Several years ago in Slate, Tom Scocca sliced Big Onion wide open with an exposé of a damnable lie replicated in innumerable published recipes:
Layers of Deceit
Why do recipe writers lie and lie and lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions?Browning onions is a matter of patience. My own patience ran out earlier this year while leafing through the New York Times food section. There, in the newspaper of record, was a recipe for savory scones with onions, currants, and caraway. Though I wasn’t particularly interested in making savory scones, one passage caught my eye:
Add the onions to the skillet and increase the heat to medium-high. Cook until they begin to turn dark brown and somewhat soft, about 5 minutes. Add the oil and a pinch of the fine sea salt; continue cooking until the onions are soft and caramelized, about 5 minutes longer.
Soft, dark brown onions in five minutes. That is a lie. Fully caramelized onions in five minutes more. Also a lie.
There is no other word for it. Onions do not caramelize in five or 10 minutes. They never have, they never will—yet recipe writers have never stopped pretending that they will.
I remember reading this and thinking, “YES! Stop fucking lying about the onions!” I know why they do it. Scocca explained. They want you to try their recipe — and even better, tweet and like it on social media — so they shorten the total cooking time so you won’t think it’s too hard and move on to something easier.
Recipe editors mostly got the message, I think. I baked bread earlier today and was browsing souped-up grilled cheese recipes when I spotted a recipe for caramelized onion grilled cheese sandwiches with miso butter in The Post. Here’s how that recipe treats the caramelized onions:
In a large skillet over medium-high heat, heat the oil until shimmering. Add the onion and salt and cook, stirring often, until the onions start to soften and brown, 5 to 6 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium-low and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions are deeply browned and sticky, 30 to 45 minutes.
That’s more like it.
I have another recipe gripe, but the motivations behind it aren’t as clear to me, unless recipe writers are in league with the fossil fuel industry. I’m referring to the tradition of starting the instructions section of every recipe with “Preheat over to X.” In some cases, yeah, it makes sense to do that. By the time you get the simple ingredients assembled, the oven will be at the correct temperature, and you can pop the dish in.
But virtually ALL recipes start with the “preheat oven” instructions, no matter how much time will elapse between turning the oven on and placing the item into it. Martha Stewart’s rustic Meyer lemon tart recipe is a particularly egregious example:
Step 1
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Make the crust: Whisk together flour, sugar, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and the lemon zest in a large bowl. Cut in butter with a pastry cutter or your fingers until dough begins to hold together.Step 2
Stir together 1 tablespoon water and vanilla, then mix into dough. Shape dough into a disk, and wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.Step 3
Using your fingers, press dough evenly into bottom and up sides of a 9-inch fluted tart pan with a removable bottom. Freeze for 30 minutes.Step 4
Bake tart shell until golden, about 25 minutes. Let cool completely.
Emphasis mine. Why would I stand next to a hot stove while preparing the dough, chilling it for half an hour, taking it out of the fridge, rolling it out, placing it into the tart pan and freezing it for another 30 minutes before putting it in the oven? This makes no fucking sense, unless I planned to cook a damned meatloaf while waiting out crust-chilling sessions.
We need to know what temperature to set the oven to, obviously, but do recipes really need to tell us WHEN to turn the oven on? I don’t think so. It’s not blatantly deceptive like the 5-minute caramelized onion fallacy. But they should just tell us the baking temperature — maybe below the ingredients but before the instructions? — and let us figure out for ourselves when to turn the oven on.
Open thread.
JR
Add some baking soda to the onions
Omnes Omnibus
Magic grits.
zhena gogolia
The preheat oven thing is annoying.
I just thought I had the wrong kind of onions. I don’t think I’ve ever succeeded in browning onions. Shallots, yes.
MomSense
I love you TaMara! I am always hate reading recipes.
Best way to caramelize onions I’ve found is slicing them into rounds and putting them in a cast iron skillet in the oven at 425. Even better if you roast a chicken on top of the onion slices in a cast iron skillet. For a small bird it takes about 1 hour. Roast chicken with crispy skin, caramelized onions, garlic mashed potatoes with the pan juices is honestly the best meal ever.
The rub for the chicken is so easy. This recipe makes enough for two 3-4lb whole chickens.
Major Major Major Major
Wow! If this is endemic to online recipes, it would explain a lot of my frustrations over the last few months lol.
In other news, oh look, the anthology I’ve been working on since last spring came out today! Linking to amazon because it has the description and stuff; on the off chance you buy, note that the hardcover is having major issues (manufacturer borked due to COVID somehow)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1640760458/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Yutsano
@Omnes Omnibus: Ah. Now we know where you got your courtroom style.
TomatoQueen
That’s a lovely loaf.
Martha Stewart has been and always will be a goddamned liar. Don’t get me started.
As much as I love ’em, caramelized onions in a recipe will always make me think twice. I wonder whether it’s a good idea to do a big stash of them from time to time, then portion and freeze for later use.
Bevster
As for preheating the oven, I made the mistake years ago of buying a Thermador commercial-style range. That oven takes fcking forever to preheat. When the repair guy came out to replace a heating element (byee, several hundred bucks!), he told me these restaurant ovens are designed to be on all day, so that even if you turn them on and let the temperature gauge get to the correct number, it may not really be there. He recommended preheating for at least an hour. Sure enough, the timing on my baked goods is now much closer to what’s listed in the recipe. Next time, I’m buying a landlord special from Costco.
MattF
If you’re going to talk about oven temperatures and food fallacies, I’ve got one. Everyone has noticed that opening the oven door (and thereby letting out all the hot air) doesn’t affect the oven temperature, as indicated on the oven display panel, right? The obvious explanation is that Big Oven, determined to keep us fat and happy, doesn’t want us to see the real oven temperature.
