully cooked onions but ... well, let's just say "not" otherwise. Fully cooking onions to the proper transparency (with just the tiniest bit of color) is a 20-minute process, and actual caramelization takes twice that.

I suspect that the reason most cooks lie is that they're not the ones doing it. To them, cooked onions are an ingredient that a spouse or assistant put in a bowl for them while they were still deciding which homey anecdote to fill out their "recipe" with. Peeling, chopping, and basic preparation are for the little people.

> Here you have real world cooks and the collective experience of them telling recipe writers that you can’t caramelise onions in 5-10 minutes.

This is backwards. It's really the other way around here.

What you have is real-world cooks and chefs, with all their collective experience, giving recipes correctly, but using the word "caramelized," and a bunch of people telling them that that isn't technically what "caramelized" means.

The vast majority of recipes involve cooking onions for 10-20 minutes, not caramelizing them for 45.

The "mistake" in all these thousands of recipes is simply the word, not that none of these people know how to cook, or are deliberately lying to you about how to caramelize am onion.

>> hundreds of years worth of collective professional experience is wrong

This isn't what the author thinks. He thinks recipe writers are lying, not wrong. If you learned face-to-face, they would teach you the proper way... 40m. When they cook the dish themselves, they do 40m onions. When they write the recipe, they say 5-10m.

Your onions are great topping onions. Lovely on a burger, spuds, yum. Onion soup needs softer onions.

>If you learned face-to-face, they would teach you the proper way... 40m. When they cook the dish themselves, they do 40m onions. When they write the recipe, they say 5-10m.

Leaving aside French Onion soup and looking your other example of rogan josh, here are some deep links to videos mentioning "~10 minutes":

- "7 to 10 minutes" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2GKfjaZQZE&t=2m15s

- "caramelizing quicker [...] 5 to 7 minutes" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICT_oOoMf4w&t=2m40s

- "caramelize into light brown color [...] 10 to 15 minutes" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri3rSU1MkJY&t=0m57s

So either 2 possibilities:

- the different cooks actually cook the onions for 40+ minutes but hide the extra 30 minutes from the viewer and prefer to lie on camera and say "~10 minutes"

... or ...

- those cooks are actually just browning the onions for ~10 minutes and calling _that_ quick process "caramelization"

Doesn't Occam's Razor point more to the 2nd scenario?

IDK how Brother Occam cooked his onions, put the author is not arguing semantics. The Author is calling out recipe writers on succumbing to something or other... and fibbing. Occam was a man of god and would have told the truth.

I don't think deducing from pure logic in a court of first principles (I am being dramatic, obviously) is the way to go here. These are some pretty established recipe families and good cooks tend to cook them the slow cooked onion way.

I suppose one can always argue that art is in the eye of the beholder, that French Onion Soup, Bunny Chow or Rogan Josh are whatever we decide they are, plurality, etc. but... well... these recipes are half onion. They're not quick fried onion recipes. The onions are soft and mix gently with the gelatinous liquid parts. There's no lost in translation here. They're saying and showing pictures that imply slow cooked onions. In their restaurants (and homes), they are certainly not serving soup that's a stock with crunchy onion rings floating around! They're making french onion soup that's french onion soup. They're using slow cooked onions and lying about it! Godammit HN! Sometimes things just are as sneaky as they seem. I've had it with these onion fibbin fraudsters. They've been lying to us this whole time!

>the author is not arguing semantics.

I agree that the author is not dissecting semantics and that omission is my point. It's the flaw with his essay. I'm saying the best way to explain the widespread "lie" (across books, Youtube videos, etc) is via differing language usage.

And look closely again (freeze the frame) at that deep link of the onions in the Vivek Singh of Cinnamon Club video... those are not deep dark brown onions (scientific chemistry of caramelization) -- and yet he calls that 5-7 minute heating of onions ... "caramelization".

>There's no lost in translation here.

Those videos and this entire HN thread full of contradictory comments about "caramelization" and various posters trying to correct each other ... seems like evidence that there's plenty lost in translation. :-)

The author quotes Madhur Jaffrey's cookbook for rogan josh and the Youtube video shows Madhur Jaffrey re-iterating that it's 7-10 minutes to brown the onions.

It's not a neutral observer kind of an examination. Some things are intuitive if you understand the subculture.

It is similarly difficult to "prove" the antipattern in a web app's data consent model to a neutral observer. But, if you live in a world of Web Apps & TCS, then it's quite intuitive. Users can tick here, click there... consent. If someone has never used a computer before, it'll sound reasonable.

