<p>Onions are like the base of every good curry or sauce, but it’s so time-consuming to chop them (and often painful), and then caramelize them for 20 minutes. Lately I’ve been taking a leaf from red cooking (which braises) and experimenting with frying sugar dissolved in hot oil (on medium-low). I fry with ginger, garlic and sometimes chili or habanero peppers that have been mashed into a paste by mortar and pestle. After 5 minutes I might toss in ground beef, curry paste, other spices and then after a while some Chinese vegetables (yu choy, sweet king napa). It often makes a good sauce for ramen (cooked with the water drained, when I get sick of eating rice). </p>
<p>Sugar by itself in hot oil turns from slightly yellow liquid into a black solid that you can’t deglaze in like 60 seconds, so you have to fry it with things rich in protein (like tofu) to encourage the Maillard reaction and deglaze upon an appropriate amount of scorching. If the reaction is quenched too early, there won’t be enough flavor (but this is like deglazing when the onions haven’t scorched). The flavor can be quite rich and intense. You can fry like 4 tablespoons of sugar and if browned sufficiently the “raw sweetness” is no longer present but a very diverse range of flavor is. </p>
<p>However from a quick googling frying sugar as a part of a savory sauce seems kind of uncommon so I wonder if anyone has ever tried it?</p>
<p>Better that you just learn how to chop an onion.
You don’t need any skill to burn sugar.
[YouTube</a> - Broadcast Yourself.](<a href=“YouTube”>YouTube)</p>
<p>So much time spent on trying to avoid chopping onions. Spend the time chopping a huge number of onions, double wrap them/place in plastic et al for odor control and freeze what you don’t use. Or buy frozen chopped onions. Indian H does this. We also take shortcuts all of the time- the microwave is your friend. No reason to follow cookbook directions when the result tastes fine with less effort. Powdered spices are used very successfully by many Indian cooks here. Who spends 20 minutes carmelizing onions???</p>
<p>It sounds like you are willing to spend a lot of time with experiments, time for onions is not really the issue. Not at all impressed with your other efforts. The risk of burning sugar, cleaning up messes or ruining a smooth stove top just to say you did something different not worth it. Think about good tasting food, not fancy methods- your guests won’t care how many hours, or minutes, it took to produce food they enjoy.</p>
<p>I do. I cook Indian food all the time. And Thai/Chinese, etc. Not much caramelizing of onions there. (For a good French onion soup, it actually takes more like 40 minutes.) </p>
<p>Honestly, it is not time consuming to chop an onion. Peel the onion. Cut it in half from top to bottom. Place flat side down on cutting board and either slice thinly OR make a few long cuts from one end towards the other and then quickly cut across them. Voila. Chopped onion. Probably took 1 minute, including peeling. What’s the big deal?</p>
<p>Caramelizing sugar–which is something I do frequently, since I make and sell a lot of sea salt caramels–is a lot lengthier and touchier a process than chopping an onion.</p>
<p>Edit: I mostly use Madhur Jaffrey’s recipes for Indian food, and she rarely calls for actually caramelizing onions. Browning, yes, sometimes. The onions in the soup are <em>really</em> caramelized. Actually, I’m realizing on rereading the original post that the whole issue is garbled. Not clear what cuisine the OP is talking about. In any case, slowly cooked onions, often with other vegetables, sometimes browned, sometimes not, are part of the flavor base of many dishes in many cuisines, and there is no shortcut that will produce the same result.</p>
<p>I rarely have a problem with crying while chopping onions. Peel it underwater. Slice from the bloom side (not the root side). Use a sharp knife and in seconds you have chopped onion.</p>
<p>I actually start most meals with caramelized onions, but my method takes no supervision and very little effort… but a lot of time. </p>
<p>Chop the onions. Add olive oil to the pan. Put the lid on. Put the pan on the lowest possible heat setting. Ignore except for stirring every half hour or so for about two hours or more. </p>
<p>You can freeze caramelized onions so I usually do three or four (or more) large onions at a time , then freeze them spread thin in a ziplock bag so I can just break off a chunk.</p>
<p>On the crying thing…the trick is to keep your mouth shut. Seriously. Keep your lips together, don’t talk, and breathe only through your nose.</p>
<p>dmd77: I often do something similar with onions and chopped red/yellow/orange peppers, especially when the peppers are getting a little elderly. But I’ve never frozen them. Great idea!</p>
<p>LOL–I just remembered when the kids were little…really little…I would sometimes have no idea what to make for dinner but I would start frying some onions before my DH came home so at least the house smelled like I had an idea! And usually he would help make dinner, or take over entirely if I was nursing a little one.</p>
<p>And HE would nurse a before-dinner drink! ;)</p>
<p>I think the secret to chopping onions is a sharp knife. I have to admit I despise getting the skin off onions. Drives me crazy! If it’s really the chopping stage you hate you can use a food processor, though the fumes when you take the lid off can knock you dead.</p>
<p>I like caramalized sugar, but the flavor the onions give almost any recipe are so good I can’t imagine trying to subsitute them.</p>
<p>Pound for pound it’s literally the same price for me to buy a bag of pre-chopped onions at the market (fresh in produce), but regular onions keep longer. Learn how to chop them looking at the youtube video. It takes no time at all. I often pre-soften onions prior to saut</p>
<p>I just got a 1000 watt blender, so tonight I blended garlic, ginger and a habanero pepper together in oil and olive oil instead of using a mortar and pestle. The paste and the sugar got brown but they weren’t scorching so I added some baking soda, which accelerates caramelization and the Maillard reaction. (A tsp) This added some water (it produces water and CO2) but it boiled away sorta quickly – baking soda is actually quite a good deglazing agent! The mixture became really bubbly and smelled funny (alkaline things usually never smell good at first) but it gave way to a rich smell after a few minutes, upon which I added generic Masala curry powder (can only find generic mixes in C’ville, even in the Asian market-- sigh!), belacan shrimp paste and some Thai curry paste. Then it really started to smell good, but it didn’t scorch at all. To make sure the base was all gone I squeezed half of a lime (I used the other half two days before) at the end of it. </p>
<p>The flavor was really rich and creamy(!) for some reason, and sweetness well controlled; it’s like part of the ground beef had turned into cheese or something-- with the texture of melted cheese on beef, but without the cheesy flavor. I guess with baking soda you don’t need to wait until it’s scorched for a super rich flavor-- it’s also a little healthier. </p>
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<p>When I am pressed for time and have assignments due, I cook a mixture of quick Singaporean, Thai and American college </p>
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<p>Not much time spent evading chopping onions really. I did all of the steps I would have used to cook a quick and dirty curry, except substitute onions with sugar (and frying the sugar with the ginger and garlic-- onions are usually the first thing you fry).</p>
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<p>You have to spend twenty minutes if you don’t add baking soda (which in the past I’ve avoided because I would always end up producing too much water, but now I know to carefully control it). That is, if you want a super-rich and flavorful product. I’m not talking about the caramelized onions that are served with burgers – that stuff’s pulled too early before the real reactions begin ;)</p>
<p>I often chop up leftover lettuce that is starting to wilt and brown and use it as onion, pepper, cabbage for ramen and other things. It makes a nice substiture for endives which are pricey. I often add a pinch of sugar when I cook.</p>
<p>You can do caramelized onions in the crockpot, putting them in the morning and they would be ready to go when you got home or let them cook overnight.</p>
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