But… there’s a better and actually true explanation. The heat in an oven that gets to and cooks the food doesn’t come from the air in the oven (unless you are using a convection oven)– the heat comes from the walls of the oven emitting infrared radiation, which penetrates the food and cooks it.
So, now you know.
trollhattan
Before we bag too much on Martha I give her one-pan spaghetti recipe kudos for simplifying my backpacking cooking. You put everything in the pot (should be a skillet but I’m not toting one of those thankyavermuch) tomatoes, onions, garlic, spices, etc. (depending on what direction you wish to go) and measured amounts of liquid and dry pasta, then cook until the pasta is al dente. Sounded ridiculous to me but damned if it doesn’t work. Add sausage at the end and serve. It avoids boilling and draining the pasta separately, which isn’t so much of a pain at home but in the mountains seems an absurd extra step. No more. The tricky bit is balancing the pasta and liquid amounts but if you start on the low side you can add liquid as you go.
The spousal unit just got an Instant Pot. Lots of dang buttons, including one labeled “porridge.” Okay then.
catclub
@Major Major Major Major:
Is THAT the problem? diva author?
Sab
YES! I have a much loved recipe for onion soup that says it should take about 15 minutes to caramelize the onions, and I have never managed to do it in less than an hour.
Major Major Major Major
@catclub: pun acknowledged.
catclub
This is true. If my oven had been at 450 and I reset it to 350. It will
ding that it is up to temperature and say 350. yeah, right.
Yutsano
Wait no I get it.
They’re being sneaky. There are actually two ways to caramelize onions. One is the long slow low heat process that makes divine onion mush. The other is to get a coating of caramelization on the outside while the onions themselves are just cooked. They were trying make it sound sexier than just browning well. Jeez why do they not have recipe editors? Ina Garten, for all her flaws, doesn’t ever write a recipe like this.
tomtofa
Especially since you need to set the heat on the stove lower than they usually say, or you’ll end up with brittle bitter black onions. And stir more than occasionally.
trollhattan
@Bevster:
That’s funny. We replaced our 25YO Dacor with another Dacor that’s heavier duty and the oven takes forever to cool, plus the control panel has its own little exhaust fan that keeps going quite awhile after shut off. “Are you sure you don’t have anything else to cook?” seems to be the message.
FelonyGovt
YES on the “pre-heat oven” directions. It ALWAYS takes me longer to accomplish the steps in a recipe than they say anyway. By the time I’m ready to get the thing in my ancient oven, it’s WAY too hot and what comes out is burned on the bottom.
laura
But virtually ALL recipes start with….
First you make a roux.
Agree with JR about the Maillard Reaction ph and browning are “A Thing.” I also like a wee drib of a vinegar like sherry vinegar to sharpen the onion flavor but not so much that the vinegar flavor is pronounced.
Major Major Major Major
@MattF: this doesn’t quite make sense to me, could you explain it like I’m 5?
hells littlest angel
Except for very finicky foods like soufflés, or with very short cooking times like frozen pizzas, getting the oven preheated is not something I worry much about.
Betty Cracker
@trollhattan: I am forever grateful to Martha for teaching me how to make Caesar salad dressing from scratch. The Meyer lemon tart is really good too! :)
CaseyL
I blame Big Onion.
The onion thing I had trouble figuring out was how to carmelize onions and keep them savory. They always came out on the sweet side – which is fine, usually, but sometimes I wanted that deep savory onion taste like when my grandmother made them.
I think I finally figured out how she did it: she fried the onions in schmaltz. That’s rendered chicken fat, an essential ingredient in old fashioned Jewish Mother cooking. The “savory” taste I craved wasn’t from the onions; it was from the schmaltz. (Don’t get me started on her grebenes (spelling?), which is chicken skin with schmaltz and onions, fried up until crisp, which were absolute heaven.)
And since I don’t cook in animal fats, because I love my heart and want it to go on beating for many more decades, I’ll have to accommodate myself to sweet carmelized onions. (Not exactly the stuff of martyrdom.)
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
I read that same article about onions and it changed my life. It wasn’t my fault that the onions weren’t done in 5 minutes! I also took away that cooking onions low and slow was the way to go (I sound like a low rider) and that has informed my cooking ever since.
I think that preheat thing goes back to when ovens were not nearly as reliable and fast as they are now.
I change up the order of stuff in savory recipes all the time now, particularly in stir-frys and recipes involving things like pork chops which call for you to fry the chops first and keep them warm while you prepare the rest of the dish. I hate overcooked meat so will do everything else and cook the chops last.
Major Major Major Major
I learned a decade or so that the right way to fry mushrooms is unseasoned, sliced and dry, cooked in a pan on medium-high heat in a single layer, flipped once. They come out meaty and delightful.
Betty Cracker
@Yutsano:
Just stop right there, bucko! Ina is flawless. It is known.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@trollhattan:
I love the Instant Pot that my spouse bought, allegedly to use himself, and that he has never touched. I’ve used it dozens of times and never touched any of the buttons other than On, Off, Sauté, and Pressure Cook.
I just looked, and mine has a Porridge button, too. I’ve have it for a year and never noticed.
MattF
@Major Major Major Major: Think of it as a ‘heat transfer’ question. Oven heat starts at the heating element, and then, somehow, has to get to the food in the oven to cook it. The question is how that happens. What happens is the heat goes (via infrared radiation) from the heating element to the walls of the oven, heats up the walls of the oven and then the heat is transferred to the food via infrared radiation. Is that clearer? The air in the oven heats up but doesn’t actually contribute much to transferring heat to the oven contents.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Sort of on-topic, we’ve been watching the Australian Bake Off after long ago watching all the British ones available. Some episodes back, they made Aussie Burgers “with the lot”, which are really an amazing pile of things on a burger. My wife noticed we had all the ingredients, and made them for lunch.
Yesterday we saw an episode where they made biscotti. My wife proceeded to make biscotti yesterday afternoon.