There is more context to these "misunderstandings" than language usage. The author's point is as true if you just used the term "onions," without a descriptor.

You can point to end cases... special onion cultivars, special cooking methods (the author tries one), a twist on the mainstream recipe... Any of these could "explain" the observations, if you're looking at it this way. There's no smoking gun without an author admitting that they fibbed about onion times...

>>Those videos and this entire HN thread full of contradictory comments about "caramelization"

Of course it they are! Semantics are Nerdbait Pro. That's why these states persist.

The semantics are cover. This is a conspiracy, of sorts. ... No cooking class will teach you the 5 minute onion version of french onion soup or Rogan Josh. Only written recipes trying to look quick and easy. This is not a coincidence. I'm not claiming there is enough evidence on the table to convict anyone specific. Each one could just be wrong, or eccentric. I am saying that as someone who cooks and eats these dishes....On average, these are blatant lies!

Despite the fact that people use terms like "caramelized" in multiple ways, we can usually know a lot of meaning from context. The more context we know (eg, knowing how these dishes are ordinarily made), the better we are able to distinguish meaning... and also antipatterns like habitual fibbing in a certain context.

We're more likely to notice the photo effects, if we know that we're looking at a thumbnail.

[disclaimer] Being melodramatic for fun. Obviously not this cranky about onion recipes.

>Olive oil is good for many things, but not for frying things.

You've just discarded like half of Spanish cuisine... For instance the first thing you do in a paella involves frying (well, sautéing really) meat, vegetables and then very precisely paprika with olive oil. It's widely used to fry everything here, including potato omelettes and fish.

Of course it's good for frying things, there are cheaper and easier oils to cook with if you like them, but they make lousy substitutes for the dishes traditionally fried with olive oil.

The videos you posted aren't of caramelized onions, they're sauteed/browned onions. It's a different chemical reaction. You are creating a Maillard reaction of the protein in the onion. Caramelization is a reaction of the sugar in the onion.

I got a buddy who's from Texas, and he makes a mean brisket. He spends like 6 hours on it. I'm from California, and I make a pretty awesome tri-tip. I spend like 1 hour on it. They're both beef. They're both delicious. They look the same if you squint at it right. But they taste absolutely nothing like each other. And that's fine, as long as I don't call my tri-tip brisket and he doesn't call his brisket tri-tip. Cuz they ain't the same thing.

It's all Maillard browning, just more extensive in the longer cooked onions. If there were significant caramelization happening, the onions would be long ago burnt and acrid.

To summarize the answer to the title question: the problem is not the time but using word "caramelize". Why do recipe writers use the word "caramelize" when they mean "soften" or "brown"? Well, that's an easy one. It sounds more interesting and flavorful. It sounds cool.

because words mean things. caramelization is the process of breaking down sugars into a goo. “soft onions” are not what you’re going for. “brown” is a less precise definition.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caramelization

When recipes say "caramelize/cook/brown/soften onions for 5 min", what they almost always mean is soften onions until they're a bit brown not caramelize.

The brown bits are the result of the Maillard reaction not proper caramelization which takes time for the sugars to break down, but what you have isn't "caramelized onions" what you have is softened onions that are a bit brown.

https://www.thespruceeats.com/how-to-brown-onions-913397

> The problem with using the term "caramelized" for browned onions is more than just inaccuracy. What causes confusion is that the term is used for two very different methods and results. The first method, which involves very slow cooking, results in onions whose cells have broken down so far that they almost form a paste. They brown slowly and evenly, almost from the inside out.

> The second method cooks the onions more quickly over higher heat so that they brown before they have a chance to break down. You end up with browned onions that retain their shape and some texture. They also retain much more of their volume.

That’s not at all a summary of the article.

OP didn't claim it was.

That's exactly the source of the confusion, and this is an argument that has gone round in circles so much in the past decade it drives me up the wall.

"This recipe says caramelize the onions for 5 minutes, then add some stock. That's ridiculous, it takes at least 45 minutes to caramelize onions, so I need to add 40 minutes to this recipe."

No, this issue isn't with the timing, it's simply with the word "caramelize." Yes, cookbook authors are guilty of incorrectly using the word "caramelize" when they mean brown and soften. No, they are not guilty of simply pretending that they didn't spend half an hour gently caramelizing onions when they write "for five minutes."

People learn that caramelization takes a half hour or more, and then they incorrectly assume that this is what you should do with all recipes that brown onions.

