I read somewhere that if you’re cooking dinner and shit falls behind just start sautéing some onion and it will smell so good people will happily wait and be ready to eat when you are ready to serve, 15-30 minutes.
That’s pretty fair. I generally get a pack of dinner rolls, parker-house or whatever cook them ahead and let them rest under a tea towel.
An appetiser is the ultimate time saver, because someone ALWAYS shows up starving.
Me, I’m that someone. Got any rolls?
I gotcha fam 🥐🥯🍞🥖🥨
If you can smell the salt, you might be using too much.
Why does it taste good starter pack.
Salt, sugar, fat, acid
And Umami
And my ass
I also choose Toaster’s ass.
Ooooh, mommy
Why am I tripping balls starter pack
Acid, Mushrooms, Ayahuasca, Ibogaine, DMT, Butter
I have so many sauces like this, works for many dishes. E.g. soy sauce, honey, rice vinegar, chili / ginger. Fat from whatever is sautéing rn
fat acid heat. Just missing sugar for the quardfecta.
It makes the onions fry quicker in oil!
Cause it draws out the moisture
Oops I had been adding sugar.
That should technically work as well, since sugar also draws water out. It’s also a common tip in those recipes that use quick ‘caramelized’ onions, since it also browns faster than real caramelized onions. If you’re wanting to lower your sugar intake and aren’t worried about upping your salt (no high blood pressure, kidney problems, etc) then salt probably works better for drawing out moisture and getting cooked onions. But if you’re wanting the caramelized onion taste the trade off will be longer saute time to actually caramelize the sugars in the onion.
Found the american
They said sugar, not corn syrup
You usually cook onions because they already contain a lot of sugar…
Honestly, salt is my secret ingredient. Way more than anyone else is brave enough to put in, but it makes things delicious.
This is probably a joke, but do try to limit your salt intake to something healthy: https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/salt
I only use the LD50 but that’s mostly to stop people from getting seconds.
Not that it matters at that point but is it scaled to one LD50 per serving or nah?
It wouldn’t work well if it wasn’t.
Who needs to have functional kidneys anyway
I want some big, strong kidneys! Got to train them every day.
Growing up my mom would tend to oversalt the food she cooked, which lead to me thinking most normal food tastes bland without more salt
Who told you she over salted it, the people making the bland food? 😅
I started cooking for elderly people and I’m not allowed to use salt at all. But I’ll see them dumping salt on it at the table.
Yup. It’s always what one considers too much plus one more shake to season perfectly…but that still doesn’t stop me from under seasoning when cooking new dishes. Can always salt later.
Taste as you go!
Though I have definitely been caught out by salting it perfectly then it reduces and is then too salty.
shallot, butter, white wine
A better combination is onions, carrots and celery
You forgot the garlic
Sorry … garlic is almost automatic for me at this point when I cook, it’s almost like salt and pepper … I never think of it.
And I’m at the point where I buy about 20lbs of garlic from my local farmer every fall (I just bought my supply a couple of weeks ago) to last me the winter.
How do you ensure the garlic lasts through winter?
I keep mine in a very loose burlap bag which my farmer gave me years ago … then I hang the bag on a hook from the ceiling in my basement (about six feet off the floor) where humidity lingers about 50-60% year round … no natural light and temps are about 17-20 Celsius year round.
I learned that hanging is better because everything gets equal amounts of air. If you sit it on a shelf or near the floor, the bottom layer will get damp fast and give no air circulation. My farmer said that he had a few customers complain that their supply of garlic went bad midway through the winter … he suspected that they kept their bags on the floor or on a shelf.
Last year I kept 20lbs starting from about October and I used the last of it at about June the following year with only about three or four bulbs going bad … and bad meaning they just shrivelled up and dried out.
Does it start to sprout still, or does the humidity level & hanging it help prevent that as well?
You should write a book about garlic facts, I’ve learned so much from you this thread!
None of it sprouted. I don’t think garlic does that as easily as potatoes or onions.
It took me years to learn all this and even so, I don’t think I know that much about it … just enough to be able to keep a big bag of garlic in my basement all winter. The best thing is to hang the burlap bag (which is very coarse and lets in lots of air) … and keep a bit of cool temps (15-20 Celsius) and humidity at about 50% (in the late summer and fall, my basement is at about 60% but then dips to about 40% mid winter) … and keep it all away from sunlight as the sun means that the room temps will change and fluctuate … I don’t have an expensive setup, I just have an old dry basement in a small old house with an electronic temp and humidity gauge.
And if you can find a good farmer … buy it all in bulk, as much as you can afford, it’s always cheaper that way.
And just follow simple cooking advice on how to use garlic from old chefs like Jacques Pepin … simple straight forward cooking
Fascinating, thanks for all the tips, I’ll definitely up my garlic game going forward…
Wow & I thought I liked garlic, I feel amateur by those standards. Your food must taste amazing & I bet not a vampire in sight too!
I’m not exactly a gourmet cook, I’ve just been learning how to cook for years. One Italian friend of mine recommended that I should always try to get fresh garlic as much as I can because it is better. Canned, preserved, precut, minced, bottled garlic … or even dried, dehydrated garlic is not the best … not only does it not have as much of a strong garlic flavour, most of it comes from Asia and specifically China where it is produced cheaply and under very shady circumstances.