I love this woman.
As a general rule, we don’t get inspired by the ridiculous concoctions people make on these baking shows, they’re just too over the top. But even I have been slightly influenced. I’ve made bagels a couple times after they showed up. And after a recent one with marbled dough (a cake), I have an urge to make a marbled something. Bread, bagels, cookies, not sure what. Probably bagels again.
raven
The “pre-heat” the oven is so that the cooking time is accurate.
Betty Cracker
Another thing I always watch out for: recipes that tell you to sauté garlic for more than a minute or so, i.e., to dump the garlic in the pan along with other aromatics and cook for several minutes before adding the liquid. It burns the garlic, which makes the whole dish bitter. I add the garlic a minute or so before adding the liquid instead.
dmsilev
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: Yeah, I’m the same way with my Instant Pot. Timed pressure cooking, maybe the Saute function depending on what I’m making, maybe Keep Warm at the end, and that’s it. Don’t care about all the fancy preprogrammed modes.
Re: oven preheating, the only time that I care about a long preheat is when using a baking stone, for pizza or bread or whatever. That thing takes forever and a half to heat up, so when recipes say “preheat oven an hour before you plan to bake”, there’s a reason.
geg6
The only recipes I’ve found that are honest about how long it takes to carmelize onions are ones for French onion soup. Or any recipe calling for such onions in Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking. Julia always told it like it is.
Major Major Major Major
@MattF: that makes more sense, thanks!
Kristine
I also find recipe prep times in general to be ridiculously short. Anything involving more than opening a few cans and maybe chopping an onion takes longer than 10-20 minutes unless you’re an absolute samurai with a chef’s knife. Add in peeling/chopping, say, a butternut squash, and it’s easily 30+ minutes.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@trollhattan: I saw a reader contribution item in a magazine about favorite family dinners and one of them was for “Grandma’s spaghetti” which involved cooking the dry spaghetti in with the tomato sauce and ground beef. it was described as her children’s favorite that they made for their children now. Because of the rave review I tried it and it tasted almost exactly like canned Chef Boy R Dee spaghetti (which explained why the kids loved it so much).
cain
I think I’ve always filtered out those instructions. I don’t carmelize onions very often but even I know it takes a long time to do it.
I like using the instant pot to do it as I don’t have to manage it and it does come out nice and carmelized.
raven
You want complicated”
Julia’s Gateau De Crepes.
Or Paul Prudhomme’s recipes.
West of the Rockies
Oh, that’s a beautiful loaf of bread!
CaseyL
@Major Major Major Major: Thanks; I’ll have to try that!
If I want ‘shrooms done right, I’ve had to toss them in olive oil and spices and then roast them. Takes longer and uses a lot more heat.
Ken
Maybe they have a more elaborate porridge in mind, but I’ve never had any trouble with stirring oatmeal on the stove for three minutes.
geg6
@Betty Cracker:
Gotta agree. When I’m looking for something new to make or to find a recipe I’ve never made, she is one of my go tos. Always easy to follow and it always comes out fantastic. And there is no other way to roast chicken than Ina’s way.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Kristine: Yup, I always mentally double the prep time given in a recipe. If I’ve made it many, many times, I might be able to get it down to the listed time. And I don’t think I’m a particularly slow cook.
I do think recipe writers often both deliberately underestimate the prep time and simplify or combine steps that should be separate, like sautéing garlic with other ingredients, to make them seem less daunting or time-consuming. Experienced cooks can read through and spot the potential flaws, but success with a recipe shouldn’t depend on that.
Sewing patterns and instructions are a useful contrast – patterns are almost always rated for sewing experience level, for example, “confident beginner” or “advanced.” Recipes, at least in newspapers, should do the same.
sempronia
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: Half of the recipes in the included booklet were for Chinese dishes, and one of the listed authors was Chinese. The Instant Pot is great for congee, which is a staple of Chinese home food, so it’s nice to have a “porridge” preset button. Drop a couple chicken drumsticks or other meat in while you’re cooking, and it comes out fall-off-the-bone tender.
Major Major Major Major
@Ken: if it’s anything like the porridge setting on my rice cooker, I think it’s more for things like congee.
oatler.
“Nigel Slater’s Quick and Easy Recipe For Courgettes and Thrush Tongue in Aspic”. prep time 2 min.
Betty Cracker
@geg6: I make her roast chicken all the time. It’s fabulous.
MattF
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice:
Sometimes– just for amusement– I count the number of different ingredients in newspaper recipes. Cooking for myself, I rarely go above three or four.
catclub
Isn’t this highly US centric? Lots of places use convection ovens as standard?
Major Major Major Major
@MattF: googling some, seems like it’s still not recommended to open it for a lot of recipes since humidity is important.
catclub
I make barbecue pork in a slow cooker and it is also fall-off-the-bone tender. I was thinking about trying that with chicken dark meat.
MattF
@catclub: It’s certainly true that heat transfer is enhanced in a convection oven– heat gets carried by the moving air to the food.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@MattF: It depends. If many things on the ingredients list are spices that can all be measured into a bowl ahead of time and then dumped together into the pot, then a long list is fine with me. Likewise if you’re making a sauce and you chop up the onions, peppers, carrots, celery, mushrooms, etc. in advance and then sauté them together. But the more technique is needed, the fewer ingredients I’ll tolerate.
Frosty Fred
@catclub: Or turkey thighs. Highly recommended.
Major Major Major Major
@MattF: my dinners tend to be a well-made cut of meat, nuke-in-bag veggies, and well-made rice. If I’m feeling feisty I’ll make fresh veggies instead. You don’t need much more.
Falling Diphthong
Preach about the preheating thing! Just put “preheat the oven to” at the start of the last step, not before the hours of marinading and chilling.