I grew up and continue to cook classic Italian and classic French recipes (grew up in Italy and France, my family is still in Italy). There are very few Italian recipes that require caramelizing onions, and few French recipes, except those where caramelized onions are a specific feature. For heaven's sake, don't caramelize onions for 45 minutes when making a pasta sauce.

What if I'm making "Suction's Caramelized Onion Pasta Sauce", though?

It's only suction's caramalized onion pasta sauce if it comes from the self-loathing region of France. Otherwise it's just sparking onion sauce.

It's true.

Sautéeing, softening, frying "until golden", browning, and caramelizing are all (consecutive) stages of frying onions -- approximately something like 5 min, 8 min, 12-15 min, 20-25 min, 40-45 min.

They are all entirely different things, and recipe writers can be maddeningly imprecise about which one they actually mean. They all have different tastes and/or textures.

caramelization is a subset of non-enzymatic browning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_browning#Non-enzymatic_br...

I suspect most recipe writers are using brown to mean the verb "to dark golden"

Scientifically sure, but nobody's going to say "brown the onions" if they mean to caramelize. Also you should never caramelize if it just says to brown.

Browning is about color and deepening flavor, caramelizing is specifically about sweetening on top of that, hence the name.

There was a very good article about this a few years ago, after this Slate piece (this Slate piece was referenced). It was titled something like "Since when did caramelizing onions come to mean browning?" I wish I could find it.

Same general issue, although they documented this shift in meaning of "caramelized onions" and how it affects dishes. I remember it well because if how long it took to do and how different carmelized onions are from browned sauteed onions.

I've been taking cooking courses recently and found one thing I used to do incorrectly was never heat the pan up high enough before adding onions. The oil should run in streaks as you angle the pan when it's hot enough. You can test it by dropping a teaspoon of water onto a heated pan - it should become a single drop and glide along the pan. At that temperature with a high-burning oil I believe you could start to caramelise onions in 10 minutes. I'll double check in a few minutes for breakfast and put an imgur up after that period of time :)

When I first learned about getting the pan hot enough was around the same time I got my first infrared thermometer. I learned the hard way that they don't mix; if you want to use the IR thermometer, add oil first. I ruined my favorite skillet waiting for it to get to temperature before adding my oil; the thermometer registered 180F on bare metal, but in actuality it was well over 600.

Maybe you should use cast iron and stainless steel. You can really treat them like trash and with minimal effort they get back to being good.

Also has the advantage that you don't get any nano particles from whatever fancy coating was applied.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27931180/

https://therationalkitchen.com/is-nonstick-cookware-safe/

https://www.foodpackagingforum.org/news/nanoparticles-releas...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324527553_Profile_a...

Seems like the jury is still out.

From the second link: "In all honesty, we suspect that the risks with both types of nonstick cookware are low, and you would probably benefit more from focusing on risks in your drinking water and food supply (for example). "

Why would you add an additional risk if you can just avoid it to begin with?

I think pointing to "we don't know" as if it's equal to "it does not matter" is not good policy. A better one is "better safe than sorry" from my point of view.

As someone who has had a (university clinic, lab values supported) heavy metal poisoning diagnosis, I had positive effects of chelation (DMPS, DMSA, some ALA) long after the clinical case was closed, i.e. for measured excretion values way below where a treatment would be started (at the start it was high). My doctor (a researcher mostly) supported me continuing to take them, but he was clear that we had left the area supported by clinical studies. Because now we were in an area where studies were just too hard or even impossible, which didn't mean it was all gone and that the chelators were useless.

That's because we have no methods - apart from large-number statistics based studies which only tell you something about populations but don't help any one concrete individual because there is no way to tell which part of the large-number based statistics an individual belongs to - to say for sure what is going on. And when you get a population level result, such as "there is no safe level of lead exposure", you still don't have anything for individuals, such statistics only support big policies but not individual treatments.

Of course the jury is still out - like it is for pretty much all long term low level effects of anything, especially in the messy real world. Even if you performed an unethical study and found an effect of one thing by careful exposure of some people to something you still would not know the effect of many things. I once read a study (PubMed), a standard LD (lethal dose) toxicity study of heavy metals on rats, with mercury and lead, where when they were done with each individually they tried combining those two metals. Toxicity shot up through the roof, a tiny fraction of the amount needed to kill half the rats now was enough to kill almost all of them.

You can still ruin them (ask me how I know)... If you use too intense heat right from the start, this is only a problem with induction. Or if heat surface does not fully cover the bottom of the pan the center will bulge. Probably some heavy hammering would fix that but for most homes that's as good as ruined. Basically start slow and match heat surface to pot/pan size.

