Caramelizing Onions for Healthy Cooking Recipes

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and today I am going to show you a basic cooking process with onions. A lot of recipes refer to caramelization or caramelizing onions until they appear translucent. So I am going to demonstrate this for you today just to show you what that definition really means. I've got some diced onions here and they are actually yellow sweet onions for those of you that are interested. I've got a small pat of butter that I am going to put into my sautee pan here which is already heating. Now the idea with sauteeing any item, vegetables especially, is the pan and the fat product that you are using in this case butter, needs to be nice and hot before the actual product is put into the pan. So we are going to get this all nice and hot so immediately when the onions hit the pan, they are going to sizzle. As you notice, this anodized aluminum conduct heat really well so my fire has that heated up pretty fast. I've got some nice bubbles on the butter so we should be good to go. I'll go ahead and throw these onions in here. I'm going to throw just enough in there so that I can give you guys a clear picture of what's happening. What you are doing with caramelizing is that the natural sugars are coming out of the onion as well as water. The sizzle right off the bat is a good sign. What's going to happen is those natural sugars along with the butter fat are going to cause these onions to become a little caramelly and it's going to take that edge off of them so that it won't be as pungent. This is required in just numerous recipes. At this point, we could throw in some garlic and some shallots if we wanted. This whole process will work for a green bell peppers, red bell peppers as well. So it's not just limited to onions. I really just want to keep these guys moving around. I'm going to crank the fire down just a tiny bit. Just keep them moving around so that one side doesn't get any more done than the others. You'll get better at flipping these and if you need a kitchen utensil to just stir them around, that's okay. It's a little bit easier to keep flipping with food items and keep them moving. As you cook along too, it will start to emit a certain kind of smell which means they are actually breaking them down a little bit which is what we are trying to do. Also at this point, with these vegetables or any other you can actually add some salt and pepper to them at this point because as they start to seep, the salt and the pepper actually kind of stick as they are caramelizing and gives them a really nice flavor. For today's and intents and purposes, I'm just trying to show you what happens to these guys. We've got a little bit of steam coming off the pan and so we know that the heat is not too high. I've got a few little flecks in there that are kind of getting a little over done. I kind of just pull those off to the side. We won't taint the rest of it. Basically just keep turning and keep them moving. So as these guys start to get a little bit of glassy appearance, you will also notice that there is some translucence in the sense that you can actually start to see into the onion pieces and start to see the veins so we are moving right along. Different recipes will call for longer cooking time, shorter cooking times based on what you are going to do with these once they are done. So these are pretty much as far along as I use them for just about any other recipe or sauce that I am making simply because you want to factor into the fact that you are going to add more heat to these later in a different process in a different stage of a recipe. So you really don't want to cook them further along than you need to here. So we've got a little caramelized brown color, some translucence; they smell nice, they're nice and soft, they're still a little moist & glassy. And that's how you caramelize onions."