Caramelized Onions, Crockpot-Style

Caramelized onions are incredibly delicious. All sweet and squishy and tasting nothing like the crunchy raw onions they come from. Food chemistry in action, people! But they take a while to cook properly. And a lot of stirring. I am too lazy to bother with that process most of the time, so I rarely eat caramelized onions.

This is where my crockpot saves the day.

I found this great recipe on a blog called Island Vittles, and I am never going back. To the old way of making caramelized onions, I mean, not to Island Vittles. I’ll probably go back, it was a nice blog. 🙂

The idea is to dump approximately a ton of sliced onions into a crockpot, add some butter and olive oil and maybe some thyme and pepper if you’re so inclined, and let it go until the onions are soft and brown and perfect.

I ended up needing a total of 6 hours on high, with a stir break every few hours. The onions tend to stick to the sides and crisp up with the heat, so stirring helps to avoid any charred bits from ruining the smooth texture you’re looking for. The liquid buildup from the sweating onions was significant, so somewhere around the five hour mark, I took off the lid, tipped the crockpot a little, and spooned out some of the juice so I didn’t end up with onion soup. On further reflection, this might be a really good way to make onion soup…

I mixed some of the finished product into some mac and cheese (awesome), and froze the rest for later.

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