Was this cast iron or stainless steel?

Cast iron

This surprises me. My inherited cast iron tillet ( at least 50 yrs old ) seems indestructable.

Thanks for the info.

I've also slowly shifted to cast iron and stainless steel cooking ware, but they are objectively more effort to clean and maintain properly than anything with "teflon" or other similar coating.

Burning in the patina and keeping it intact is more effort and requires people being more aware about what they are doing when washing dishes.

> I've also slowly shifted to cast iron and stainless steel cooking ware, but they are objectively more effort to clean and maintain properly than anything with "teflon" or other similar coating.

I do not believe this is true.

I started cooking with various cast iron pans about a decade ago - initially I was dubious, and it took longer to season in the Lodge than the Le Creuset (both around the 20cm size, normally used on gas). Now they're equally seasoned, and cleaning is typically some hot water, ideally the same night they were used, maybe a very mild detergent, with a nylon scrubbing pad. If I don't get to them until the next day, I may need to run some hot water over them for five minutes, but that's rare.

OTOH I've got a number of non-stick coating woks, that I treat with great care, but are (in the same time period) looking a bit crusty / scratched, despite only using silicon / plastic / wooden utensils, and never running them above a medium heat. That is, treating them much more cautiously than I treat the cast iron.

Granted, I don't do, say, omelettes in a cast iron -- but herb encrusted meat, at very high temperatures, which would challenge a non-stick (teflon or similar) takes about 30s to clean out of the cast iron if I get to it later that night.

> maybe a very mild detergent

If you gonna do dishes, most people gonna use dishwasher soap, particularly if somebody is doing the dishes who doesn't even have a clue about seasoned pans.

But afaik that's a big no-no as it will also wash away to seasoning, that's why usually dry methods like rubbing baking soda/coarse salt are recommended to clean nasty spots without destroying too much of the patina.

Add in the oiling requirement, once finished with cleaning, and that's already two steps required that most people who are only casually into cooking don't really know about.

> I was dubious, and it took longer to season in the Lodge than the Le Creuset

Ain't the Lodge one supposed to be pre-seasoned? At least that's what mine said, I still seasoned it.

Honestly, all those rules about caring for cast iron are kind of nonsense. I clean mine with dish detergent all the time. I'll oil a pan before storing if it doesn't get used often, but for frequently used pans, the cooking process is enough to keep them seasoned.

Soap does not harm a properly seasoned cast iron pan.

https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-buy-season-clean-maintain...

How much effort does it take?

I got a lot of misinformation about how to maintain an iron skillet. Internet cooking blog trolls had me convinced I should never use soap or else I'd have to scrub it down to bare metal, soak it in oil, and bake it at 500 to restore that precious nonstick coating. Turns out that's bunk and all I needed to do after cooking was wash it, dry it, and spread a little oil over it.

I cook in titanium pots. They are marketed to ultralight hikers, and are mostly too small, but you can find ones large enough for kitchen cooking. It's easier to clean than iron or steel, but not as easy as teflon. The nice thing is, unlike coated pans, you can use copper wool on titanium.

It was a Calphalon stainless steel skillet that I ruined. The bottom warped, and it never sat flush on the stove again after that.

I have used cast iron in the past, but living with people who don't know about keeping it seasoned means I come back to find it has gone through the dishwasher or been scrubbed with a brillo pad. I live near the ocean, and without the seasoning later, cast iron develops surface rust rather quickly.

I made the opposite mistake once. The oil was too hot and the second I put in the onions, WHOOOSH, giant fireball. It dissipated quickly and there was thankfully no harm. The oil didn't spatter or spill out but it was absolutely a mistake that only had to happen once to learn a lesson.

Whoo instant caramelization! I'm definitely trying that.

Wow, that's quite an experience! I wonder what conditions you must have had for the oil to not already be on fire / smoking, but hot enough that a disturbance caused immediate combustion.

I'd guess it was probably all the moisture from the onions causing oil to splatter into a fine mist, which then hit the flames.

One hour later and the onion still hasn’t caramelised

Haha! Had to take the dog out, about to start now

I don’t understand this article. A lot of the recipes don’t require caramelized onions. They simply require onions that are slightly browned.

For example, Indian cooking almost never (never?) caramelizes onions. The Rogan gosht recipe is almost certainly looking for fried onions.

You're right, cooking styles aren't universal, and technique is rarely shared or accounted for in recipes.

Just consider how differently each culture prepares rice, then imagine using an American, Persian, or Indian method to prepare it for a Japanese dish.

