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

I don't recall seeing instructions to caramelise in pasta sauce recipes, that's usually "until starting to brown", same with curries.. "Until translucent" for risotto.

What I'm really talking about is... Let's have a look... First result for "caramelised onion quiche" says cook onions for 15 mins. Doesn't work!

To be honest, there's a lot of these sort of words that are often used in recipes where I have no idea what they mean. A basic cook book to just explain these sort of things, would be fantastic. Just the different ways to properly cook onions, mushrooms, and other ingredients, and what those techniques are called. And warn for ways that those names might be misused: "If a recipe says to caramelize onions in 10 minutes, don't caramelize them, do this other thing instead." I think a book like that would be really helpful to a lot of people.

However the true use of the word "Caramelized Onions" are onions that have gone through the cooking process of caramelization. This process requires three things: sugar, heat, and time. Just like making candy caramels, you are performing the same process to onions. This makes true caramelized onions actually sweet, with savory notes throughout.

Most recipes bastardize the word "Caramelize". They tell you to caramelize onions, when in reality you don't actually want caramelized onions (which in many cases would actually ruin the recipe), instead they want softened onions with browned to a light caramel color, which is a completely different thing.

This is like a recipe needing turkey but asking for chicken. Like sure, it will probably work, but it is clearly different and not entirely substitute.

French Onion soup is the most common use of real caramelized onions, which is sweet and savory soup. It could not be made with browned onions, that would ruin it. Coq-a-vin is another popular recipe that uses caramelized onions, which complements the prominent wine flavors of the dish into a sweet, savory, gamey (usually made with game hens), and earthy delight of a meal. The caramelized onions are what pull that dish together and critical part of the recipe. This meal takes a long time to cook, similar to a gourmet version of American potroast.

The linked article gives a few examples where there was no vagueness: The recipes described the visual state that the onion should be in when caramelized, and it corresponded to the ~45 minute process, not the ~10 minutes the recipe claimed it would take.

I've had this issue myself with a meal kit service that said caramelized and showed a picture of the ~45 minute result but the overall prep & cook time for the entire meal, as stated in the recipe, was only 30 minutes. (In general meal prep kits seem to drastically understate the amount of prep time. At best, it might correspond to the amount of time it would take a skilled chef to chop and slice and peel everything, not the average consumer who subscribed on the basis of easy 15-30-45 minute meals)

1.) Anschwitzen, literally "sweating up", means putting them in a pan on low heat for around 10 minutes until they are translucent ("glasig", literally "glassy"). This is how to get a starter for many sauces, and is the standard way to prepare onions for many, many meals and sauces (e.g. a standard tomato sauce). They should not turn brown, as this would for example ruin the color and flavor of white or light sauces - caramelized onions have a kind of "heavy" flavor.

2.) Karamelisieren, "caramelize", which is the meaning described in this article.

3.) Rösten, "roast", which means frying the onions with a bit a flour until they are crispy.

Most people don't want that though most of the time. In 99.9% of applications fully caramelized onions simply aren't nearly as pleasant as onions that have been cooked until soft and very slightly caramelized.

Pan quality is still going to matter.

But you don't need $50k in kitchen gadgets to properly caramelize onions...

This is pretty ironic in a thread about the misuse of the term "caramelize".

It's not steaming if you put water into the food directly. It's simply ... cooking, or maybe simmering/stewing.

Related, it turns out that caramelised onion, mushroom & goats cheese is a pretty good pizza topping.

You'll quickly realize that it belongs straight in the trash.

    I've never really figured out the difference between cooked yellow, white, and sweet onions

---

Yellow onions have a stronger flavor, even after cooking. (Though cooking of course lessen it a lot.)

White and sweet are essentially the same, with the latter being slightly sweeter.

In the end they do taste similar cooked. Biggest difference is price. Yellow is usually 20% cheaper than white and 40% cheaper than sweet.

The solution to confusion might be contact everyone using "caramelize" to verify they mean that or sauteing.

You simply aren't going to speed up the chemical reactions that happen during cooking. Even if you do find a way, your result will often be different or the result of using ready-made ingredients at the store. (I can buy frozen caramelized onions, for example).

