Technique: Carmelized Onions

Carmelized onions in four stages: raw, softened, golden, carmelized.  

Carmelizing onions is a fundamental and useful technique. When well cooked - which takes about 25 minutes for a large onion - they develop a rich sweet and savory. From there, they can be used many ways:

• Tossed with pasta, cheese and herbs
• Used as a topping for grillled pizza
• Simply presented as "grilled onions" as if on a burger from an old school diner
• Stuffed in roasts, such as pork or butterflied turkey breast
• As a key ingredient in a rich tomato sauce with sweet peppers and sausage

To Carmelize Onions

1. Onions cook down to a pretty small quantity when carmelized. Don't be afraid to use a lot of onion.  
2. Slice 2 or 3 large onions. You can slice across the equator, or pole-to-pole. Slices should be consistent in size, either 1/4" (larger) or 1/8" (smaller). 
3. Add a tablespoon of olive oil in a large skillet. Over medium-high heat allow the onions to cook for 30 to 35 minutes total. Stir the onions about every 5 minutes to loosen from the bottom of the pan. 
4. Season with a little sea salt and fresh ground pepper. 

Option 1: Add 3-4 sprigs of thyme and one bay leaf for additional flavor. 

Option 2: Use 50% onion, 50% fresh sliced fennel. After 10 minutes, add a tablespoon of fennel seeds, two teaspoons of red pepper flakes. 

Homemade Carmelized Onion Dip 

This is what most people would call "French Onion Dip".

1. Chop 1/4 of a large onion into a fine dice, about 1/4" pieces or smaller. You should have about half a cup. 
2. Saute onion in olive oil, along with a tablespoon of sugar. 
3. Allow onion pieces to get dark brown - just short of being burnt. 
4. Immediately add to one cup sour cream. 
5. Refrigerate. Stir once an hour. Serve at least two hours later or overnight. 

For the past five weeks or so I’ve shared some thoughts about ingredient selection:

Ultimately, the key to ingredient selection is to develop a critical eye for what you determine to be the best available product – just don’t choose randomly. Consistency in ingredient selection will help create consistency in your cooking.

Fresh Leeks from our garden

On Technique 

I used to think that developing sound cooking techniques was the hardest part of cooking, that is, if you already took advantage of good recipes, of which there are fewer than you’d expect. 

As I think about it further, developing technique boils down to just two key elements – awareness and repetition. Once you know what to do you can practice and get better; then get faster and develop true expertise. It’s just a matter of time.

Maybe ingredient selection is harder than that – seasons change, vendors change, products change, shelf life, organics, locally sourced…….yes, that’s definitely harder.

Cooking Techniques – A View From 30,000 Feet

I’ll share here a simple outline of the types of techniques needed for sound, fundamental cooking. Not tricks, shortcuts, specialty techniques – just the things you need to make every day cooking more reliable. As the weeks go by, I’ll share details about specific techniques and recipes that use them.

Techniques

1.       Mise en Place – being organized from the start

2.       Prep Cooking – getting products ready for the “real cooking”

3.       “Cooking” – sauté, braise, roast, grill, brine, deep fry, steam, brown, stir fry,….

4.       Cooling and resting

I’d guess that most people would think that '#3–Cooking', would be the hardest skill of all. I don’t think so. Oh sure, that’s the area where there’s greatest potential for disaster. But,......

Without organization, the whole cooking process can get convoluted, nerve racking and time consuming - thus discouraging. 

Prep cooking, well, it takes the most time usually. So it becomes a very critical stage so you don’t get discouraged with the overall cooking process, or decide that you’ll ‘never try to peel a mango again’. 

Cooling and resting are critical to final quality and taste. In fact, might be the single most important steps for many dishes. 

Simple Spring Recipes for After Your Easter Feast

A month or so ago when I began to focus on ingredient selection, I was picturing a massive glossary of how to pick out numerous ingredients - staples, meats, produce etc. But I suspect you may not want a glossary all in one go. So I'll begin to shift a little from ingredients to technique, just as the seasons are shifting now around the country.

After many people have a big Easter dinner, these two recipes are so simple that you might want to try them this upcoming week.

I made two dishes last week, for the same meal, each of which had very, very few ingredients. So the importance of ingredient selection was underscored. Yet, the keys to make  each dish incredible were very much centered on technique. The first dish was "Barely Cooked Zucchini with Almost No Vinaigrette".