Also, I didn't feel successful cooking dhal until I bought a traditional pressure cooker and learned what a "whistle" was.

WRT to dhal, you can do it fairly easily in an instant pot (obviously recipe dependent) but maybe 10 minites on high.

Curious not to see any mention of lye / baking soda / sodium bicarbonate. I think I learned this from either Good Eats or McGee or possibly both?

When frying onions in vegetable oil it rapidly speeds up the time taken to get from cold raw onions to unctuous brown goopy onions.

It isn’t quite the same as genuine 45 minute onions but I think it’s the same chemistry, at least. It is also a risky shortcut only to be used when needed. More than a tiny pinch will drastically affect the taste.

Adding a pinch of baking soda significantly speeds up the cooking of onion. I've never timed it (and I've never taken onions all the way to caramelization since Indian food doesn't need it), but it's noticeable. It's my go-to trick when cooking a large amount of onions for Indian gravies. As an additional benefit, it also helps cut down the oil requirement, if you're conscious about that sort of thing.

You need to be very careful with how much baking soda you add, really it’s like an 1/8 of a pinch per onion. The smallest amount will brake down a fairly large onion, really quickly.

I’m speaking from experience here, I used what I thought was a small amount on a very large onion and it just destroyed the thing, I had onion mush that wouldn’t even brown correctly.

In my experience even in small amounts the process is faster and the results are inferior. Not enough to ruin the dish unless you overdo it, but enough to not make it worthwhile for me.

Actually some Indian cuisines do need it. I think the best is to add some salt and sugar - that way your onions won't break down but still cook faster.

True - caramelized onions are often added as toppings to Biryani and other rice dishes. They're rarely needed for gravies though.

Edit: typo

In the 1982 second printing of Madhjur Jaffrey's "Indian Cooking":

On page 28 she addresses the length of time it takes to brown onions and how people give up because patience is required.

On page 51 (Rogan Josh), "Put the onions (minced) and garlic (minced) in to the same put and turn the heat down to medium. Stir and fry the onion-garlic mixture for about 10 mintues until it has browned." Clearly not 5 minutes as claimed.

If you actually read the BOOK and not the RECIPE, she explains that Indian techniques take a very long time by Western standards.

I think the problem is people thinking a recipe tells you everything. It doesn't. You need to read the book part of the cookbook as well to understand the context that the chef is expecting you to inhabit.

Read Alma Lach's the Art of French Cooking, or Marcela Hazans Italian cookbook. Both of those books have very lengthy sections on techniques, which often differ from what you see on the Food Network or shows sped up to fit in 7 minute recipe segments.

Why put the inaccurate time in the recipe, though? Just as a test to make sure you read the whole book?

Because the title of the article is literally "Why do recipe writers lie..."

Don't you think that perhaps the person making the claim should have their facts straight?

Says the guy who didn’t read the article where the author actually identifies and tries a 10min caramelization tech she finds and discovers it too doesn’t work.

Please read the hacker news guidelines for posting (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. "

My point is that the author is complaining about lying but not following their own objection.

I am confused.... if the recipe itself lists an inaccurate time, that is still the recipe "lying" even if another part of the book says onions take a long time?

You don't get caramelized onions in ten minutes, either.

5 or 10 - no difference, each are a lie. It takes 45 minutes.

Here's one that claims 1 or two minutes! https://www.thespruceeats.com/recipe-quick-browned-onions-91...

Yes people get this wrong all the time. One good approach is to dry-fry onions for the first half covered, to get the water out. Then remove the lid and add oil (careful! there's water in the pan) and fry for the 2nd half of the time. Onions with water driven out will brown faster.

The author was likely referring to the original, not the expanded and updated second printing.

You can caramellize onions in 10min:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yt_0e72fs9M

(There was a real time version of that video, but unfortunately it seems that longer video is no longer available)

I've been able to repeat this process on a plain electric home stove with a stainless steel pan. It does work.

Jacob Burton is a great resource for proper technique and fundamentals. Teaches you cooking much better than “recipes”

Burning onions and using the burnt parts to darken the onions does not make caramelized onions.

He's adding sugar, I think that's cheating since you can quickly caramelize anything that way. The result is basically steamed onions with butter/caramel sauce - very different from simmering in butter for a long time.

What I do is make a large batch and freeze it in cubes. One cube = one simmered down onion.

Sugar, and Butter both things that turn brown quickly. You can see that butter is already partially browned when he starts. Also he is more mixing and soaking the tiny bit that caramelizes with contact with the hot pan by using water into the onions. You can tell by the texture and color of those onions at the end it's not exactly what you would get from a normally caramelizing.