Sure you are. meat thermometer, hot pan and a butterflied breast [0] will give you evenly cooked chicken in about 8 minutes.

[0] https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/how-butterfly-chicke...

But without going there, I can clearly hear my mother answering me that once again "it's very simple honey, 20 minutes top", when asked how she did the lunch.

She consistently does this, yet when I copy everything she does, I'm lucky to get 40 minutes.

Surely, you are dramatizing a bit here. Or are you assuming that everyone shares the same need to fiddle with everything?

Doesn't make sense to me. I certainly don't choose a recipe based on the estimated time-to-complete.

In fact I generally click through a bunch of recipes, and pick and choose the ideas that sound as if they'll work. Felicity Cloake does this, in her "How to cook the perfect..." series. She consults a bunch of top cookbooks, tries several mash-ups, and feeds the results to a tasting panel. At least, that's what she says she does; I'm inclined to believe her.

Some of this is probably a difference between home and commercial kitchen equipment.

I know my stove doesn't have the same kind of heat output that a commercial stove would, let alone specialty equipment like pizza ovens or wok burners. And lots of home range hoods are awful for ventilation, which makes it even more impractical to cook at a high heat.

Add a minute for the genetic freak 2+ inch thick ones.

You will need to pat the moisture off them first and brush with oil.

People bother to do that?

Just wipe, reinstall, and run your postinst scripts to restore everything you need.

Your optimal slow cooker will have decent insulation (saves on energy) and if you crave luxury, a timer so that you can set it to automatically turn off or switch to "keep warm" after x hours.

You're also in luck because most people never use their slow cookers and eventually donate them to the local thrift shop, so you can pick them up super cheap to try out and decide if a slow cooker is for you. Once you've gotten a taste for slow cooked foods, you can start looking around for what tools will best serve your future culinary ambitions.

And no, you don't need a Le Creuset; that's just for snobs who like to tell everyone that they have Le Creuset. It won't make better carmelized onions.

I can guarantee you that I can make caramelized onions that are better than pretty much anything you have ever had in your life, but it won't be because I have fancier tools. It will be because I'm using delicious homegrown onions that you can eat raw like apples, that you would be hard pressed to replicate.

What's my point with that anecdote? Don't really have one, much like yours.

Specifically what aspect or quality of yours do you think makes better caramelized onions?

From what you've said, I think you don't know the subject matter[1] well enough to talk authoritatively about it.

[1] How slow cookers work, or cooking in general.

And no, your Le Creuset caramelized onions will taste no different than slow cooker caramelized onions. This is what we call in science a placebo.

I only did caramelized onions twice with the same one, but based on my experience, any brand/model should work. And I agree, crockpot is the best way to cook caramelized onions.

Plus, it's not like that recipes on the internet (or books) are usually targeted at professional kitchens. Or like professional kitchens will take times at face value (and won't test it).

Then they shouldn't label it prep.

> And it makes sense: the prep time can vary wildly (e.g. peeling and chopping veggies) making the "actual time" quite useless and in professional kitchens other people do this prep work.

This is a recipe for home cooks not professional kitchens. Both cook time and prep time are always going to be estimates. Labeling a step as "prep" and excluding all of the actual prep tasks isn't useful for someone trying to plan their day. This 5 min step ads nothing of value to the recipe as far as I can see.

Please try and not use "us" in online discussions. This has been considered to be poor manners since the BBS days.

They will still be mushy thou.

Fun one I noticed: if you search for Hungarian (as in, written in Hungarian) recipes for paprikash, you'll get one dish[1]; if you search for it in English, practically every result would best be classified as some other dish—maybe also good, but not really the same thing.

The key difference seemed to be that the writers of the English recipes were terrified of the amount of sour cream you need to make the real thing. It's a lot. I mean, I'm not Hungarian, but judging from what ~every Hungarian recipe I found said, the correct amount is at least 4x the sour cream per serving of what the English-language recipes suggested. Depending on the recipes one paired up from each language, some were more like 20x.