It’s like recipe developers believe that “an oven” is a rare piece of equipment most cooks won’t have on hand, and so they need to warn you upfront.
Steeplejack (phone)
@CaseyL:
But, let me guess, your grandmother lived to be 99 years old.
MattF
@Major Major Major Major: My rice cooker does the rice– I’m one of those people with a rice-cooking disability, so it’s a life-saver. Wouldn’t ever cook or eat brown rice otherwise.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@sempronia: I assumed it was for Scottish-type porridge that needs long cooking, but congee makes sense.
I’ve never even looked at the recipe book that came with it. I can heartily recommend Instant Pot Obsession, by Janet A. Zimmerman.
RW Force
Haven’t tried it yet, holding in reserve:
https://www.sbs.com.au/food/article/2020/07/24/how-make-caramelised-onions-while-you-sleep?fbclid=IwAR2EQVIVfWCCsReRVNAhCvwk6Y6YoMczQCxBperhqr0IfAhk_PZYcjkc5WY
Roger Moore
@Major Major Major Major:
I don’t think he’s right. The thing about ovens is that the air in the oven is not even close to the only thing you have to heat up. If it were, the oven would reach temperature in no time flat. But you actually have to heat all the metal in the oven up to temperature, too, and that takes a long time. When you open the oven and let the hot air out, it’s only letting out a tiny bit of the heat. When you close the door again, the air heats up very rapidly because its heat capacity is tiny compared to the walls of the oven.
Note that this is different from a broiler. Broilers do work by radiation; the broiler element gets hot enough that it can cook by infrared. This is why you’re supposed to keep the door of the oven propped open when broiling. Since the heat is being transmitted by radiation, it doesn’t matter if you let the hot air out. It’s actually better because the broiler could otherwise cause the oven to overheat.
HinTN
@Betty Cracker: Emeril was very good about separating the garlic from the onions and celery in the preparatory maneuvers for whatever was to follow.
Somehow I had never figured that out prior to trying one odd his recipes. BAM
FelonyGovt
Interesting that folks here like their Instant Pot. Mine is sitting mostly unused on the kitchen counter. I find it unpredictable in terms of how long something is actually going to take to cook. And I don’t like the fact that I can’t go in and tweak seasonings etc. while the food is cooking.
Miki
@CaseyL: I make a Cook’s Illustrated Chicken and Rice recipe in the Instant Pot that starts with browning skin on/bone in chicken thighs skin side down, removing from the pot, then browning onions and carrots in the chicken fat. Add rice and garlic and toast for a minute, add broth and scrape up browned bits, nestle chicken on top then pressure cook on high for 15 minutes. Holy schmaltzy moly! In a slight nod to heart health, I toss the skin before serving.
MattF
@Roger Moore: How does that differ from what I said?
HinTN
@raven:
By God they’re fantastic when you do what he says!
Roger Moore
@hells littlest angel:
It’s very important to preheat the oven when baking; less so when roasting. If you put bread dough or cake batter in a cold oven and let it cook as the oven heats, you will not get what you are expecting!
E.
I’m a professional baker. I appreciate the oven setting being right up top so you don’t have to look for it once you are ready to go. I admit it doesn’t make any sense at all in that Martha Stewart recipe if you are going sequentially, but don’t you at least sort of read the recipe first before starting out? If the recipe writer had to try to accurately calculate at what point in the sequence you need to fire up the oven, it would actually be more confusing, in my opinion. FWIW in our formulas at the shop we just have OVEN: xyz as the first line of each formula. We let the bakers decide when to adjust the oven temps.
Roger Moore
@Ken:
That will work if you have rolled oats, but not if you’re trying to make a porridge from whole grains. Those take a long time to cook.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Miki:
Holy moly, that sounds good! Just added chicken to the shopping list.
True story: when M. Colette and I were engaged, we had a meeting with the cleric who was to perform the ceremony. She asked me what I liked about him, and I blathered about the usual – sense of humor, dedication to equality and justice, sexy legs. M. Colette, when asked what he liked about me, said “her chicken.”
Lapassionara
I cant help but think about the poor cooks who had to use a wood stove for baking. Pre-heat the oven indeed! Does anyone besides me remember Mrs. Bridges from Upstairs Downstairs? She put together some feasts in that house.
Major Major Major Major
@MattF: yeah our Zojirushi is the bomb.
BruceJ
@TomatoQueen: 
Make a huge batch in the slow cooker, then freeze. Protip: dish them into an ice cube tray, freeze overnight then dump in a plastic bag. Instant 2TB portions of caramelized onions. I do the same thing with the big jar of hatch fire-roasted chiles I get at Costco.
MattF
@Major Major Major Major: I bought a Zojirushi as a gift for my sister and BIL, and pointed them at the ‘steel-cut oats’ setting. Made them both very happy.
JaySinWA
The lie that bugs me is the one where total time ignores waiting periods. A several day process for finished product when you are looking for something tonight gets compressed to an hour or so in the total time.
Sloane Ranger
Arsenal wins the FA Cup, hurrah!!!
Arsenal 2, Chelsea 1.
My day is complete!
trollhattan
@Major Major Major Major:
We had an eight-buck rice cooker that did okay, but just that and replaced it with a 10x the price Zojirushi and my lord, perfect rice every time. Also takes an hour but that’s the price of perfection I guess. Our dog has learned the Zojirushi “Happy rice done” song and trots into the kitchen because he knows he’s getting rice with his dinner. Cannot recommend it too highly. (Also their video on properly rinsing rice beforehand.)
Roger Moore
@MattF:
I don’t have a big problem with having lots of ingredients. What I find difficult is when you have to prepare ingredients in many different ways. If I have 6 kinds of vegetables but they’re all chopped into the same size pieces, it’s not much harder than having the same volume of one kind of vegetable. But if one ingredient needs to be diced, another one coarsely chopped, and a third one needs to be pureed, and then they need to be cooked different lengths of time before they’re combined, that’s a complex recipe.