The onions if caramelized should be more broken down that. This seems more like an in between browned and caramelized.

I use the same technique but with baking soda and balsamic vinegar at the end to make quick 'caramelized' onions.. but this video undoubtedly shows burnt onions that they call fond.

A few things I have learnt over time.

The thinner you slice the onion, the faster they caramalise.

The hotter the pan when you drop in the onion, the faster they caramalise.

Too much oil ends up frying the onion, and doesn't caramalise them.

It's been my experience that almost everything is like this. You decide one day to learn how to do x, and look up some information from what seem like trustworthy sources on how to do x well. What you'll need, the technique involved, the time, the danger points to watch for. You do everything according to what you've been told. And somewhere between 15% and 20% of the time it goes to shit because the source you trusted was either a moron or a liar. I just factor it into my expected time-table now that part of learning any new thing will be burning through untrustworthy sources until I find one that isn't full of shit.

This can be somewhat ameliorated by cross-referencing several sources, and the internet makes this easier, especially Youtube. But it's still infuriating, especially when time and money are limited.

I love cooking food the slow way.

Pans last longer, and the mess is much less.

In addition to onions, you can cook bacon on low for an hour and skip all the exploding grease that creates droplets in the air and, over time, makes dust sticky near the ceiling.

>Why do recipe writers _lie_ about how long it takes to caramelize onions?

Because the author Tom Scocca didn't delve deeper into the meta layer of language usage to see that many people are using the word "caramelize" differently from him. They are not lying. To paraphrase Ludwig Wittgenstein, "problems in philosophy are actually problems in language".

Wikipedia article makes a distinction between caramelize vs browning:

>Like the Maillard reaction, caramelization is a type of non-enzymatic browning. Unlike the Maillard reaction, caramelization is pyrolytic, as opposed to being a reaction with amino acids. -- from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caramelization

But the above internal chemistry definitions are not how many people are using the word. To many folks, "caramelize" == "browning/sautéing/frying/softening" ... which means it can be done in 5 to 10 minutes. This HN thread also has example of people using caramelize as synonym for a quick Maillard reaction.

Because Tom Scocca doesn't explain the language being unknowingly used in different ways, his article actually adds to the confusion instead of clarifying the misunderstanding. By focusing his text on being snarky instead of educating the reader, he actually doesn't even answer the "why" question in the title!

EDIT reply to : >This is a fib, not a language problem. I don't believe that most of these recipe writers are using 5 minute onions themselves. It takes 40m to make the onions good. It's not hard. You can do it in advance. They know the difference and they do not serve the inferior version.

In this HN thread, a poster[1] tried to "prove" that caramelization can be done in 10 minutes by linking a video from a 20-year veteran chef that was professionally trained at the California Culinary Academy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt_0e72fs9M

And then you have random commenters exclaiming, "it takes me 45 minutes to 3 hours to caramelize onions. How did you break the laws of physics to get it done in 10 minutes?"

Those 2 contradictory statements are about different language usage and not about lies.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27649690

This is often true, but it is not true here.

These recipes (Rogan Josh, Onion Soup) all call for slow cooked onions that take a long time. The 5-10 minute onions are an inferior ingredient, and it's not the one to use for good results. This is a fib, not a language problem.

I don't believe that most of these recipe writers are using 5 minute onions themselves. It takes 40m to make the onions good. It's not hard. You can do it in advance. They know the difference and they do not serve the inferior version.

Fun article. This has been bugging me for decades.

Spending an extra 30 minutes on onions isn’t always worth it. Sure, I could spend 2 hours making and cleaning up a glorious breakfast, but doing it every day isn’t worth the time.

It is if you want to make French Onion Soup.

That's a different question. You can make a different dish, quicker.

The dishes being described in these recipes call for slow cook onions. The chefs writing them prepare them this way. Maybe it's not worth the time, but that's the recipe. The printed recipe is a lie.

In any case, it's 40 minutes of waiting.. not working. You can also onions them in advance. They last a few days in the fridge.

Worth it..? If you're efficient with timing/prep then it doesn't really add any time. I would definitely say that it is worth having good onions if onions are the main part of the dish.. which these are.

Meanwhile, the best quick alternative to caramelized onions is grilled onions, not quick fried onions.

No, if the recipe calls for 10 minutes that’s the recipe.

