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Cooking Cooking Tips

Savory and Satisfying: The Comfort of Homemade Onion Soup

Quickly caramelizing onions
Quickly caramelizing onions

Onion soup is the ultimate hug in a bowl. The sweetness of slowly cooked onions combined with the richness of the broth makes for a soul-soothing dish. A slice or two of cheese toast is the perfect accompaniment.

But the process of caramelizing onions was always frustrating for me – it just took too long (40 minutes).

A while back I discovered in an issue of Cooks Illustrated a better method for caramelizing the onions for making homemade onion soup – and wrote about it over on my recipe blog Scotts Kitchen.

With a bit of coolness in the fall air this weekend, I felt like making a batch of onion soup and remembered this better method – which worked great for two batches of soup made both Saturday and Sunday! The basic idea is to cook the sliced onions in a covered large sauté pan with 3/4 cup of water and 2 Tbsp of oil for 10-15 minutes. This softens the onions nicely and the browning step can then begin. Much quicker!

As you think about making some soup this fall, you may want to try this quicker way to great onion soup!

Categories
Cooking Tips Kitchen Meat

Adjusting the Williams Sonoma Cooking Probe Thermometer

This post goes in the “notes to self” category. We have a Williams-Sonoma Cooking Probe Digital Thermometer – and lost the manual eons ago. This thermometer was apparently actually made by Polder and private labelled to Williams-Sonoma.

Anyway, it’s the one with the 3 foot long cord to a probe that goes in the oven and into the meat. The problem I have with it is the somewhat arcane user interface it has for setting a different alarm temperature than the various defaults it comes pre-programmed with for the various types of meat. So, here’s how you do it!

Using the Meat button, scroll to the UI page. Hold down the Memory button until the Alert temperature starts blinking. Then, using the up/down (+/-) keys, set the temperature you want for the alert. Hit the Memory button again to store the new value, turn on the Alert switch, and you’re now set.

Happy cooking! 😉