Caramelized Onions

There are very few things that do not benefit from caramelized onions, almost all of which should not be eaten. The biggest roadblock to having delicious gooey onions is how long it takes to do it right. The best compromise I've found is to make a massive batch at once. It takes about the same amount of time to cook 1 onion as it does to cook 10. Because this is a pretty straight forward recipe, I thought I'd also share some of my favorite kitchen tools.

Onions

butter

salt

sugar

I have a terrible habit of excluding onions from my shopping list. I just always assume I have some. This works for me most of the time, but on the occasion I will go to the market and just stare at the bags of onions, wondering if I have one or six or no onions left at home. They are cheap, so I almost always grab a bag. Then I come home, realize i bought a bag last week, and try to figure out just what the hell to do with all these damn things. Caramelized onions, that's what we do. 

I've seen dozens of recipes floating around the Internet for quick, easy, tasty caramelized onions and that's fine but that's not what we are making here. When I want an ultra-traditional and completely impractical recipe, there is only one place I look to for guidance. Larousse Gastronomique. 

This is a direct quote from the 1961 English edition, which was a direct translation from the 1938 French edition, "Glazed onions. Heat some butter in a shallow pan and put in the onions. Season with salt and a pinch of caster (fine) sugar. Cook, covered, on a moderate heat, in such a way as to allow the onions to cook and acquire their colour at the same time". That's pretty vague, but we have enough information to work with and some interesting points. I've seen several sites say that using sugar is "cheating". Those sites are clearly wrong. 

Cut the ends from the onions, then split in half and peel. I probably lost a fair amount of people right there. Personally, I hated cutting onions before I moved in with Miss Bailey. Awful, nasty, things used to make me cry like crazy. Miss Bailey, God bless her, introduce me to the two greatest onion chopping tools.

If you wear those dorky goggles shamelessly from start to finish, I guarantee you wont end up a sobbing mess. The second tool is a bench scraper. Its fantastic for clearing off cutting boards or moving cut onions from the table to the pan. I used to use my knife to do this, but the bench scrape has a much bigger surface and I don't care if it gets dull. 

I find the easiest way to peel a large amount of onions is to cut the ends, then split the onion, then peel. If you peel before splitting its not a fun time. Once they are peeled, I cut them into semi-circles.

Next head a nob of butter over medium heat and add the onions. Season with salt and sugar (two pinches of salt, one of sugar) and wait.

This is the onions after an hour on the stove covered, stirring every ten minutes.

They certainly are broken down, but they don't have that delicious brown color that we are shooting for. At this point I removed the cover, cooked for ten additional minutes, and got this.

Which is pretty much exactly what we were shooting for. You could probably uncover somewhere at the 30 minute mark and have similar results. These are great in, on, and around pretty much all food. Go crazy man, seriously.