- Steps that actually include many different steps.
- Steps that don't repeat the quantities, making me scroll back and forth between the step and the quantity list.
The diagrams in this post very cleanly solve both.
But I might not read it super carefully when recipe planning at the start of the week, which can result in scheduling mistakes.
My favorite is the ‘30 minute recipes’ that involve overnight marinating, carmelizing onions, etc.
(That is great gaslighting in that vid, lol)
Not sure what you meant about the gaslighting.
That being said.
Caramelized onions should be a dark (nearly black) and warm brown color, not a neutral clay-soil brown. (Picture brown-sugar boba pearls.) They should have no water content, and should be visibly syrupy in texture. They should smell buttery + nutty + toasty; and should be extremely sweet, in that complex caramel way, with no trace of the original onion flavor remaining.
The onions in the video are none of those things.
These properties are all corollaries of what caramelization is, when it comes to onions: you're not only breaking down starches inside the onion into sugars, but then also fragmenting some of the resulting sugars into volatiles (diacetyl, furfural, etc), while polymerizing more of the resulting sugars into various caramel compounds.
The onions in the video have merely finished the first step: sweating. The cells of the onion have broken down, releasing simple sugars and water; but despite a few minutes' pan frying after breakdown, they're still wet and gloopy (and have quite a bit more cooking to go before they stop being so), because onions contain rather a lot of water, and rather a lot of sugar, and simple sugars are hygroscopic, i.e. they really want to hold onto nearby water.
The goal of caramelization is the same in an onion as it is in candy-making: you need to heat the sugar up until it melts and begins to react with things around it, both building up (polymerizing) and breaking down (fragmenting.)
Sugar melts well above the boiling point of water. So you can't caramelize anything until all the water is gone.
And that's why caramelizing onions takes around 40 minutes. 10 minutes on high heat to sweat the onions (as in the video); 20 minutes on med-high to drive off all the water; and a final ~10 minutes with careful watch-and-adjust temp control to actually caramelize the sugars, without burning them.
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In theory, you might be able to make this process happen faster... but not with any random store-bought onion, the day you buy it. You'd need to 1. freeze, and then thaw, the onion (to break down its cells), and then 2. desiccate the onion (i.e. keep it in a bone-dry environment with convective air) to pre-purge the lysed water from it. The result would be a "ready-to-caramelize" onion that would let you skip the first two phases of cooking. (The result would also now be incredibly non-shelf-stable, becoming a pile of mush after a day or two.)
Some people throughout history (who perhaps originated the idea of being able to caramelize an onion in 10 minutes) may have done both of these steps purely by accident! In fact, insofar as onions are storage vegetables often kept in a root cellar for months before consumption, and insofar as some root cellars can both get to below freezing and be very dry inside, I could see most historical people cooking onions for winter recipes having gotten this "speed hack" for free without even trying.
But an onion you buy at the store will have gone through neither of those steps. Caramelizing an onion the day you buy it will take 40 minutes, full-stop.
In the comments from the original article, which you can find on the Internet Archive, he says that these these are not exactly the same as 45 minute onions and he would only use them a certain recipes.
And again, he's not the only one. There are lots of videos and articles about it.
And my point—I'll state it again—is that while these 10-minute onions might be useful, they are not "caramelized onions" in any sense, because no actual caramelization has occurred. And so saying that "this is a way to make 'caramelized onions' in 10 minutes" is false.
These are, certainly, a 10-minute substitute for caramelized onions; but they can no more be used as an argument that "you can make caramelized onions in 10 minutes, actually" (as the GGP poster says) than the existence of rice pilaf is an argument that you can make risotto in 10 minutes. They're different things!
Julia Child's cookbook has the recipe in two columns, one for ingredients and the other for directions. As soon as I saw it I wondered why every cookbook doesn't do something similar.
Personally, and I say this as someone who has been trained to do recipe editing, I find this tabular system to be not entirely clear. Consider the first example--the instruction to mix is applied to several ingredients at least twice. The instruction to 'fold in' seems to apply to all the ingredients at once, which makes no sense. Normally, you'd mix the dry ingredients together first. Also, in this case, you'd probably want to whisk the eggs and sugar together first so the sugar starts to dissolve. It also doesn't give you a clue as to what 'done' means.
Also, clickbait headline: There is no dissent presented anywhere on the page that this recipe format is pretty great. It did not divide the internet even a little.
Look at the site design! It went viral on Digg! That's how old this is.
So, I think its utility is a bit context-dependent.
My favorite example of this is people self-censoring “shooter” as “sh**ter”, which I can’t help myself from always parsing as “shitter”.
“The shitter in Virginia has been apprehended”, etc.
TL;DR: self-censorship is so prevalent because it saves online platforms money.
What a ridiculous take. Many platforms and games actually prevent you from posting certain words, or flag or otherwise penalize posts if you include them. In some cases, this is completely explicit, i.e. you'll get a message saying "cant' post that."
Instead of playing a guessing game of which platform censors what, it's common just to avoid such words by censoring, euphemisms, or synonyms.
People: complain to politicians when egregious content starts trending
Politicians: bug Platform to do something about the egregious content
Platform: quickest fix for egregious content is dumb pattern matching
Content Producers: avoid becoming a false positive by using dumb substitutions to dodge the dumb pattern matching
The most direct fix would be the platform getting smarter about censorship, but this would not be without its own tradeoffs.
But it didn't. Isn't that the point of someone inventing it? If the system existed the whole time then it would most likely be much more realized.
Also people don't use this system because 99% of people don't right things down in tables. I know not many people hand write things anymore but even typing up ingredient lists on a machine I don't begin by creating a table.
Also this article format of numbered tweet responses as images is just terrible. What am I reading Buzzfeed? I had to stop reading.
Also isn't "viral" 100k or more? Not 10's of thousands? This is a clickbait article. But it brings up a bigger question: why claim that something is viral with 100,000+ views/likes/shares/responses/whatever when we know damn well Twitter is full of bots?