Watch a Netflix documentary series called ‘Rotten’ … Season 1 Episode 3 is titled ‘Garlic Breath’ … and it details where a lot of cheap prepackaged garlic products come from … namely cheap Chinese prison labour where in some factories, prisoners are not allowed any sharp objects to peel the garlic by hand so they have to resort to using their fingernails, which they eventually wear out and then later resort to using their teeth.
After watching all that … I really took my time to search for a local farmer and pay double the amount for fresh garlic and I just buy the stuff in bulk now because it’s cheaper in the long run.
I had no idea, thanks for the docu recommendation. Thankfully I’ll nearly always use fresh unless a recipe requires dry & it feels needed, like dry rubs. I will certainly be checking where any non fresh garlic comes from in the future. Happy cooking!!
Yeah … it took me a while to get my garlic setup … at first I bought grocery store commercial garlic but then noticed that much of the time, it’s really cheap Chinese garlic. I’m not totally against Chinese products … the thing that gets me is that I really have to wonder how I can buy such cheap produce when it has to be shipped to me half way round the world in Canada! Not to mention that this cheap Chinese garlic is usually not that potent or tasty.
At first a few gardener friends gave me samples of their home grown garlic and man … when you grow your own garlic and tend to the soil and keep it well tended all year, it produces really potent, tasty and strong garlic. I can chew Chinese garlic and get a good taste of garlic and not be bothered by it much … I did the same to a friend of mine’s home grown garlic years ago and nearly choked on a piece because it was like fire in my mouth.
If you ever get the chance in the mid summer, find a local grow op or farmers market when they get their first crop of garlic. It will be a bit expensive but the garlic that time of year is like gold and it will be worth it. They even sell the long green stems of the garlic called SCAPES and you use them in cooking like green onion. And the home grown garlic is potent. You can literally just just one clove at a time per recipe, compared to trying to use an entire head to get that garlic taste.
Happy cooking to you as well!
Where I currently live we get a lot of wild garlic growing everywhere for a month or so a year, the smell is in the air nearly anywhere you walk for a few weeks. I do see some people picking it by the sack full, wonder if that’s similar to what you’re suggesting about the early farm crops. Although I presume the wild stuff is much milder than farm grown. I’ll try to source some from a farm next spring as soon as I see the local wild ones coming out. Cheers!
Plus, for bottled garlic, the preservatives added to it (citric acid I think) make the bits never really soften when you cook them. It’s always easy to tell when you go out to eat somewhere and order something with garlic all over it if they used garlic from a jar, since the garlic always looks like gravel or uncooked cous cous.
I didn’t know the half of that, and I was mildly happier for it :(
Usually Chinese garlic is also a different plant than European garlic. You can notice it by the fact that the roots of the garlic fall off in a neat chunk for Chinese garlic but stay attached for European garlic.
I don’t tend to check individually every time I buy just to make sure, but from what I read and on occasions where source was actually identified so that I could check, almost all the garlic sold here in Australia is from China.
I have not really observed this phenomenon with the roots that you’re describing. Also, it’s kind of hard for me to say what particular characteristics Chinese garlic has because assuming that the garlic I’m buying really is coming from China, then it seems they grow several varieties that all gets sold as just “garlic” because in any given trip to the same supermarket you get noticeably different attributes to the size and appearance and physical characteristics of the garlic sold.
I don’t really notice much difference in cooking with them or eating them though. Occasionally you get some much stronger flavoured ones, but it’s just the same taste but stronger rather than detectably different and often this doesn’t really seem to couple with which type they happened to sell this week. Any attributes of the garlic’s appearance that seem distinct to what’s available this week, don’t seem to reliably signal what it will taste like the next time you see those same attributes again the next time they’re on sale.
You mean a mirepoix?
You mean soffritto?
You all talking about mixing onions, carrots, and celery?
this could get wild
Or onions, green peppers, and celery. I guarantee.
Lol my mom used to tell me she’d come home exhausted from work and wouldn’t know what she was going to feed us, so she’d just put some garlic and onions in a pan to fry while she wound down and figure it out as she went. She said the smell at least made it seem like she had it all figured out, to us anyway
There’s a common joke about that. It goes something like: “A [Ukrainian] starts frying onion and garlic in a pan and only then starts thinking about what they want to make.”
[Ukrainian] can be substituted for most other countries, to be honest.
But, to be real, garlic shouldn’t be fried for that long IMO, so I’d only put in the garlic about 30s before I was ready to start adding all the other ingredients. But, with the onions, I’ve actually started onions more than 30 minutes before figuring out what else I wanted to make. That way they have a chance to get good and caramelized. That doesn’t work for every recipe, but it works for a lot of them.
How do you prepare the garlic? Cut or pressed or just sliced?
90% of the time I’m using garlic I mince it. The other 10% it’s thinly sliced or just crushed.
My mom, who was a self admitted not-good cook would start these on the stove a bit before dad was set to come home. He’d be hungry but smelled too good and he would finish cooking for us
why are people acting so normal, is this not just a loss meme? have I lost it?
