This simple kitchen hack lets you get golden onions in record time

My family loves Kenji’s channa masala. With basic ingredients like canned chickpeas and tomatoes, ginger, garlic, and a few basic spices, it doesn’t take long to prepare, so it’s an easy way to get a flavorful dinner on the table, especially on a weeknight. And while it’s a super simple recipe, the dish is never good unless I make it — or so my family says — so I’m tasked with making channa masala at least once a month. The beauty of this monthly ritual is that I focused on a technique that really cuts down on cooking time: adding baking soda to speed up the browning process of the onions. It’s such an impactful tip that I’ve started using it in other dishes, and it saves me about five to ten minutes, cutting the onion cooking time almost in half. Here’s how.

What happens when you add baking soda to onions

PH has a significant impact on the Maillard reaction, a chemical process that promotes the browning of foods when heated. The higher the pH, the faster the reaction. Onions only have a pH of about 5 out of 14, making them a more acidic ingredient, but an alkaline ingredient like baking soda can raise the pH level of onions, promoting faster browning.

Baking soda also softens onions; its high pH, ​​between 8.3 and 9, weakens vegetable pectins, causing the degradation of their cell walls. The faster the onions break down, the faster the chemicals are released, which not only means faster cooking, but also faster development of flavor and color.

How to Add Baking Soda to Your Onions to Speed ​​Up Browning

Incorporating baking soda into your recipes to speed up the browning of onions is simple. Heat the oil in a pan or whatever container you plan to cook the onions in, then add your chopped, sliced ​​or diced onions, followed immediately by the baking soda. You will need to use about 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda per pound of onions. Make sure the baking soda is evenly incorporated into the onions, then let the onions cook until they begin to brown, stirring frequently. Once the onions start to leave a brown coating on the pan, add a tablespoon of water and scrape up any brown bits. Repeat this process until the onions are a dark brown color. The entire process should take about 10 minutes for diced onions cooked over medium-high heat, but you will need to adjust the time depending on how thin the onions are cut.

When you should and shouldn’t add baking soda to onions

While this technique is great for quickly browning your onions, there are a few caveats. The way the baking soda breaks down the onion causes it to lose much of its shape and take on a softer, almost mushy texture. For a dish like channa masala or butter chicken, where the onions are supposed to blend into the sauce, this isn’t a problem: you wouldn’t want crunchy onions sprinkled in dishes like those anyway. But when you want your onions to retain their structure in a recipe like French Onion Soup or Oklahoma-Style Onion Burgers, you’ll have to skip this technique entirely, or you’ll end up with gooey onions all over your dish. And while this tip speeds up the browning time, it still takes about 10 minutes, which is why Swetha Sivakumar skips the onions completely in her 10-minute chana masala recipe.

The baking soda also keeps the onions from becoming too sweet, which, again, is warranted in some dishes. But this tip won’t help in recipes that rely on the sweet, caramelized flavor of onions. Given the sometimes soapy notes that baking soda can give off, you need to make sure that the dish you’re using it in has enough flavors to mask this.

It’s also important to note that while this technique works with white, yellow, and red onions, baking soda do gives red onions a bluish green color which, in my experience and opinion, is not very attractive. But once onions are incorporated with other ingredients to form a sauce, the color is usually not noticeable.

Takeaways

Adding baking soda when you cook onions is a great way to speed up the browning process. However, this technique works best in recipes that do not rely on (1) retaining the structure of the onions or (2) the sweetness of the onions. But if you’re like me and want (or, really, have to) make a channa masala every month, baking soda is just what you need to save time.

August 2024