[1] "What's 'paprikash' in Hungarian, though?" that's what the Wikipedia "other languages" links are for! Find your recipe or ingredient or whatever there, then hit the dish's native language in the language bar. It doesn't even need to be in a script you can read. Works for just about any dish popular enough to have an English-language Wikipedia entry. More reliable (for this specific thing) than Google Translate.

Restaurants do have containers with chopped vegetables sitting around for this reason. You might not like this convention, but it is pretty universal.

So your complaint sounds like "3 minute angel hair pasta?!?! My water won't even have started boiling by then." Totally understandable misconception for someone who just started cooking, but you should learn pretty quickly what 3 minutes actually means.

A professional kitchen doesn't either. They wipe things down with sanitizer as they go. i.e. a damp rag from a bucket of water/steramine solution.

Saves 5 minutes or so of prep time, well worth it IMHO. Also you can just throw it in the dishwasher and not worry about scrubbing a wood cutting board and possibly damaging it with moisture.

To be honest that's better anyway - unless you have some long cooking times with nothing to do but clean up & prepare the next thing, a bit of planning & preparation - mise en place - ends up saving time and giving better results IMO. (Better results because you're not accidentally cooking something longer than you wanted, say, because you were trying to finish chopping the onions to add, and the onions aren't uneven because you didn't rush.)

Having cooking time from actual customers instead of veteran cooks would be helpful.

When I'm focused I'm even faster.

Even then I'm probably on par if not only a touch faster than these recipes XD

It's like watching an electrician wire a bathroom in two hours and assuming anyone can do it. They can; after years of experience and knowing what to do, what not to do, and what to avoid.

A cookbook that focused on "here's stuff you can pre-prep that can be used in multiple meals" would be nice.

As time has gone on I found that making dinners took me less and less time, part of it is knowing the right techniques for preparing certain foods, others are little ergonomic things like getting a knife magnet and ensuring all the tools you need are at your fingertips. It's also knowing how long food cooks for, what you have to keep an eye on and what you can just let cook. The first time I made smash burgers at home it took me in excess of an hour to prep and cook everything and yesterday I was able to do the same in about 20 minutes.

Its a lot less stressful, but its clearly slower to not optimize your order of operations.

Item 5 can be interpreted in more than one way, though, so I think it's worth digging into. At a fundamental level, with virtually no tradeoffs, it's important not to be crowded by dirty dishes while you cook. If you're worried about your elbow bumping a water glass while you chop onions, or if you have to reach around a dirty mixing bowl to find the garlic, it's going to slow you down, both physically and mentally. Keeping your workspace tidy pays back every second many times over.

Taking "clean while you cook" even further, you can try to save time by scrubbing pans and bowls as you are finished with them. This is extremely appealing for busy people, but how feasible it is depends on what you're making, how much work and attention it requires, and how fast you are. It's a rare triumph for me if I can put three dishes on the table with no dirty dishes in the kitchen. I've done this, but much more often, I've messed up dishes when my attention got hijacked by scrubbing a pan that I could have left for later. If you feel rushed or stressed while cooking, you can give yourself breathing room by getting the dirty stuff out of the way in the easiest possible manner, even if that means stacking it to clean it later.

The point is, don't think you are the baseline for everyone else. Nobody should give two shits about efficiency with cooking unless your job is to cook efficiently.

I can give him a bell pepper, and by the time he's finished with one bell pepper, I've diced two other bell peppers, the onions, the celery and the chicken.

Or if we're dicing and roasting potatoes, he'll dice one potato in the time it takes me to dice 3 or 4.

Most of the time he just cleans up after me or sets the table and we find that a better arrangement.

That's literally what "prep time" means though?

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Cookbook-Young-Chefs/dp/1492...

It's Professional Cookery: The Process Approach by Daniel R. Stevenson

Here's a link https://www.amazon.co.uk/Professional-Cookery-Approach-Danie...

It doesn't go into a lot of theoretical detail about food chemistry but it is an eminently practical and down to earth textbook for people who will cook for a living. No frills, no pictures.

Separating those from the clear golden liquid is how you make ghee.

Again, times given are stupid ridiculous.

On the other hand, recipes with eggs and soft vegetables are better freshly made.