• Technique 1: Sweating zucchinis and squashes in a colander with Kosher salt. You may have run across this technique before. It's counter-intuitive to sweat moisture OUT of a vegetable, then rinse it, but you don't want all that salt. Using very fresh squashes make cooking almost unnecessary. 
• Technique 2: Barely, barely cooking the zucchinis. Overcooking vegetables, especially squashes and zucchinis, is a sin to me. I think the quick 60-90 second saute in olive oil helped just seal the vegetable surface with a little oil and heat. I may try this again with no cooking at all. 
• Technique 3: Using very, very little vinaigrette. I've mentioned this before, see: Secret Weapons for Great Summer Salads. In this case adding a very tiny dose to the zucchinis was just right. I used a cipollini onion-based vinaigrette recently published in The Frankies Spuntino Kitchen Companion and Cooking Manual, a very attractively produced book about Italian-American home cooking. I don't want to copy their recipe here, so buy the book. It's got a few gems you'll enjoy, and is fun to read. 

You can find the zucchini recipe and one for a subtle vinaigrette in separate posts.

The other dish was Sausage with Sage Brown Butter, another offering from The Frankies. Again, I'll not recreate their recipe. However, the key technique was to par-boil good Italian sausages, allow them to cool slightly, then cut them into coins. Saute these sausage coins in a large wide pan, undisturbed, to create a lot of browning. That's the best part of sausage, isn't it? Their technique maximized the crusty parts. Awesome. whether it's sage brown butter sauce, simple tomato sauce, or anything else, this technique is a valuable and simple one to have at your disposal.

For more on Italian ingredient selection, including sausage, see "How to Survive Without An Italian Deli".

Note: If you critically observe this picture, there's not massive browning on the sausage coins and little evidence of sage or brown butter. Several reasons:

1. All the authentic hot Italian sausages with sage were long gone by the time I pulled out the camera. 
2. A parallel batch of this dish was made with Italian-style turkey sausages, a fairly inexpensive, fairly healthy product even the picky kids in my house like.  
3. The Frankies technique added a good amount of extra flavor to the slightly bland (which is why they like them) turkey sausages. 
4. There's no way my son would eat sage brown butter, so he got just butter, as depicted.  

Barely Cooked Zucchini with Almost No Vinaigrette

This is a unique combination of technique and a light hand on ingredients. Sweating the zucchinis with salt makes cooking almost unnecessary. Of all places you'd never expect, I learned this technique from a master chef who specializes in the cuisine of southwest China. 

1 pound zucchini

½ pound yellow squash

2 tablespoons Kosher salt

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 tablespoons homemade vinaigrette

1.     Slice zucchini and squash into ¼” rounds. Place in a colander and sprinkle with 2 tablespoons kosher salt. Mix to combine. Let drain for 15 minutes. Rinse with cold water and shake to drain.

2.     Heat olive oil in a large skillet over high heat. Add the drained zucchinis and cook for 60 to 90 seconds, shaking the pan a few times to release the slices.

3.     Transfer zucchinis to a bowl and toss with no more than 2 tablespoons vinaigrette. Add additional fresh ground pepper if desired. 

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Subtle Vinaigrette

Vinaigrette can be as simple as 1 tablespoon vinegar to 3 or 4 tablespoons olive oil, plus salt and pepper. Classic French versions add Dijon mustard and herbs. Lately, I've liked using sherry vinegar and rice wine vinegar in equal parts, and peanut oil and olive oil in equal parts, with a little lemon juice:

1/4 cup Sherry vinegar 
1/4 cup rice wine vinegar 
3/4 cup peanut oil
3/4 cup olive oil 
Juice of half a lemon 
Salt and fresh ground pepper


I buy a terrific brand of rice wine vinegar from Pearl River Bridge (their Soy Sauces are also very good). Terrific value and available at almost any Asian market. 


Sherry vinegar is a little trickier to source. I've never seen a decent anywhere but specialty markets. Here are a couple I've used with success brand from Paez Morilla, Jose Paez Lobato and L'Estournell. I avoid Don Bruno (actually from mass producer Roland), and Columela, though these might be found in mainstream groceries. Search Amazon.com for sherry vinegar. 

vOne I don't think I'll try is La Bodega, individually numbered, only 4,000 bottle made per year, at $45 for 6.8 ounces at Williams Sonoma.