Slow Cooker Caramelized Onions: or, Replacing kitchen tedium with naps

As we have learned, caramelizing onions is a long, slow process. Every recipe that starts with "Cook onions until golden, about 5 minutes" is lying. There is simply no way to speed it up. If you try to cook onions faster, they will burn. 

Granted, you really only need to carefully tend the frying pan when the onions are nearly done. But although you don't need to stay in the kitchen the whole time, you can't leave the house. Also, stopping whatever you were doing to stir the pan every now and then gets subtly irritating. With that in mind, I recently read that you can caramelize onions in a slow cooker.

Slow Cooker Caramelized Onions Place frozen chopped onions into a slow cooker, as many as you like. (You don't need to defrost them.) You can buy fresh onions and chop them yourself, but you won't tell the difference after they're cooked. You can also add peeled garlic cloves. Pour on enough cooking oil or melted butter to lightly coat the onions, and stir to mix. Cook on low heat for 6-17 hours, or until they are a rich dark brown. The time will vary depending on how dark you want them, how many you're cooking, and how hot your cooker gets. If the onions look like they're browning unevenly, you can stir them. Keep in the coldest part of the refrigerator. Mine have lasted up to two weeks. These keep well in the freezer. You can divide them into about half-cup portions (which is about what you'd get from a single onion), and then drop them into whatever you're making. For things like soups and sauces, I don't even bother defrosting them first. Note 1: These will shrink a lot as they cook, so you may as well completely fill the slow cooker instead of just doing a small amount of onions. Note 2: This will produce a powerful smell as it cooks. If you have a yard, patio, or apartment balcony, set the slow cooker outside.

I had a few reservations about trying this, mostly because the cooker's big ceramic insert is too bulky and heavy for the dishwasher. You may as well try and perch a medium-sized flowerpot on the rack. And so, I asked my relatives who love going to thrift shops to keep an eye out for one of those miniature slow cookers that you're supposed to use for cheese dip. Eventually, this little thing turned up for $4. 

Apparently this mini pot is meant for keeping dips and sauces warm, not for cooking anything. So, I didn't know if it would get hot enough for today's endeavor. But I figured that if I got nothing but a small pot of hot raw onions, I had only wasted the price of a truck stop sandwich in a moment of thrift store frivolity.

The method seemed self-evident: load the cooker with onions and leave it. To make things even easier, I purchased frozen chopped onions.

I plugged the little cooker outside because of the impending smell. After the onions had been in the pot for a while, I decided that perhaps I should look up directions. Putting onions in a slow cooker is new to me, but other people have been doing it for a long time. Therefore, I figured that if I was missing any crucial steps, a lot of other people had figured them out before me. Every guide said you should mix the onions with olive oil or butter (or something like that). Since my onions hadn't even thawed yet, my mistake was easy to fix. 

About five hours later, I checked on the onions. Would this work, or was I about to try to resell this dip warmer to get my $4 back? To my delight, the onions were slowly turning brown! But I should have stirred them once or twice. We had hot spots and cold spots, like when you put last night's lasagna in the microwave. After mixing the onions, I let them continue cooking while I made dinner. Based on the color, I probably could have let them cook even longer. 

When I tasted the first onions to come out of our miniature cooker, I thought I would never part with it. I was so happy, I didn't even mind that you can't take out the ceramic liner for cleaning. Even at this slightly premature stage, the onions had a beautiful deep golden color. And they tasted amazing. I froze some of them, and dumped the rest into supper. I probably added a lot more onions than good taste permits, but I didn't care.

For those who are wondering, the rest of the recipe is pretty simple. Make a white sauce, or purchase it by the pint from the nearest purveyor of fried food. Then stir in frozen spinach, mixing until it's thawed and hot. Add seasonings and shredded cheese, stir until all is melted. Then pour it onto pasta.

As much as I liked the result of slowly caramelizing onions, I was annoyed at the shrinkage. Before cooking, the onions nearly pushed the lid off the cooker. But after they were done, they barely covered the bottom of it. I was initially annoyed that I would have to do a new batch of onions every time I wanted to use more than a tablespoon of them. Then I realized that no one required me to make these one small batch at a time. If I wanted to, I could use the big pot.

You are looking at three 12-ounce packages of frozen chopped onions crammed into one pot. I had to mash the lid down a bit to close it. (For those who prefer metric alliums, we are cooking a generous kilo of them.) I could have defrosted the onions in the microwave to let them cook faster, but I decided I would rather use the slow cooker's time instead of my own. This timesaving strategy didn't quite work because I kept going outside to see if the onions were dark enough yet. 

After about 17 hours, the onions had taken on the rich brown color of an exquisite creation from a woodworker's shop. If you wanted to be extremely picky, you might have noted that the onions in the very center were slightly lighter than the rest. I could have prevented this by stirring this at least twice a day, but I didn't want to put in the effort. What's the point of a slow cooker if you can't plug it in and ignore it?

When we got to the bottom of the pot, we found a lot of onion juice that never quite boiled away. Figuring that it would have been at the bottom of the pan and then mixed into the rest of the food anyway, I dumped it into the (not-so-)little storage container along with the onions.

If you have the mental space to plan ahead, this is a wonderful way to get perfectly caramelized onions in your sleep. It's almost impossible to burn the onions unless you go away for the weekend and forget you left the pot plugged in.

And while caramelizing three pounds of onions at once may seem excessive, it speeds up a lot of future cooking. Whenever a recipe begins with "Cook the onion until golden," you can take a scoopful of caramelized onions out of the refrigerator and skip to step 2 of the directions. It almost feels like cheating to get the delicious flavor of caramelized onions without patiently tending a frying pan on the stove. Now I just have to get a spoonful of them out of the refrigerator.

Slow-cooking massive batches of onions also liberates me from everyone else's complaints when I add them to something. Granted, I still have to endure a few minor flareups of squawking when the fumes from the backyard seep through the door. But now I can add a big beautiful spoonful of caramelized onions to my own portion without ruining dinner for everything else. Truly, it is a beautiful pungent thing.