Onions

>Why are they in everything?
Onions are cheap, weedy, healthy, and flavorful

inb4 they are like ogres

i think of it as as versatile as garlic for flavoring. its like a basic ingredient.

Minority opinion reporting in, but I definitely agree. Onion seems to be at the heart of all dishes, like garlic. Understood, but should be used very gently; just a taste, my man...I like to taste other things besides those two flavors...Chives are similar; take it easy, son...Like for example, basic store bought hummus would be so much better without garlic and onion. LET ME TASTE THE FUCKING CHICKPEA before I get flavor blasted....Same with most other dishes...

what kind of basic store bought hummus are you buying that has a ton of garlic and onion it it? most basic hummus brands only have a bit of garlic powder in them, if at all.

They also don't use leeks, shallots and scallions i believe

Not a ton, but it leads with it, you know? Say Sabra versus Ziyad--the latter by the way will get you much more for much less, price-wise. With Sabra, it's like "football party dip!" and with Ziyad, it's more of a neutral base...you can add to it. Another example--bought some yucatan guac recently...mild. Expecting to taste the avocado first...what I got was onion, salt, garlic...and finally avocado...Why, man? Why....

i don't know. i find most store bought hummus tastes like what its advertised as - if i get the roasted garlic kind, it should taste like garlic. red pepper kind should taste like red peppers.

if this really bothers you, you should make your own hummus. all it takes is chickpeas, tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, and salt.

I do! I use Ziyad as the base; ingredients from the can are as follows, in this order: chickpeas, tahini, citric acid, salt. To me, that's how it should be--you buy what you want to taste first, then add accordingly. But to OP's point, that often gets smothered by onion and garlic. I make my own guac for the same reason...mashed avocados, little salt, little garlic...done. Three ingredients, one leading, two in the distant background. No onion.

Yeah this sounds like bullshit. Maybe it's something that certain sects of Buddhism believe, but I doubt it's a very widespread practice. I mean, not all Buddhists are vegetarians. Such an extreme position surely isn't widely practiced.

This is called "Su vegetarianism" and is practiced mostly in Taiwan. This kind of vegetarianism avoids things from the allium family ("fetid vegetables")

onions fucking suck

Fuck you man

its a spiritual vegetable. its here literally to protect us.

Onions are love. Onions are life.

onion eatin ass bitch

>raw diced onion on a hotdog
UMPH

I think most people who say they don't like onions have had them prepared improperly. There's a huge difference between a salad with too many large slices of onion, and a salad with the perfect amount of super-thinly sliced onion. Same thing with cooking onions, they take a while to cook down and if they aren't cooked all the way the texture won't be right. And for caramelized onions it takes at least a half hour to get them caramelized, not sure how so many recipes started coming out saying you'll get caramelized onions in 5-10 minutes. And throwing in a few onions in a pot of stew that's going to simmer results in a thicker broth with the onions literally melting into it and becoming sweet.

If you know how to use them, they're brilliant and delicious. If you don't know how to use them, they can ruin an entire dish.

Takes a special type of sperg that doesn't view the varieties as a given.

> its not the huge selection of different sorts of onions, its how you cut them that makes them taste different.
I don't think that's what he was saying, but that's not wrong. There's a big difference between a thick slice of onion and the same amount that was sliced as thin as possible.

>like ogres
bc they make you cry?

Nu-uh. If you slice garlic thin enough it liquifiees in the pan. I'd like to see you do that with whole cloves of garlic.

so much this, I make and bring salads to work and people are amazed that the raw onion isn't too strong, like no shit retard it's because i slice it super thin because i don't use a goddamn butter knife and know how to use a knife

> it takes at least a half hour to get them caramelized
Depends entirely on heat and surface area and how thick you want them to be at the end. As long as you don't overload the pan cutting them really thin and rapidly moving them around in a blistering hot pan gets them done in moments.

> As long as you don't overload the pan cutting them really thin and rapidly moving them around in a blistering hot pan gets them done in moments.
And that's flat wrong, and you're guilty of the same thing that the guy you replied to is complaining about

Softening/sweating onions is NOT caramelizing them and no matter how many idiots perpetuate this myth, it will never be true

Whether or not they sweat or caramelize is just temperature my man.

I'm not going to argue with you for the next six hours while you try to figure out a way to make your assertion retroactively seem "technically correct" .
>oh but when I said "moments" what I meant was 45 minutes, in Bantu the word for moment is more ambiguous than in English
You are confused, you remain confused, and you are spreading disinfo. Kindly make like a tree, and fuck off.

