Adding caramelized onions to your cooking repertoire is a great way to spice up countless recipes from burgers to baked beans to soups. Using nothing more than onions butter salt and pepper you can easily make them at home and add a complex umami flavor to your home-cooked meals. The only downside to caramelized onions is that they take a little time to prepare. You’ll need at least 30 minutes to achieve the right texture and flavor and if you try to take shortcuts the quality of your caramelized onions will suffer.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
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 America's Test Kitchen | 2022-12-18 20:00:05 |  6,259,887 Views |
Faster Caramelized Onions with Water #Shorts
You may have heard that baking soda can speed up the caramelization process and while that may be true it comes at a price. The alkalinity of baking soda will soften the onions faster saving you time but also leaving you with a slurry that looks more like onion jam than caramelized onions. If you want the best texture and flavor skip the baking soda trick when making caramelized onions.
Understanding how baking soda affects the caramelization process requires a little bit of food science. A phenomenon called the Maillard reaction is responsible for the browning that occurs when you apply heat to onions. As onions cook they release sugars that give them their characteristic caramel brown color. The onions also soften due to the moisture released during the cooking process. When you add baking soda to this chemical reaction your onions will brown and soften much faster.
With a pH of around 8 baking soda is naturally alkaline. Adding even a pinch of this common pantry staple will change the pH of your sour onions and higher alkalinity speeds up the Maillard reaction. Your caramelized onions will be soft and brown within 10 minutes but they’ll also be mushier than they would be without the baking soda. You can certainly get a creamier texture if you plan on using the onions in a dip or spread. However you’ll find that the baking soda will also affect the flavor of your onions.