Another Scott
@tomtofa: You mean hard black onion flakes aren’t “caramelized onions”??!
Welcome to my kitchen. :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Sure Lurkalot
@geg6: Jacques Pepin would like a word.
dmsilev
@JaySinWA: I like recipes that explicitly distinguish between active time and total time required. Like, a pure sourdough bread recipe may not take much active time, but each short knead or shape or whatever step is separated by a few or several hours waiting for one or another fermenting stage to finish.
BruceJ
@FelonyGovt:
in slow cooker mode there’s no issues with opening and closing it to add seasonings.
We just got one 6 months ago to replace our ancient 20yo $15 crockpot, and are still kind of getting used to how to manage it.
There is definitely a learning curve, but we’ve been able to modify most of our slow cooker recipeies to suit. The big thing is there’s a LOT less evaporation so reducing the amount of liquid is a must.
It excels at making stews, pulled pork, pot roast, etc.
To be honest, though, most of our slow cooker recipes didn’t need attention to seasoning during the cook, so it is great for deciding “I want a batch of ranchero beans” and being able to eat them soon instead of tomorrow after they’ve cooked all night.
So far the single heaviest use of the instant pot is turning a gallon of milk into yogurt once a week or so which our crockpot couldn’t do.
Catherine D.
I use a slow cooker with a saute function for caramelizing onions – set it on low, add whatever fat and as many onions as I have on hand (sliced on a mandoline) with some salt. Stir frequently at the beginning, then put the lid on sideways to release moisture. I stir when I feel like it. Beautiful results, and I freeze whatever I’m not going to use.
CarolPW
@trollhattan: I use the porridge setting on mine all the time to cook red lentils (masoor dal), and they come out perfectly. I’ve also used it for other dals and for Scottish oats. Although my Zojirushi has a permanent allotment of my very limited counter space, I have never used it for rice.
narya
For oven temps, I always started mine early, in part to get the baking stone up to temp. As a result, I often roast some veggies before I bake whatever baked good I’m going to make; veggies don’t care that the oven is still coming up to temp, and I just keep them in there until they’re done. We’ll see how the new oven works in that regard–and I have a convection option in the new one, and I’m interested in how that will affect my baked goods. I think the reason that cookbooks give people that instruction is so that people don’t turn on the oven right before they put something into it.
Totally agree about onions–and I do a similar adjustment to my mis en place to “fix” that, too. I slide/dice the onion(s), get them started, and THEN start peeling and chopping everything else. It gives the onions time to actually caramelize, and I haven’t lost any time waiting for that to happen. The new range puts out some serious BTUs, and I haven’t adjusted fully to that yet–front burners are much hotter than the old stove (and the hottest one is on the left, not the right, which is just WRONG).
a thousand flouncing lurkers was fidelio
@TomatoQueen: I do that—cook up a big batch in the slow cooker, portion them out, and freeze them. The slow cooker is the best way to go about it, if you ask me, unless you want to warm up the house by having the onion on for an hour or two, which I can see might be a feature sometimes.
It’s also a great way to make onion soup—you can load up the slow cooker and go off and do things and come home to almost-ready soup.
CaseyL
@Steeplejack (phone): Well, 89. But she was highly athletic for most of her life (swimming and bicycling) and I’m not nearly that active.
sempronia
I’ve never used a convection oven, but my friend just got one. How do you adjust the timing or temp vs a conventional oven?
Roger Moore
@MattF:
The oven mostly cooks by convection. There is some IR from the walls of the oven, but the main factor is that the food comes in contact with hot air. The radiation power from a surface is proportional to the fourth power of its absolute temperature, so IR only becomes a major factor when the oven is very hot; it’s quite minor at medium and low temperatures. Radiation is important with broilers, which are much hotter than typical oven temperatures.
“Convection” ovens work somewhat more efficiently than regular ovens because the hot air in a regular oven doesn’t circulate very fast. When the hot air comes in contact with cold food, it transfers its heat into the food and cools down. That makes the air next to the food cooler than the rest of the oven, which slows down the cooking. Using a fan to force the air to circulate eliminates that stagnant air layer, letting the food cook faster. But that happens because it’s the hot air doing the heating, not IR from the walls of the oven.
Sure Lurkalot
@dmsilev: Mine has a sous vide function that works quite well. iPad wanted to autocorrect that to sour video.
a thousand flouncing lurkers was fidelio
@CaseyL: Maybe you could add some bouillon cube bits or chicken base?
JPL
@Miki: Oh no, a skin tosser. Once I was at a friends for Thanksgiving, and the first thing they did before carving the beast was to toss the skin. The crispy skin
BigJimSlade
I always assume they put the preheat note at the beginning so you don’t accidentally get ready to put something in the oven, only to find that you haven’t turned it on yet. And they don’t have to bother with getting its placement exactly right in the directions.
Ruckus
Maybe the preheat the oven bit is from the wood burning stove days. It’s always been in recipes and no one had any idea why, because most of us have used gas stoves for all our lives.
CaseyL
@Miki: Yummy! But I’d probably wind up eating the skin, provided it was still crisp.
@a thousand flouncing lurkers was fidelio: That… might work. I should try it.
Another Scott
http://www.clovegarden.com/ingred/li_onionw.html#fry
Cheers,
Scott.
Miki
@FelonyGovt: It took me a while to get used to not being able to tweak seasonings until the end but I got over it pretty quick once I learned to trust the machine. Timing similarly takes getting used to. I’ve been cooking in mine since 2015 so I’ve had a lot of practice. I like that I can set it and forget it for soups, stews, braises, root veggies, hearty greens, beans and, yes, risotto and occasionally pasta (ducks and runs).