Wrong number of objects in 2nd and 3rd panels to be a lost meme
It appears Quinny has indeed, lost it.
Garlic and onion in oil is enough to trigger my hay-fever and irritate my nose so that shit doesn’t actually smell good to me
A cursed existence
Skill issue
My dad hated onions, he’d pick them out of his meals like a 5 year old. One day after I found a love for cooking in highschool this happened and he decided to try my dishes. He was very proud that he only picked out 3 onion pieces and kept the rest lol.
Honestly I don’t like onion pieces either, but I find that if I chop them small enough I don’t mind it.
As a kid I used to tell anyone cooking for me, make sure onions are either indistinguishable or large enough to separate easily.
Not enough garlic in that picture
The bummer is that garlic that big tends to be less potent. I think that’s elephant garlic? Bought it once, was very disappointed.
Always at least double the garlic called for.
Just put some in at the end of cooking if you like garlic, no need to waste it.
Been trying to figure out how to explain to my little kids that they don’t like the taste of onions, they like the flavor.
They love McDonald’s cheeseburgers, chips of all sorts, all with onions. They’re small, biting an onion is too much for their taste buds, so they think they hate onions.
Anyone help me articulate the idea? LOL, it’s funny I think on it so much.
You don’t drink ketchup. You don’t eat salt. But if you try unsalted fries without ketchup you’ll understand what salt and ketchup are for.
For me, I dislike (and as a child, hated) the texture of onions. Onion as a flavour has always been fine, it was biting them that was the problem.
Caramelize the onions a bit and blend half into a paste, ask which one tastes bad. If they answer that only the chunky onion is bad, teach them about texture preferences.
They taste different when cooked.
Caramelize them properly and they go from weird, sour but slightly spicy vegetables to straight up candy.
they don’t like the taste of onions, they like the flavor.
I don’t think the distinction between “taste” and “flavour” is the right way to frame it. Raw onion on its own can be overwhelming. If you eat a hamburger with raw onion on it, the amount of raw onion per bite will be pretty small, and it will be one taste in a whole bunch of other tastes. Your kids probably wouldn’t like eating pure salt, or pure pepper either. But, food with some salt tastes great.
Having said that, fried onions are a whole different game. After 5 minutes the onion loses a lot of its potency and gets a bit sweet. After 30 minutes it’s basically a very slightly pungent candy. For a French Onion Soup, you can cook them for up to 2 hours before they’re ready. A pot that’s full to the brim of raw onions reduces down to a thin layer at the bottom, and they taste more like gummy worms than onions at that point.
I love French Onion Soup, and occasionally make it. I’d make it more, it’s just that slicing up more than a kilogram of onions is a whole process. It’s so difficult it makes me cry every time I do it.
A second hand mandoline a game changer in that regard! Chopping/slicing/cutting evenly suddenly to a fraction of the time. Would drivel recommend (second hand because first hand are stupidly expensive if you rent good quality)
Yeah, I’ve used a mandoline to do it before. Frankly, that’s really the only way I’d do it these days. But, even then, it’s a lot of work and it’s hard on the eyeballs. Plus, mandolines are scary. I know what not to do when using one, but it’s like a fear of heights. Even if you know you’re doing it safely, it’s still nerve wracking. Maybe if I had a chain-mail glove I could do it without fear, but I don’t have one.
I chop my onions by hand but I wear swimming googles and they help a lot. The biggest issue is that they work so well I sometimes forget to move away from the onions before I take them off and it’s like getting punched in the face.
I found a plastic handle for the mandoline. If you mess up, the handle gets cut but your fingers survive unscathed.
I’d be interested to see what that is. It seems like it would be hard to make that work because securely gripping the thing you’re chopping is an important part of using a mandoline.
Eat it or starve.
Pickled onions… yum!
Salt doesn’t smell.
Is that because it doesn’t have a nose?
My dog has no nose.
Why do they call them smelling salts?
Some salts smell. Table salt (what’s pictured in the meme) doesn’t have a detectable smell in solid form, not enough vaporizes to notice. Smelling salts are ammonium carbonate, not sodium chloride like table salt, and they do smell strongly. “Salt” can refer to either table salt or to any ionic compound whatsoever. The latter is chemistry jargon, but then gets used in colloquial terms like “smelling salts” or “salty licorice” neither of which have table salt but both of which have other ionic compounds.
Not with that attitude
Yours maybe.
I have seen this picture of an onion before
That’s what a generative AI would say
It looks nice.
Except butter instead of oil
Coward. I use both. And then salt the fuck out of it. Every meal takes a year off my life, but fuck if I’m not enjoying the ones I’m left with
salt the fuck out of it.
I misread this as ‘fuck the salt out of it’ for just a moment.
Why “instead” ?
And bacon instead of salt
What about the wonderful stink of cumin?
It’s a personal thing, but the smell of cumin kills my appetite. I had a bad experience with it once and I can’t shake the association between the smell and the experience.
I just don’t put on deodorant, same thing
Should be ginger instead of salt.
I mean, you need salt. But you don’t smell it.
