The Lie Of Caramelized Onions

The Lie Of Caramelized Onions

OH MY GOD, I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST ME

Rarely have I been as happy, as personally validated, to read a Slate story as this one: "Layers of Deceit: Why do recipe writers lie and lie and lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions?"
 
I only recently came to this whole "cooking food" thing. For the first, oh, 30 years of my life, I was strictly a processed and pre-packaged food gal. Lean Cuisine for lunch, frozen pizza for dinner, bag of pre-packaged salad (with all the fixins) as a healthy side dish. (What can I say? I was raised as a latchkey kid by a single mother who worked all day, then went to class at night to earn her MBA. My mom didn't have the time or energy to cook, and I certainly wasn't going to bother.)

 
I find that there are a lot of things people just know about cooking, which are rarely actually mentioned in the recipe. You're just supposed to know, for example, that "green peppers" probably means "green bell peppers" and not "jalapenos." You're supposed to know that if a recipe calls for green bell peppers, you can use red or orange if you want it to be even better. For years I didn't use red or orange bell peppers, because recipes always specified "green bell peppers."
 
So this thing about caramelizing onions, I just always assumed I was doing it wrong. And being an inexpert cook at best, I followed the recipe to the letter. If the recipe said to cook the onions for five minutes until they are caramelized, I cooked them for five minutes, end of story. If they weren't exactly caramelized… well, what the heck does that mean, anyway? I assumed that either I wasn't cooking them right, or I just didn't know what "caramelized" meant.
 
But here it turns out I was right all along. If you want your onions brown and tender, which is to say "caramelized," you need to cook them for at least half an hour - probably more like 50 minutes.
 
All those recipes that say otherwise? They lie.
 
This is part of the trend for recipes to be done quickly. In the name of quick meals, recipe writers (or rather, editors) cut a lot of corners that they really shouldn't. But if you don't know, how are you supposed to know? You know?
 
Anyway. Do yourself a favor and REALLY caramelize some onions sometime, to see what you're missing! And mistrust any recipe that says you can do anything meaningful to an onion in only five minutes!