You can always spice things up by spending 40+ minutes slow cooking onions, but that’s not the recipe as presented. It’s little different than changing the spices for your personal palette, but while you may prefer different steps or different ingredients that doesn’t invalidate faster, simpler, or cheaper recipes.

We're going in circles.

The premise of this article is that the written recipe is a lie. There's a nebulous, yet "real" recipe which is instructions for onion soup or rogan josh with the flavour and texture it's supposed to have.. the good version.

Yes, and at it’s heart that premise assumes saving time isn’t a valid option. Which is as I am pointing out obviously false.

Presumably, for most of these recipes there are many things that could be improved with more effort somewhere in the process. For example grinding flour is best done directly before you use it, it’s however not something that most people can even notice and takes a lot more effort.

Properly caramelized onions freeze and thaw very well, since they are already pretty broken down and much of the moisture is gone.

Since the big factor is the 40-60 minutes on the stove, I make a large batch in several pans. The onions can be cooled a bit and then individual portions in an old ice cube tray and frozen.

Then I can just pop out an onion cube and microwave it until softened, anytime I'd like to add caramelized onions to something.

This is the problem.

Recipes aren't just about instructions. They are also advertising. People have heard the word "caramelize" used with "onion" and it sounds sexy. So a recipe will happily use "caramelize" rather than "brown" to better sell the recipe and take advantage of semantic drift. Now there are two very different meanings of the same word but the impact is very minor for serious recipes because you can just trust the time.

The only time I've ever seen this go badly is on amateur french onion soup recipes which call for cooking onions for only like 6-10 minutes because they've been convinced that this is the only way to cook onions. But that's an easily solved problem by just getting decent recipe books.

I've had the same experience with baked potatoes. Every recipe I've read says something like 45 minutes and I've never managed to bake a potato in less than ~90 minutes.

You can speed this up significantly if you have a microwave. Zap them for a few minutes, then finish in the oven to brown the skin.

How hot are you going? I find it takes ~90 minutes at 350 but only about 45 at 450.

The British cooking writer describes a process that works as adverstised: cook an a high heat for 2 minutes until golden, add a splash of water and simmer on a low heat for 35 minutes.

One way to speed up onion caramelization is to add a pinch of baking soda.

Changes the consistency a bit. Becomes a sorta brown-onion-jelly.

But it's good. And you end up with more of the final product.

In practice, how long it takes for any ingredient step is naturally going to be context-sensitive, and most recipe authors and readers appreciate that.

(chef's experience, properties of the ingredients used, quality of equipment.. among many others)

While thinking about a digital format for recipes I wondered whether it'd be possible to instead specify an "end condition"[1] for each preparation step - in terms of colour, taste, texture and so on.

There could still be "estimated" typical durations for each step, but it'd allow for those to be somewhat dynamic based on the environment "at cooktime".

[1] - https://github.com/openculinary/soupson/blob/8d43a08534d9906...

> In practice, how long it takes for any ingredient step is naturally going to be context-sensitive, and most recipe authors and readers appreciate that.

Yeah, most of the things quoted in the article are also within the realm of reason, and all of them state an end condition; there’s a few that are complete BS, but, since I assume the author knows the difference between browning and caramelization and recognizes that most of the examples aren’t referring to caramelization – appear to have been included for padding to exaggerate the prominence of the pattern being complained about, relying on readers not understanding the difference.

> since I assume the author knows the difference between browning and caramelization and recognizes that most of the examples aren’t referring to caramelization

The recipes call for caramelization - that’s the point here.

> The recipes call for caramelization

They don't, though. The actual description of the target state in most of them is (often light) browning, not “caramelization”.

I think the correct response to the question is 'till they are done'. I hate it when recipes have timing directions like this, as everyone's equipment is so very different. If an onion is larger, it'll take more time to boil off the liquids, if the pan is larger, it will take longer to heat, etc etc.

It would be more useful for people to think of cooking as building a catalog of techniques they have mastered, then to apply these in different combinations to different ingredients to achieve the various dishes they want to make.

On the subject at hand, cooking onions more or less produces such a variety of tastes and textures, it really is a very important part of cooking many dishes.

here's the secret. the first many minutes of cooking onions are just putting energy into breaking down vegetable matter. You can replace this part by microwaving the onions first, until they are soft. Then, squeeze out all the moisture, ideally with a press. This should take about 10 minutes (I have a high power microwave, so it's 5 minutes on high).

What you have now is already "cooked" and ready for caramelization.

The folks who get a few brown spots on the exterior of the onion and the rest is still white: that's not caramelization.

