Hacker News Reader

The confusion comes in the color versus the process. I've seen some recipes call for "cook down onions until translucent and caramel in color". This is the most accurate definition of what most recipes want when asking for caramelized onions.

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.

Real French Onion dip, made with onions and not a prepared packet, is another nice dish with real carmelized onions. Alton Brown has a good recipe for the basic version: https://altonbrown.com/recipes/onion-dip-from-scratch/ Note he's honest about how long it takes ("Total Time: 2 hours", step 3 doesn't have a time estimate but it's about right overall).

It isn't haute cuisine, but for something you might serve for a Superbowl party it's at least pointing in that direction. It can stand up to taking a moment to savor and inhale it, moreso than most of the rest of what might be served up there. Pair with the bizarrely tasty Costco Kettle Krinkle Cut potato chips.

I feel like you shouldn't call it coq au vin unless you're using the male of the species.

This sounds like the same problem as recipes that call for "browning the meat" which I tend to read as "sear the meat" because e.g. mince will brown up within seconds but the searing is what actually gives you the flavour.

So the lie isn't in the time they say it takes to carmelize onions, but in that they say the recipe calls for carmelized onions at all?

That's even worse. And it begs the question: why are they lying about this?

They're not lying, they're just using the word in a more imprecise manner.

Recipe authors have probably been using the word "caramelize" to mean "soften and turn brown and sweet" for longer than food nerds have been nitpicking the exact definition of caramelize.

This irritates me (I know it's a silly thing to be irritated by). I'm far from a food nerd. I'm not a cook. I rely on following recipes to turn out decent dishes (I'm good at following recipes).

It would have been nice if someone had clued people like me in to their special definition of the word before now. I'd have saved a whole lot of time and frustration.

But now I'm presented with the other problem: when a recipe calls for caramelized onions, how am I supposed to know if they mean caramelized onions or "cook until translucent"?

If you followed the recipe as written without overthinking it, you would have had translucent onions after ten minutes and a complete and tasty dish.

You aren't supposed to interpret a recipe. You are supposed to follow it. If you have enough skill, practice, or ability to order pizza, THEN is the right time to make decisions about whether this recipe actually needs REAL caramelized onions.

Recipes have been vague and don't make sense out of context for millennia.

I do follow the recipes without overthinking them, because I don't have the skill required to make judgement calls. But also, I know that any time a recipe gives is highly suspect, so don't judge if something is done based on times in recipes.

So when a recipe says to "carmelize onions", that's what I do. To do anything else is to deviate from what the recipe is plainly telling me.

> Recipes have been vague and don't make sense out of context for millennia.

True. But the fact that this is true means it's essentially impossible to follow a recipe without some degree of interpretation.

I'm just irritated that there was a secret definition to "carmelize onions" that nobody clued me in to.

All of this is meaningless in the grand scheme of things. I'll get over this minor irritation. :)

> I'm just irritated that there was a secret definition to "carmelize onions" that nobody clued me in to.

Many words will have definitions you don’t know — sometimes literally the opposite of their “proper” definitions!

It’s not a secret, it’s just a thing you didn’t know yet. So don’t be too mad, now you know.

Well, I'm not actually angry at all. Just mildly irritated. I wrote far more words here on this topic than it really deserved.

Some people add sugar but it is not required to achieve carmelization. Onions contain sufficient sugars to ensure this process.

I've found you really do need to use sweet Onions like Texas 1015s or Vidalias if you want good, quick(er) carmelized onions. Adding sugar is not the same thing at all as having the sugar grown into the onion itself!

Adding water early on in the cooking process to steam cook and soften the onions really speeds things up, too. (See Lan Lam's YouTube video on cooking carmelized onions. I use a slightly different method, but she got me on the track of adding water early, which really does help...)

Exactly. I'm no cook, I'm barely an amateur cook, and I have absolutely no idea what "caramelized onions" means. Turned into caramel? I'm pretty sure you can get onions brown in 10 minutes, though. It probably won't be caramelized, it might be burned, but it's brown. I remember brown, dry onions. I'm sure caramelized ones are better. In fact, I think my wife once did something with onions that made them very sweet. I guess that was caramelized? But that's not what most recipes need.

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.

Yes, caramelized onions are sweet.

They are not "better" or "worse" than fried onions, they have a very different taste.

> I think a book like that would be really helpful to a lot of people.

It's called The Joy of Cooking.

How to Cook Everything would be a more modern alternative that's just as good IMO.

How to Cook Everything, I'm Just Here For the Food, and On Food and Cooking are my big three. The first one for the breadth of recipes, the second to learn a bit more about the physics and chemistry of cooking, and the third for the truly deep dive into everything we know about food.

Then Modernist Cuisine just for the pictures. Actually I learned a bunch when Mhyrvold spoke at my company- we talked about how to make BBQ ribs. His suggestion: sous vide, then immerse in liquid nitrogen, then deep fry.

Ruhlman's 20 was that book for me. From that one book I feel like I can dissect and understand so many core concepts that I very rarely follow recipes any longer, I just skim for the key aspects and wing it, substituting with what I have available, and a reasonable intuition for when I can't do so. Am grateful I made that investment (reading it, making most of the recipes).

You're probably right, but it still results in people not knowing what caramelised onions are - which is (or should be) a crime, because they're lovely.

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!

Luckily, in German, there are three completely different words for preparing onions in a pan:

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.

I am sure that Germany has many more words on how to describe cooked onions. Likewise, we have at least a dozen words in the English language for how to cook onions, that also translate directly to the German oddly enough. Unfortunately people who write on-line recipes have latched on to the caramelized onion notation and are not particularly explicit in what they actually want. Having gone through four years of culinary training, I now look at recipes on-line with a very critical eye and much like how you can identify the copy & paste code and architecture of a junior developer, you can also identify the recipe borrowing and construction of people who are better at blogging than they are at cooking.

In English we call these "sweated", "caramelised", and "frenched", respectively. I'm not sure why the phrase "sweat" doesn't get much use outside of pro kitchens, it's a useful term.

>The real issue is simply a vague use of the word "caramelize,"

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)

The article confused things by talking about "caramelizing" but as you say that's a rare instruction in recipes. However, the point remains: what recipes much more frequently call for is to cook until "translucent" or "golden brown" and those times are wildly underestimated in published recipes.

That is called "sweating" the onions