Now you, you I can trust on this topic.

I feel that 15 min is only feasible with everything ready within (fast moving) arms reach and all cutting done by a food processor...

Here's my grandma's recipe for flapjacks ... accompanied by a picture of flapjacks ... the recipe I made up, the picture was from a stock photo site (best place to get pictures of gravy! /jk) ...

For me that revelation explains a lot.

(And sometimes they do clearly vary from the recipe - like clearly not the called-for cheese, or without the described scattering of something over the top or whatever. Which I think's mostly fine or even good, but occasionally I think 'what do you mean by x' and either can't tell from the photo, or have to remind myself that that's only someone else's interpretation anyway.)

Very likely this has changed but once there were specialized artists that made mock-ups (often using wax, but not only), besides the ready-made props (usually plastic).

And then there is an endless list of non-food ingredients that are used because they come out great in photography, example:

https://petapixel.com/2018/11/30/tricks-food-photographers-u...

It came with experience, but knowing whether 1 TSP or 1 tbsp of something per portion is the right rough ratio comes in handy significantly more often than you think

I wonder what you would think of Ethiopia: Recipes and Traditions from the Horn of Africa ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/1623719631/ )

The recipes are good. But the book rarely specifies an amount of anything, and sometimes when it does it's accompanied by a note saying "I toned this way down for an American audience". [1] Many recipes include the direction "add enough water to prevent scorching" one or more times.

I just take the philosophy that that book mostly expects you to know what you want and how to get there, and whenever you try making a new recipe from it you might be wildly off. But it's not a matter of the recipes being "incorrect" -- they're great! It's that they're underspecified.

I don't think the requirement for familiarity with a recipe can really be gotten rid of. Learning to make rice-a-roni from a box had its hiccups; over time I tended to get better results despite not consciously doing anything different. And if any recipe is going to be tested for reliability and ease of following by people who are barely able to cook, it will be the directions on a box of rice-a-roni.

[1] And he wasn't kidding about that. I had to use five times the amount of berbere indicated in that particular recipe to get it to taste right.

Food photography very often is staged for visual appeal, not prepared as directed (for a recipe illustration) or as actually prepared (for a restaurant illustration.)

You may be looking at glue used as milk, motor oil as sauce or mashed potatoes pretending to be ice cream [1].

(And don't call me Shirley)

[1] https://petapixel.com/2018/11/30/tricks-food-photographers-u...

No they do not. Haven't you ever tasted something and said "this needs salt?"

Once you know what x+y tastes like and y+z tastes like, you can sometimes imagine what x+z would truly taste like; Any two things you think might taste good together probably do, for just as surely as you can imagine what something looks like, or sounds like, you can imagine what something tastes like.

The amounts generally remain the same orders of magnitude so even if they're not to your taste, the dish will probably "work", and if it doesn't, home cooks have priors:

Everyone has a crap oven, or high/low humidity or altitude or whatever, so there isn't a single recipe that would work for everyone, and I think most home-cooks know this! Hasn't a recipe ever turned out badly for you?

So if there are any issues they might have with a recipe, I could believe they would blame their skill and/or their kit, and/or adjust a few times before they ever blamed the recipe, because surely that can't be true!

> Plus every modern recipe has pictures to show what the result should look like. I

We have hi-resolution AI pictures all the time on this very site that people can't tell from fiction, and food surprises you?

C'mon! You can get pictures of just about anything from stock photography services. At newspaper-dpi nobody is going to notice!

> I just don’t believe she would get anything approximating a good result from this.

Well I guess it depends what exactly you mean by a "a good result..."

It's almost safe to say you can't actually eat the meal that gets photographed.

Then I realize I don't know what half those ingredients are, wouldn't know where to source them, and in any case I don't have time to go shopping for nonstandard stuff.

Nonserious recommendation: Just drop >600USD on

https://modernistcuisine.com/books/modernist-cuisine/

… and end up spherising your breakfast or something, idk.

I tend to disagree on that one, unless you are particularly experienced, or naturally gifted, measuring tools (timers, scales, thermometers,...) will give you the best results. At least for me, that's the case.