That moisture you’re squeezing out contains sugars that should be in the pan…

if you wanted to retain that, you should separately boil it down. Or just add sugar while cooking. The water is the problem that makes everything slow.

Cooking meets Tech-community-grade autism

I've always wondered and hoped for a website or app that somehow intuitively captures everything difficult about cooking, such that you can always find the best versions for cooking steak, coffee, chicken with minimal effort.

One day it'll be built.

Either that or robot chefs will learn how to cook for us.

Not that I mind either fate.

2 issues with that - ‘best’ is subjective, and techniques advance over time as trends take hold and innovation happens (both in equipment and techniques).

It’s easy to think of something man has been doing for thousands of years as a ‘solved problem’, but it’s an art, not a science.

I don't think it's a solved problem, but I do wish there was an easier way to sift through the backlog of tried methods.

Took me a while to figure out how to brew delicious coffee.

Wish there wasn't so much information overload.

This is why I cook caramelised onions in big batches and freeze them in portions for later us.

Shoot. I feel like when I’m trying to sauté my onions I will turn my back for a second and suddenly have shriveled little caramelized onions in the blink of an eye

Not bragging here. I suck at cooking. Cooking onions terrifies me

Sounds like too hot

Recipes very rarely seem accurate on prep times like this.

This seems especially the case with meal kits. I'm can cut & chop at a respectable pace, but to get some of those meals done in the claimed 30 or 45 minutes.

The same reason software developers (or at least those who blog or post effusively in forums) lie about the 3-line script, or that comparable app they wrote in a weekend.

Makes me glad working on software as recipes here don‘t lie.

The recipes here are not only outdated, they are for the wrong thing and end up 10x more expensive. Like you wanted to bake an apple pie but somehow ended up with a lump of bread. And it's on fire for some reason. Oh, and whoever decided that whisks aren't a thing anymore so now we're all stuck with shiny but inferior alternatives - fuck you.

> And it's on fire for some reason.

Oh, that's just someone overengineering to pad their CV. The flame is part of the project - the burning isn't.

The sarcasm is strong with this one.

Not that telling people it's possible to do something in half the time actually required has anything to do with programming a computer. Oh, wait...

This was a great opportunity to put some videos up there to show how its done and showing the difference between the cooking and simmering of the onions.

This sounds like "rich people problems", albeit effective in creating some buzz.

I eat garlic/onions/leek raw, to preserve enzymes and vitamins

I prefer to save time cooking by just eating all the ingredients.

Pressure cooker cuts carmelizing time down dramatically.

It should be a crime to caramelize onions.

So he didn’t actually try browning in butter.

It's the same for Risotto.

just make them in a crock pot overnight.

They're not lying. They're just assuming you're using the proper cookware.

There is no such "proper" cookware. This isn't rocket science.

These reactions take a certain amount of time that you can't change a whole lot because you need to stay within certain parameters, like thickness and heat.

> These reactions take a certain amount of time that you can’t change a whole lot because you need to stay within certain parameters

“Caramelization” of onions (which isn’t really caramelization, but that’s…beside the point) takes a long time (though you can alter it considerably by varying the thickness of cuts) because you have to cook the onion slow enough for it to cook through thoroughly in the time it browns without burning on the exterior.

Browning onions where you want to retain texture without cooking through the way that occurs in “caramelization” is quite quick, is what is actually described in most of the quoted articles, and can also be varied by thickness of cuts, choice of onion, stove temperature, chosen oil, and, yes, cookware.

I wonder if grating the onions would caramelise significantly quicker if you're going for a sauce-type result anyway.

The one, e.g., claiming 5 minutes to dark brown plus 5 more to caramelize is a complete lie (or using “caramelize” in a completely nonstandard way to how it is usually used for onions.)

Most of the rest, though, are pretty reasonable directions for browning onions, and don’t claim to be or describe caramelization.

Well, I think you could say they are not lying, because they say 'for about 5 minutes or until the onions turn a medium-brown'.

So if he result is not what you expected, you probably decided for the wrong part of the condition ;-)

But in the end, this is just missing the point.

I guess it depends on quantity? Half an onion is easily just a couple minutes for me--maybe 5-10, at most.

And yes, I know what proper caramelization is, and no, I didn't somehow mess up the time or anything because I keep track of when I finish everything everyday and stick to a strict schedule. I can't eat onions less than fully caramelized without getting severe digestive pain (simply being soft will still burn my stomach), so I'm definitely not cutting corners either.

Not that I doubt you or anything, but… would you video this and post it somewhere?

Seriously, I would love to have a quicker way to cook onions.

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