Miki
@JPL: ‘Cept it’s no longer crisp once it’s been cooked in a pressure cooker, so it’s less of a moral failing.
MattF
@Roger Moore: But the air has to be heated and moving for convection (hopefully, towards the food)– how does that happen in a closed oven with no fan? And yeah, I know about natural convection, it’s not that great at heat transfer. I’m unconvinced.
frosty
@Kristine: Yeah, the prep time is a complete joke. There are some recipes where assembling the ingredients from the pantry, spice cabinet, fridge and freezer can take up the whole “15 minute” prep time. On a recipe that calls for chopping onions, garlic, peppers, chicken, and sweet potatoes. Heck, just peeling the garlic takes 5-10 minutes.
Ruckus
@Steeplejack (phone):
Neither of my grandmothers lived anywhere near that long and they cooked with animal fats because they were cheap (the animal fats!). Their food tasted great though.
JPL
Now I want a nice bowl of French Onion Soup.
Jager
@Lapassionara: My grandmother grew up cooking and baking on a wood stove. My dad said, she would say, “Hand me a piece of wood about the size of your thumb” and like magic, the oven would heat up to the right temperature.
frosty
@Roger Moore: Diced, coarsely chopped, finely chopped … somehow that’s all the same size when I’ve got the knife.
Steeplejack
I have a low-end apartment-grade range, so when I got a ThermoWorks ChefAlarm thermometer I sprang for the extra “air probe” to measure the oven temp. I assume it’s accurate, but mostly it gives me consistency. And I can also set an alarm for the desired preheat temp so I don’t have to keep checking the little red light on the range.
oldster
I understand the complaint about preheat times, but I think the reason that the recipe is written that way is different.
They don’t want you to preheat the oven from the start. Instead, they want you to know, from the start, that you will need to preheat the oven.
The writer’s idea is: don’t surprise the cook. Don’t make the cook get halfway through and then tell, “so *now* you tell me!”
Savvy cooks always read the whole recipe through from start to finish, before they start cooking.
But most of us aren’t savvy cooks! We plunge right in, chopping and kneading, and see where the recipe takes us.
And if you wait until a later stage to tell me that I will needed to set aside half of the tomatoes, or that some of the olive oil is for sauteeing and some gets drizzled on at the end, then I am going to feel like I was led down the garden path.
Same with preheating.
Tldr: they’re not telling you when to start preheating. They’re just giving you an early heads up.
Eta: and what BigJimSlade said, quicker and better, at 93.
evodevo
@JPL: NO NO NO that’s the best part!!! How could they do that?!!
Steeplejack
@Kristine, @Comrade Colette Collaboratrice:
Prep times:
I like certain cooking shows because they really do prepare their meals in the allotted time. Very little of that “We’re going to take a short break while I finish paring these 12 apples. Be right back!” Jacques Pépin and Ming Tsai are especially good, as is Rachael Ray, although I haven’t seen her much since she got promoted to talk-show queen. She always had her ingredients at hand and had fierce prep skills, so I don’t think I could hit her 30-minute time, but you could see that it was somewhat realistic. And it always amazed me that she did all that while keeping up the steady stream of instructive chatter.
No name
@Jager: Same here with the grandmother of my ex. Every meal from breakfast to Thanksgiving feasts cooked on a cast iron stove that is still in his house. I tried to toast a slice of bread once and half was burned black and the other barely got warm.
Steeplejack
@JPL:
Inorite. Tragedy!
No name
And have to agree with others here on prep time BS…just yesterday saw a zucchini recipe, prep time for whole recipe given as 15 minutes…including chopping six pounds of zucchini. Yeah, not happening.
Steeplejack
@MattF:
I think convection ovens do have fans.
ETA: Or maybe you’re just talking about regular ovens.
trollhattan
@sempronia:
I’d begin by reducing cook time an arbitrary 20%. I’m not a baker and expect baking needs more precision. Ours has both convection and convection bake, the difference being straight convection uses only the heating element inside the convection unit and not the baking element on the oven bottom. Convection bake is faster. Gas ovens will be different yet.
MattF
@Steeplejack: Right. Which is why I’m generally talking about conventional, non-convection ovens. Forced convection does work for heat transfer.
chopper
oh man don’t get me started on the whole ‘searing the meat seals in the juices!’ bullshit.
mrmoshpotato
I’ve never nominated a line from a post, but “YES! Stop fucking lying about the onions!” is brilliant.
debbie
The real food fallacy is rice pudding. I tried so many recipes and always tossed them out because they ended up as nothing more than warm ricey milk. Then I happened to see a food column in The Atlantic about the writer trying to duplicate his grandmother’s rice pudding. I got to the sentence about letting the cooked pudding stand for 4–6 hours to thicken and it was like an epiphany. I went back and checked all the recipes and not one of them said anything about letting the pudding stand to thicken.
debbie
@JPL:
Sacrilege! We kids used to risk amputated fingers trying to sneak a bit of turkey skin while my grandfather was carving it with one of those newfangled electric knives.
JAFD
Reply to MomSense #4 – Am stealing your spice blend, making up a batch (sans salt) soon as I can find a new ‘shaker’.
Double boilers work great for oatmeal from rolled oats – in any weather but high summer, I make a potful for breakfast / brunch / dinner 3 or 4 times a week, cup of oats, 2 cups water, half cup raisins, tablespoon brown sugar, pinch salt, go and read BJ posts from overnight, be done when you’re finished cussing out the news.
Have a Toshiba rice cooker, acquired for two bucks at porch sale in the 80’s, has one button to turn on and light that goes out when it’s finished. Keeping it for wintertime when adding moist heat to place is a good thing.
Want to hit big bookstore in near future, check out ‘instant pot cookbooks’, see which ones I want.
Ken
Ironically that was one of Julia Child’s complaints about The French Chef. The budget and/or technology didn’t allow for editing, and she thought a lot of time was wasted showing her boning a chicken or doing other prep.
