Let me start by saying: DO NOT BOTHER  MAKING SOUS VIDE CARAMELIZED ONIONS! After 18 hours, it still took me an additional 45 minutes of cooking the onions in the pan to give them a good flavor. In that amount of time, I could have made them the traditional route. This recipe is here for others to critique and improve upon. Also, I spent the time to record the process and make a video out of it… so you have to read and watch it now

There are two blog posts that most people reference for making sous vide caramelized onions: Emily’s Culinary Adventures and SVKitchen. SVKitchen’s method is a little sketchy… in that it cautions about EXPLODING BAGS OF NEARLY BOILING-HOT ONIONS. So, I like Emily’s idea of just cooking off some of the gases first

I sliced the onions, gave ’em a couple minutes in a pan to off-gas, bagged ’em and soaked ’em at 200ºF for about 18 hours. The result was: “meh.” They were sweet, but has no depth to the flavor

There are two important things going on when we caramelize onions, and caramelization of the sugar is only one of them. The other is the Maillard Reaction. It is possible for the Maillard reaction to happen at temperatures this low, but apparently we didn’t get nearly enough of it

After throwing them in the pan for 45 minutes, they had a much deeper flavor and they were a little sweeter than normal, but nothing amazing. Skip the 19+ hour method, and go with the 15 minute method

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