Sous Vide Caramelized Onions
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
Prep Time: 30 minutes
Cook Time: 18 hours
Total Time: 18 hours, 30 minutes
| Cook Time | 1080 minutes |
| Servings |
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- 3 onions medium , sliced " globe -to- globe ."
Ingredients
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- Pre-heat a water bath to 200ºF.
- Heat 12" pan over medium-high heat. Drop onions in and cook for 5 to 10 minutes, stirring frequently. You want them to be slightly soft.
- Pull the onions off of the heat. Transfer onions to bag, seal, and drop into the water. Let cook for 18 hours.
Notes
This recipe isn't very good. I spent another 45 minutes cooking them "traditionally," to get a good flavor out of them.
4 thoughts on “Sous Vide Caramelized Onions”
You should have seasoned the onions before you placed them in the bag, also some butter might have helped.
Scott, we’ll be trying out sous vide onions again since it’s so easy to prepare we can experiment a few more ways.
Scott, I wanted to go seasonless to find the “true flavor” of caramelized onions. Butter and salt are awesome, but I was hoping to get a good end results with out them. Live and learn and try again with salt and butter 🙂
True flavor is good an all by salt bring out flavor in anything, that’s why we like it. Also, without the loss of moisture from the bag, you flavor will no be concentrated. By cooking them at the end you doing just that. I think sous vide would be a safe way to Carmelize them in bulk the night before an event and adjust them the next day.