LeftCoastYankee
@frosty:
I used to have this problem, someone suggested to cut the ends off the clove and press the flat side of the knife on the clove until there’s a light crack sound, then peel off the “paper”.
There was also a recipe I saw for 40 cloves of garlic and chicken. It said to put the cloves into a metal bowl and dome a second bowl over it and shake the bowls.
Seems it’s OK to beat the crap out of the garlic, it’ll still taste good when cooked.
Steeplejack
@debbie:
I was hoping to see you here. I seem to remember from a previous thread that you are the expert on stain removal. My problem: red wine on carpet. I blotted up as much as I could but need more drastic measures. I got on the Google and saw good things about OxiClean’s carpet and rug product, but I can’t find it in my usual supermarket.
What’s your advice?
Monkeyfister
Julia Child, in her show about French Onion Soup, at 6:50, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFsmCEVo3LQ
Onions are only getting there at ~40-50mins, she says, and that’s where she adds sugar, and the caramelization process starts. In earlier versions of her doing the recipe, a black & white version, she disdains the short-fry browning approach as “just burnt, raw onions.”
Steeplejack
@Ken:
I don’t mind shows cutting away or editing when they’re honest that a recipe takes a long time or involves a lot of prep. But too often they try to sugarcoat things, especially for “easy weeknight” recipes.
debbie
@Steeplejack:
I haven’t had to deal with red wine specifically, but I have spilled coffee on a white wool rug. Oxiclean for sure, but I’ve also had luck with something called Spot Shot.
You’ll definitely need to do multiple applications, but don’t let that stain defeat you!
ETA: I remember Orek sold a great spray stain remover, but I’m not sure if they’re still around
ETA again: You might want to try Oxiclean’s Max Force (for laundry stains) if you can’t find their rug cleaner. Max Force got the blood off my white duvet cover.
Spray, let it stand, then blot, blot, blot.
Steeplejack
@debbie:
Thanks! I don’t have a problem with multiple applications. And I might even have some Spot Shot on hand, from the housecat era (blessed be her memory!).
Sandia Blanca
One more complaint about preheating ovens before starting the prep–our meal kit directions always say “preheat oven to 425 and adjust oven rack to middle position” or some such. I’m not touching a hot rack! Tell me to adjust the rack and THEN to turn on the oven. But as many have noted above, the key is to read through the entire recipe before you do anything.
debbie
@Steeplejack:
I did a couple ETAs with more suggestions.
I can’t stand that this stuff makes me all gung ho.
Steeplejack
@debbie:
I love Max Force. Use that on my laundry all the time—my specialty is dripping stuff onto the white T-shirts I wear around the house—and I just got another bottle at the store yesterday. Might give that a go if I can’t find the Spot Shot.
Emma
I really like Robin Ha’s recipes from her Cook Korean! comic book. Maybe because she isn’t a professional chef, but the prep times are genuinely short, and I’m sloooow AF. Slicing potatoes into 1-inch polygons is about the most knife technique you need and the cook times aren’t long, even for the soups and stews. It’s my go-to recipe book for work potlucks :) (although these days I guess they’d be more like work mukbangs…)
Steeplejack
@Emma:
Thanks for the tip. That book looks interesting.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Steeplejack: I think the convection oven part IS the fan. At least that is what happens in our Viking range. The convection switch turns on a fan. Sometimes the switch is hit accidentally when using a burner and then I turn it off when I hear the faint fan whirring. Thank goodness I still have good hearing
I don’t use the convection feature very much because I am basically old school, but it cuts cooking time by about half, so I do use it when I am in a hurry or turn it on when whatever is baking is taking too long (like a large turkey).
Emma
@Steeplejack: happy to help :)
Also, on the subject of messed up recipes, I recently watched Chinese Cooking Demystified’s video comparing the CIA (not that one, haha) textbook’s mapo tofu recipe with a traditional one that you’d get at any Chinese restaurant. That video made me want to defund both CIAs. They think mapo tofu is a stir-fry dish???
Steeplejack
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
Yeah, that’s pretty much what I thought.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@JAFD: My husband and I got an Hitachi rice cooker from his sister one Christmas sometime in the 80s (since he stopped talking to his sister around 1990), and we still use it to make perfect steamed (brown) rice. That’s all it does but it does it perfectly. And like yours, it has an off/on switch and a lever to push down to start and that’s it. My only hack recently discovered is to cover the pot, under the lid, with a towel to absorb excess moisture after it dings it is ready, until we are ready to eat.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Steeplejack: I just googled Max Force since I had never heard of it and all I found was roach killer?!? Where do you get yours for stain removal?
NotMax
@Steeplejack
Also serves to stir up as a dip in which to dunk lampshades in order to clean them.
Steeplejack
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
OxiClean Max Force spray. With the laundry detergents at the grocery. I’ve also gotten it at Target, etc.
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
Do lampshades “wilt” if they get too wet?
NotMax
@Steeplejack
Suppose it depends on what they are made of. Da video.
N.B.: Fabric shades only. Paper or parchment (obviously) won’t fare well.
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
Thanks. Lampshades are one of those items that you don’t notice for years, and then suddenly: “God, that’s filthy!”
J R in WV
We used to have a Viking gas range, but the stainless steel burners corroded. At first I could buy replacements, but eventually that went away. So I was in the market for a nice range, NOT a Viking, although it cooked well until the burners died.
Wound up with a gas Thermadore 60 inch 6 burner top, one large oven. To use convection baking is just a twist of the knob that selects bake, warm, broil, convection bake. I mostly use Convection near the end when something needs a little more browning in the last 20 minutes or so. Like ribs.
