Why do recipes lie?

My chef taught us to cheat when carmelizing onions.

>throw sliced onion in pan with oil & salt
>sweat for 5 minutes on high heat
>toss in 1/4 cup Coke
>simmer, stirring constantly until coke is gone (3-5 minutes) and onions appear caramelized.

That's how you make crack

wheres the baking soda bruh, lrn to drug

THANK YOU. I've often wondered if I was somehow doing it wrong because it always takes me so long to caramelize onions.

You are doing it right. I'm pretty sure recipes are misleading because seeing, "Cook for 10 minutes until tender. Then stir in salt (etc), raise heat, and stir constantly for 25-35 minutes until caramelized," on recipe will result in people just not bothering.

Why Coke? People have been adding sugar forever to fake carmelized onion

Theres a semi-famous article about this, because the journalist took the time to disprove this and made it to the top results in google and now Google's results truncate it to the 10 minute lie since thats what he starts the article stating.

Neat. I'll have to look that up.

>To caramelise onions? You'd best be fucking trolling.

I'm not the guy you're replying to, but the pressure cooker works great for that. It's even recommended in Modernist Cuisine for exactly that purpose.

How long in a pressure cooker and do you just use oil or some liquid?

I've never caramelised onion without adding and re-adding and re-adding lots of wine or beer. Doing that, it takes me, I would guess, 20ish minutes. Maybe 25ish? Not sure.
Am I cheating by using wine's/beer's natural sugar to aid in caramelisation?

By the way, I'm asking because we also caramelise cabbage by cooking it pretty much the same way as we do onion only without the alcohol. That takes for-fucking-ever. Like 50 minutes at least.

Cuz the coke stains into the onions to make them appear caramelized.

you're not making risotto dude, jesus

I don't remember the cooking time I used.
The recipe was to pack canning jars with the onion, then place those inside the pressure cooker with a little bit of water in the bottom. Same basic procedure as canning vegetables for food preparation, except in this case the goal was to carmelize the onions for french onion soup.

>Am I cheating by using wine's/beer's natural sugar to aid in caramelisation?
Yes. The idea behind normal carmelization is that you have to drive off most of the moisture in the onions (or other veg). Once the moisture is driven off then the natural sugars within with start to carmelize. The moisture much be driven off first (when using an normal pot) because as long as the moisture is present the sugars won't get hot enough to caramelize.

A pressure cooker can get hotter than a normal pot therefore it can carmelize without driving the water off first.

Lol nice reference. I taught myself how to cook onions when I was 13 I never paid much attention to cook books or cooking shows. Tbh I rarely look watch or read those shows for simple stuff. It's why I cant stand Alton brown or Rachel Ray where they talk down and explain every little thing like I'm a fucking infant. I rarely bother with recipes either. I just distill the essence of how a person does something then do it off the cuff in my kitchen later. Like I learned how to make a great res sauce from Lydia but I've never read her exact recipe.

Your chef sounds hillbilly as fuck.

Maybe you just need to find recipe sources that are more trustworthy? I just checked four places, three of them said at least 30 minutes and the last one said 45 minutes to an hour.

Onions are an aphrodisiac in India

you must have an electric range, or a low btu gas unit.

The point of carmelizing onions is not to make them LOOK carmelized, dumbass.

>Why do recipes lie?

Because a lot of recipes are written by retards that don't actually understand the terms they are using. Most people, including some recipe authors, don't know the difference between sauteeing and caramelizing onions.

I can't even count how many times I have mentioned caramelizing onions on this very board only to have someone reply:
>you take 45 min to caramelize onions? you idiot, I can do it in 10

it takes you 45 minutes to caramelize onions? you idiot I can do it in 10

have a (You)

o u

youtube.com/watch?v=057XTJGWHUM

please don't hate me Veeky Forums, I'm just a messenger

This is pasta, right?

10,000% this.

Not at all. I don't even bother paying attention to how long onions take to caramelize, I just wait til they smell right and look right while I do other things in the kitchen and I find many cooking shows unwatchable because they bog you down with tedious mundane details that anybody who's cooked for a while doesn't need.

>distilling the essence

Let me know when you've opened your meme restaurant in Brooklyn

It will be in an up and coming neighborhood of Alameda county actually. And will not have a meme themr.

hence why he referred to it as cheating

BINGO! Becuse it's fast and easy and 99% of the mouthbreathers who at at the joint I worked at couldn't tell the difference. All carmelization is is the gentle burning of the native sugars in the onions anyhow. This just adds extra sugars and carmel coloring to make sauted onions look carmelized.

MMMmmm what is the recipe?

What are you trying to do with the onions. Do you need proper caramelization, or is browning good enough? Are you fine with caramelized sugar added to browned onions in your eight-ingredient soup, or do the onions NEED to shine?

I saw a cooking show on tv and the cook would handpeel the onions.

Doesn't he realize he can just cut it in half or removee the top and bottom and remove the outer layer in a second instead of tediously peel them by hand?

fun fact most caramel colorings are actually caramelized sugars. Don't let that shit sit around at room temperature too long or you'll start smelling some fermentation .

are you all kidding?
chop the onions, put them in a big pan with enough oil (may be 2 to a lot of tbspoons I don't know how big your pans are) on high heat after having heated the oil, cover the pan and stir them something like once a minute
I'm confident that it never took me more than 10 min

You're browning the onions, not caramelizing them.

Essentially you're cooking proteins, not sugars. The end result looks similar, but the flavours are more "meaty" (umami) and less sweet.

...

It's called "caramelizing", not "carbonizing", OP.

Lrn2/ck/.

????