Cooking tips, tricks, and advice from professional kitchens
Posts tagged onions
Perfect caramelized onions
Jan 17th
For totally perfect caramelized onions, it is best to use a mandolin slicer to get even and super thin slices. Even slices are important for even cooking.
Peel the onions and cut in half through the root end. Using the mandolin, and watching your fingers, cut to form thin semi-circles. The thinner, the more fine your end product will be. Keep in mind that the onions will cook down to aproximatly 1/5 – 1/10 of their starting weight.
Pre-heat a large enough pot to hold however many onions you’ve cut with about 1-2 tbsp of canola oil. Add the onions, with a 1-3 tsp salt. The salt will draw moisture from the onions, allowing them to caramelize once enough of the water has evaporated. Stir to coat all the onions in oil and cook over medium-low heat. Stir often and make sure that nothing is sticking to the bottom of the pan.
The onions will take up to an hour to cook down nice and slowly. With this method you don’t need to add any sugar to cheat on caramelization. The low heat and little bit of salt will do the trick as long as you are patient. Once you pass through the sweating stage and most of the moisture has evaporated, you need to pay a little more attention, and stir more often than before. Cook until the onions are an even color of your liking.
Store cooled extras in zipper bags in the freezer for up to 3 months or so.
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My New Favourite Thing: Super Quick Fresh Pizzas
Dec 6th
Fresh home-made pizza is one of the best things ever. But who can be bothered to make a dough, let it proof, punch it, let it proof again only to still have to make everything you want on the thing?!
The solution I’ve found, (sad that it took me so long to implement even though we’ve been doing this at work since long before I started a year ago) is to make all the components separately and freeze them in individual portions.
For the base, simply make the dough as you would regularly, make enough for however many pizzas you want, and after rolling, freeze.
A sub-tip here is to freeze them all on a baking sheet with a piece of wax paper in between and once frozen, wrap individually in saran wrap to prevent freezer burn.
For the sauce and the toppings, make as per the recipes you like, and freeze in small zip lock baggies. I’ve found this works brilliantly for garlic mushrooms, caramelized onions and sauce so far, and from work I know this also works with sausages (cut to size first).
When you want a pizza, simply pull one bag each of whatever you want on it from the freezer, let them defrost in the fridge (or in the microwave) and there you are home-made from scratch pizza any time you like.