It is totally computer controlled from stove top taps to the oven. I have decided neither of the stove front temperature read outs, one digital and one a arrow rotating around a dial, is telling me what the interior temperature inside the oven is, but what it intends it to be when the “I’m ready at the preset temp now!” chime goes off. When it tells me it’s 425 inside, it is drop dead serious about that. However it does take a little longer to cook some things.
I’m sure that when the computer(s) fail [as I know they will!] it will cost a bucket of money and take quite a while to order new components. I hope and intend it to last the rest of my cooking life.
I will confess I really, really want to go out to eat at a nice sit down place with real tablecloths and napkins. One nice place every evening for a couple of weeks… ideally. So tired of cooking every day! And I like cooking. Going to make Kibbee tonight. Have just thawed a pound of ground lamb.
trollhattan
@J R in WV:
Our first Dacor (referenced above) failed because somebody [ahem] spilled wine into the control panel, which itself was exposed because the plastic touchpad “skin” was peeling away from the panel, leaving a gap.
The circuit board was not an available part.
The replacement has a glass touch panel that swings upward for easier use, then folds away. It seems more rugged.
CaseyL
@JPL:
“It’s not healthy.”
Which is true, and entirely irrelevant.
NotMax
@trollhattan
Feature I appreciate on the newish electric range is that when one switches on the oven the default setting is 350.
Half a second saved here, half a second there – it adds up.
;)
trollhattan
@NotMax:
Exactamundo! Don’t we spend enough time pushing buttons? We’re all George Jetson now.
I remember the “good old days” with oven temp dials that you could pull off the post and adjust from the back, so it would match what the oven thermometer said the actual temp was. And of course there was no oven window so you’d have to open the door and read it quickly before the thermometer temp started dropping.
Had an apartment range with two oven doors hinged on the sides, guess because they took less space to open versus a single door hinged on the bottom. It effectively had no insulation and if you wore shorts and pressed against the handles you’d get a second-degree burn. That was great.
catclub
@JPL: yeah, what is wrong with these people?
cope
@LeftCoastYankee: @LeftCoastYankee: Also a problem with peeling garlic cloves: when you start taking a bulb of garlic apart to get individual cloves, too many of them are tiny, little midget cloves and not worth the effort. The solution that I started using after Geoffrey Zachariah outed it as a guilty secret hack of his: you can buy garlic peeled already in the produce section and almost all of the cloves are of a usable size.
trollhattan
@cope:
Another Martha trick: get two matching stainless mixing bowls, put your cloves in one, cover with the other one (forming a stainless ball of sorts). Pick them up together and shake the hell out of the cloves. They’ll come out peeled.
Darned if it doesn’t work.
J R in WV
@Steeplejack:
Too late now, but instant first aid for a red wine spill is to pour salt, a pile of salt, on the spill. The salt draws the wine into the salt, and then a hour later you vacum it up.
Then traditional stain removal tools have more room to be successful.
Steeplejack
@J R in WV:
Will remember for next time—hopefully far in the future. This was the first such spill in about eight years.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@LeftCoastYankee: if you want to cheat re peeling garlic,you can usually buy pre-peeled packaged garlic cloves in the vegetable section of the grocery store. Good varieties sell four or five peeled garlic cloves sealed together in little plastic shrink-wrapped individual pockets so they say fresh (usually these things sell two to four of these per package). Now the only garlic I peel is garlic from the farmers’ market.
BethanyAnne
Speaking of onions, there is a recall on red onions right now. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/07/31/recall-red-onions-culprit-34-state-salmonella-outbreak-fda-says/5560812002/
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@cope: you got there ahead of me….
Paul T
My favorite recipe gripe is recipe comments. I’m certain one of the first carmelized onion comments is something along the lines of:
I can’t eat onions. Can I substitute ( fill in name of unrelated food here.)
Steeplejack
@Paul T:
Yes! Also: “I followed this recipe exactly except for [long list of things they did differently] and it was awful! This recipe sucks.”
NotMax
A belated note that browned onions and caramelized onions are not the same and are far from interchangeable in most recipes.
Thor Heyerdahl
@Steeplejack: Late reply to your comment, but I’ve seen white wine help get red wine stains out of carpets, but the wine spill was still fresh.
mario
I came late to this party, but does this mean my separate oven thermometer that sits on the rack is useless?
Steeplejack
@Thor Heyerdahl:
Thanks, will add it to the mental repertoire.
Steeplejack
@mario:
No, not useless. I had one of those for years that was a useful confirmation of what exactly was going on in the oven. Still have it, I think. But my ChefAlarm is just so damn convenient.
Michael
@MattF: Nope. Not buying that.
Michael
@trollhattan: GE/Hotpoint electric ovens had that adjustable knob. You loosened a screw on the back of the dial to adjust it, in 5 or 10 degree notches. I’ve never seen a gas oven with that feature. A couple modern digital electric ovens I’ve checked with a thermometer were right on the money.
Cathie from Canada
@Betty Cracker: YES! As much as I love Martha, the one I always go back to is Ina.
Her recipes often have a little twist that makes them special, but they aren’t difficult and I usually have the ingredients around.
Cathie from Canada
@debbie: Try the Joy of Cooking rice pudding:
Combine and beat well: 1 ½ cups milk, 6 tblsp sugar, 2 eggs, 1 tblsp melted butter, 1 tsp vanilla, pinch of salt. Add 2+ cups cooked rice, 1 tsp lemon juice (and 1/3 cup raisins). Pour into greased casserole and bake uncovered at 325 for 50 to 60 minutes until set.
Jeffery
I read a recipe then reconstruct it mediately make it more sensible. Preheating the oven is the major change I always make. I know how long it’s going to take me to assemble some thing. When I know I have about 15 minutes more for it to be ready for the oven that’s when I turn the oven on.
Momus
My experience with NYT recipes … interesting ingredients, worthless recipes, starting with time and temperature. If the first pass suggests possibilities, figure out a recipe that does justice to the taste.