You seemed confused, my friend. With that quote and all.

Cooking is just understanding what happens to something when applying heat. There's a difference between it and knowing a recipe.

Nice deflection

Is this the first time your wrangler has let you attempt a conversation with somebody? You're not doing too well.

No, it's what you're doing. You got called out for a factual misrepresentation and are trying to now pretend it's because you're above such plebeian concerns as recipes and accuracy

Alliums are worth the health benefits. Lots of good stuff makes you smell a little. Cumin, cruciferous vegetables, black pepper, lots of stuff. You'll smell way better if you lay off refined and animal foods. I eat only whole plant foods and mostly smell grapefruity.

This "calling out" was literally just
>no you're wrong
Then all I did was repeat my stance.
Cooking is just a process, it isn't following a recipe.
Yeah if you follow a recipe you'll get caramelized onions. Or you can take the same method, heighten the surface area by cutting the onion smaller and cooking at a temperature as high as possible and you'll end up with smaller caramelized onions in a much quicker time-frame.

With the residual heat in a smoking-hot pan after cooking steak I'll toss in super thin onion to caramelize while the beef rests, for example.

>I make burned onions with my rrrawwwr! blue rare steak! therefore recipes are a librul hoax
Yeah, surely all those people making french onion soup or doro wat are confused and just need to turn up the heat instead of wasting time doing it the luddite way. As any STEM major knows, double the heat equals half the cooking time. Cakes that used to take me an hour now take 30 minutes. Isn't science cool?

You're still getting sauteed onions, not caremelized.

You cannot speed up the process by using higher heat because you cannot properly carmelize onions until all the moisture is removed. That's why it takes 30+ minutes (or even an hour) to carmelize them, whereas you can easily saute them in far less time.

You think you're caramelizing onions whereas what you are doing is a different process entirely.

>I am a simpleton
You could've opened with that and saved us both a lot of time. Have a good one now though.

Wow you sure showed me

You make guac without cilantro, lemon/lime, cumin, black peppers, chilis, or onion? how can you can that guac?

Fuck off Lady Bird Johnson, cumin does not belong in guacamole

I don't personally use it but I know it's a point of contention on Veeky Forums with a lot of people using it. My point is that without any of that stuff, I doubt you can call mashed avocados and garlic powder ' guacamole."
My personal recipe is 1 lime to every 2 avocados, salt, pepper, cilantro, white onion and garlic minced, fire roasted poblano or jalapeno, sometimes tomato.

this is mostly Jains and some sects of Hinduism, although there are some Buddhists who follow that.

This. Strict Jains have one of the most insanely restrictive diets anywhere- don't eat anything where harvesting it causes death. So no animals, obviously, but also no alliums, root veg etc because taking those kills the plant.

Caramelization is a chemical reaction of the sugars in the onion. Heat flux and all that physics aside increasing the temperature doesnt automatically makw it quicker. Some chemical reactions actually require TIME irrelevant of the temperature, of course providing more energy to a system is likely to cause an increase in a given reaction rate but in doing so youre actually causing other reactions to occur which otherwise would not have occured.

What about killing fungi, bacteria ?

I know there's extremists that constantly wear fine mesh over their mouth so they dont accidentally kill tiny insects etc

I like stripped down food; three flavors, usually--one that is the essence of the dish and two that highlight it. If I'm making MY guac, Avocado is first and foremost. It's why you eat guac. Salt and garlic follow, lightly and slightly. No need for anything else...that's how our pallets have been misled; with all the flavor blasted double tripple ripple bullshit. Just taste what you want to put into your body, and make it a bit extra nice.

Like for example...BBQ sauce...fuck outta here
Just taste whatever is drowned underneath that sloppy mess
Or just drink BBQ sauce.

realtalk here:

onions have an extremely mild flavour profile but pack quite a bit of umami when cooked, which inherently makes any savoury dish taste better. this is the purpose of caramelization, to bring out the umami.

I hope this helped.

You're completely wrong. You obviously don't know what a caramalized onion looks and tastes like. It's not supposed to be charred or burnt. It takes 25-30min to do it right and if you blast them with heat they will be dark and bitter.

Pro tip. Don't use a plastic container to store buttercream frosting in the you previously used to store sour cream and onion dip. I learned that lesson the hard way.

>muh recipes
You should learn the principals behind cooking so you don't embarrass yourself further by blindly parroting things you barely understand, if at all

Because they grow like weeds and taste better than weed.