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Hey guys. I am no cook and I don't speak English natively. What the heck is caramelising onions?
I thought caramelising is when the sugar liquifies and you get caramel. So caramelising onions would be to cover them in lots of sugar and cooking them until they are covered in caramel.
But it sounds like you are just deep roasting them.
The sugar in the onion is caramelising
It's just a process of slowly cooking them on a low heat, they'll naturally go quite sweet after a while without having to add sugar.
It's just slowly cooking chopped onions in a pan until they are a deep brown and very soft and sweet. If you've ever had french onion soup, that's basically just caramelized onions in broth.
Caramelization is the process of sugars browning due to high heat. The actual reactions that are happening is a combination of sugars and their chains breaking down into smaller compounds and those smaller compounds recombining into other compounds, all these new compounds gives caramelized foods their distinctive colour and taste.
When making caramel the sugar liquification happens often in high enough temperatures for caramelization to occur. The process of sauteeing/high temperature cooking onions long enough involves the same exact reactions. In onions the bit longer chain sugars that dont taste sweet are broken down into simple sugars thus producing the sweet taste of caramelized onions and the further reactions produce the caramel colour and taste.
Tldr: caramelization is a group of chemical reactions and 'caramel' is basically a taste and colour that results from it
Thanks. So I thought correctly, but didn't think of the longer chain sugar in onions, since they usually don't taste sweet.
Many things can taste sweet if you caramelize them. Carrots will caramelize in butter if you sautee them on low heat in a cast iron and you can make them taste candied with no added sugar
Caramelized carrots are bomb. Add as a topping on a sweet potato casserole if you wanna level up your game.
Eating onion raw is the only way to mask its sweetness. Or maybe boiling the crap out of it until it tastes like nothing at all. Otherwise, onion is very sweet.
caramelization is a group of chemical reactions
They're known as Maillard Reactions
The Maillard reaction is different from caramelization
Caramelization may sometimes cause browning in the same foods in which the Maillard reaction occurs, but the two processes are distinct. They are both promoted by heating, but the Maillard reaction involves amino acids, whereas caramelization is the pyrolysis of certain sugars.
In German it's called "karamellisieren". It's a general cooking thing, not an exclusively English or American.