And if you can't follow a recipe to the letter, without knowledge of how things are supposed to feel, it is not a proper recipe. The entire point is to give you consistent results, if I had the intuition, I wouldn't need a recipe.

And even if you are an experienced cook, precise instructions and measurements will give you a better baseline from where you can improvise. Yes, I have an idea on how cook a potato, but unless the recipe tells me how to do it, how do I know how potatoes are supposed to be for that recipe in particular?

So yeah, no matter how good at cooking you are, if you "just follow" a recipe properly and it doesn't work, then the recipe is wrong or incomplete. It is like in programming, 99% of the time, where there is a problem, it comes from the software, not the computer running it. And successful developers don't ask users to fix their bugs, even on open source projects where users have the ability to do it, why should it be different for recipe writers?

> A timer can never replace the knowledge of how something is supposed to look, feel, and smell when it's done or not.

And it's not only that. If you just eat a lot, you'll know what things are supposed to look like when they are done. However, the difficult part is knowing what intermediate stages are supposed to look/smell/feel like! If you get it wrong at T=15 minutes, there might be no way to save the finished product at T=30 minutes, however hard you try.

And that intermediate stage you don't experience just by eating. That takes cooking and understanding.

When I follow a recipe it may or may not turn out well. If the recipe is a bad one or there's a part of it which requires a technique I don't know, the end product won't be good.

When I learn a technique it opens up a variety of options for just creating delicious stuff. A good example was learning how to make a pan sauce. Suddenly a bunch of things lying around the kitchen became ingredients for whatever kind of delicious sauce I was in the mood for, accompanying pretty much any meat or vegetable I wanted to eat. Dozens of possibilities for making great meals all came from one technique.

When you learn the techniques you end up with tons of options for what you're going to cook and the end product turns out better because you understand why it works.

I'd be a lot more hesitant about adopting this approach to baking though!

For someone who didn’t learn to cook growing up, that book is a godsend.

On the other hand, I refuse to make recipes found on the internet. They work extremely rarely if you’re like me and don’t have a sense of “what the authors really mean when they say X.”

One of my biggest learnings is that no matter what I do it takes quite a while to cook a meal. Huge complex meals can take hours to prepare, but even a simple meal usually takes me half an hour - because that's just the time it takes to grab the ingredients, boil water for pasta/rice/potatoes/..., cook and present it. The time it takes to cook a meal is largely determined by the duration of the longest step. All the rest is done in parallel, with more complex recipes simply requiring more multitasking. So cooking a simpler meal often makes for a less stressful experience and simpler flavours, but often doesn't save much time.

This is not a mystery. People don't "cook along" with videos. People watch cooking videos for either to get inspired or for a vibe, most often for both.

A stew might take hours to be ready, but the core idea of it can be expressed succinctly in a few sentences. Totally made up example: "We brown beef, and then simmer it with potatoes low and slow with the bones in. It is ready when the meat falls off from the bones. Spice with a pinch of cinnamon." Those are long and sweaty hours in a kitchen to make it, but you can read the idea in seconds. Put the details and quantities in the description. Those few who want to cook it will find it there.

If there is some technique or twist, make a video about that specifically? It doesn't all have to be recipes. I have watched a video the other day where a person explained why they put a few drops of water in the pan when they are frying bacon. If they would have done it in the middle of a 20 minute video I might have missed it. Or what is even more likely would have been skeptical of the technique without the added explanation and test pieces where he has done it both ways to show the difference.

And videos you watch for vibes are not about cooking. They are about the personality of the presenter, that parasocial interaction. It doesn't matter how the food tastes. You won't eat it anyway. What matters are the feelings you experience while watching it.

Audiences don't want long segments of monotonic action with predictable outcome. No need to show how to slice a kilo of onions. It doesn't sound like the chef videos you mentioned suffer from this, but your "want fast" generalization is off the mark.

Except... a) they're ideally making big batches, enough for 10 or 20 servings, and b) their stuff is usually very modular, i.e. made out of other recipes. How do I make that great chicken with the yogurt dip? First make the marinade (recipe on page 42). Then make the spice mix for the yogurt (recipe on page 65). Then make blackened peppers (page 210). etc etc

Nice to see a +1 for Lebovitz - not really familiar with him, but have been getting into home-made ice cream and just ordered The Perfect Scoop last night as my first/only ice cream recipe book.

