The Allium family of plants responds very well to caramelizing. This is not limited to just onions and garlic, but leeks, shallots, scallions, and chives too. Caramelized garlic sounds so good right now...
Caramelized onions can go great in a lot of things. They're perfect for hot sandwiches, topping baked or mashed potatoes, mixed in alfredo sauce, casseroles, or just alone. You can change their flavor by what seasonings you add during the cooking process to suit the dish you want them for.
Anyway, here's the way I like to caramelize onions. You can use this basic process with any allium member, as long as you keep it on low heat and watch it.
Heat 2 T of olive oil or butter, or 1 T of each in a large saucepan. Stainless steel would work best for this purpose. While that heats up on a medium to low heat go ahead and slice an onion however you like. I find that sweet yellow onions work best, but try whatever you have!
Place the onion slices in the pan in one layer. If you can fit the whole onion, don't worry you can add them later. Then sprinkle some salt over the onion, it helps extract the water from the onion so it can absorb the goodness in the pan and, well, caramelize.
For this stage, keep it on a very low heat. You want the onions to sweat slowly. Stir them around every couple of minutes and raise the heat so that you can hear only the slightest of sizzling. If it's already sizzling, just leave 'em be.
Once they've softened down you can add what's left over of the onion and repeat that process, or we can move on. From here is the fun part. Adding what flavor you want to your onions. I generally like to add almost a tablespoon of honey and some chopped up ginger. I chopped up about a one inch portion of the ginger root which gave me a noticeable but not very potent ginger flavor to the finished onions. You can also add pepper, other herbs, or even maple syrup. Just be careful when working with sugar that you keep an eye so that it doesn't burn.
After adding your delicious optional ingredients, or not adding them, cook the onions at a medium-low heat for... quite some time. Depending on how brown you like it, it'll be between 10-30 minutes. I got mine to a dark honey color with some brown bits and edges, that took about 20 minutes. Be sure to stir it up!
Enjoy.
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1 comments:
Recently I roasted some onions and I cooked them in a tomatoes honey butter sauce. it was pretty tasty.
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