People put a number of stars based on their mood, presumptions, willingness to support a buddy's business, but not so often based on the real experience with the product or service.

As far as YouTubers go you have the holy trinity of Adam Ragusea, Ethan Chlenpwoski and Joshua Weissman, although I dislike the latter and would sub (haha) him out for Brian Lagerstrom.

All of those YouTubers hit a good balance between: scientific basis, concise clear steps and taking reasonable shortcuts.

https://smittenkitchen.com/

Also, note that the average book sells very few copies. Even traditionally published books. Some books have higher production values that'd justify a lot of extra effort, but tends to be linked to name recognition for people with very established names. It's not at all a given that all that much money has gone into producing these books.

I have very low trust in online recipes in general, and always evaluate the source of them first.

But books are not, overall, that much better! Whatever testing was done was often done ad hoc or in professional kitchens, or on a much larger batch that was arithmetically scaled down to home sizes. This often works fine but not always, and usually needs some tweaking. It tends to be especially true of cookbooks affiliated with a well known restaurant or chef, but certainly not limited to that.

Cookbook recipe testing is basically like fact checking in non-fiction. It's up to the author and not invested in or validated by the publisher, unless the publisher is specifically specialized in cookbooks. Usually this means some of the recipes were tested by the same handful of friends & family. The fact that there's a photo means very little, just that someone made that dish once. No cookbook has photos of every recipe.

Except for rare pockets, the state of Internet recipes is utter garbage. Get a good foundational cookbook, cook and learn from your experience, which no shortcut can substitute. The people who do test their recipes as far as I know, are Cooks' Illustrated and America's Test Kitchens (they're the same company I think).

According to America's Test Kitchen, do this: Pat dry. Start cold in nonstick/cast iron — no preheat, no oil. Flip every 2 mins. Start high, after few flips, turn heat down to medium. Keep flipping every 2 mins until done.

Most cuts worth eating have some fat on them (filet mignons might not but they are very dry anyway -- to me they're not worth it). This fat is enough to brown and cook the steak on. It's completely unnecessary to add oil.

Agreed on meat, but I consistently see way-too-small amounts of oil suggested for cooking veggies, too. It's like every recipe writer online got together and decided that 1) they must specify oil quantities for those steps, but 2) the quantity must never exceed one tablespoon.

Blast them on high heat and you drive off most of them, and polymerize the rest to creosotes.

Some claim that this is a thing when making rice too. I've tried toasting the grains for a few minutes before adding the water to boil, but I can't say I can tell the difference. Maybe that's a time issue like the onions, or maybe it just doesn't do anything...

I'm not any kind of cooking whiz but I always use an instant pot (electric pressure cooker) for stuff like that, so it gets up to 230 or so, I think.

if you don't put in a bit of oil, then you're searing one side in a dry pan, and the second side in an oiled pan. and if you're only putting a bit of oil in and it's all in contact with the meat there's really no reason to worry about smoke point, use whatever oil is handy.

I only sift flour if I'm making scones, it seems to make a difference. I'm not a cakey person, I don't bake cakes. It's cake bakers that tend to care about sifting.

One of the world’s most celebrated restaurants, Noma in Copenhagen, is closing soon. Their menu costs about $800 per person, but even at that price the business barely turns a profit and runs largely on unpaid interns who put in the endless hours of manual labor so they could have the famous restaurant on their CV:

https://www.ft.com/content/6377b292-d825-4b3a-8527-04d147551...

The idea is that salt on the outside of the steak initially draws moisture out of the steak, making it dry. But given enough time, the salt penetrates deeper into the steak, and holds the moisture in.

Whether you dry-roast or toast in oil depends on what you're trying to achieve; if you want flavoured oil for something like a tadka, then you use oil. Dry roasting to season e.g. a curry produces different flavours. It's also harder; different spices burn at different speeds, so for example add cumin first and turmeric last. burnt turmeric is very bitter.