Why You Ought to Add Baking Soda to Onions When Cooking

My household is large on Kenji’s channa masala. With staple components like canned chickpeas and tomatoes, ginger, garlic, and some primary spices, it doesn’t take lengthy to place collectively, so it’s a simple technique to get a flavorful dinner on the desk, particularly on a weeknight. And whereas it’s an excellent easy recipe, the dish is rarely good except I make it—or so my household says—so I’m tasked with channa masala-ing no less than as soon as a month. The fantastic thing about this month-to-month ritual is that I’ve zeroed in on one method that actually cuts down on cooking time: including baking soda to hurry up the method of browning onions. It’s such an impactful tip that I’ve began utilizing it in different dishes, and it saves me about 5 to 10 minutes, slicing the onion cooking time virtually in half. Right here’s how. 

What Occurs When You Add Baking Soda to Onions

PH has a huge impact on the Maillard reaction, a chemical course of that encourages browning in meals when they’re heated. The upper the pH, the quicker the response happens. Onions are solely at a pH stage of round 5 out of 14, making them a extra acidic ingredient, however an alkaline ingredient like baking soda can improve the pH stage of onions, encouraging browning in a shorter period of time. 

Baking soda additionally softens onions; its excessive pH stage, which ranges from 8.3 to 9, weakens the pectins within the greens, inflicting their cell partitions to interrupt down. The quicker the onions break down, the quicker chemical compounds are launched, which implies not solely quicker cooking, but in addition quicker taste and colour growth. 

Methods to Add Baking Soda to Your Onions to Pace Browning

Incorporating baking soda into your recipes to hurry up onion browning is easy. Warmth oil in a skillet or no matter vessel you intend to prepare dinner the onions in, then add your chopped, sliced, or diced onions, adopted instantly by the baking soda. You’ll need to use about 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda per one pound of onions. Ensure that the baking soda is evenly included with the onions, then enable the onions to prepare dinner till starting to brown, stirring ceaselessly. As soon as the onions begin to depart a brown coating on the pan, add one tablespoon of water and scrape up all of the brown bits. Repeat this course of till the onions are a deep brown colour. The entire course of ought to take about 10 minutes for diced onions cooked over medium-high warmth, however you may want to regulate the time based mostly on how finely the onions are lower.

When You Ought to—and Should not—Add Baking Soda to Onions

Whereas this system is nice for rapidly browning your onions, there are a number of caveats. The best way the baking soda breaks down the onion ends in it dropping a whole lot of its form and taking over a softer, virtually mushy texture. For a dish like channa masala or butter chicken the place the onions are supposed to mix in with the sauce, that’s not an issue—you wouldn’t need crunchy onions studded all through dishes like these anyway. However once you need your onions to retain their construction in a recipe like French onion soup or Oklahoma-style onion burgers, you’ll need to skip this system completely, in any other case you’ll find yourself with gloopy onions all through your dish. And whereas this tip does velocity up browning time, it nonetheless takes about 10 minutes, which is why Swetha Sivakumar skips onions completely in her 10-minute chana masala recipe. 

Baking soda additionally prevents onions from changing into too candy, which, once more, is warranted in sure dishes. However this hack gained’t assist in recipes that depend on the sweet, caramelized flavor of onions. Given the generally soapy notes that baking soda may give off, you’ll need to ensure that the dish you’re utilizing it in has sufficient flavors to masks that. 

It’s additionally essential to notice that whereas this system works with white, yellow, and crimson onions, the baking soda does give crimson onions a bluish-green colour that, in my expertise and opinion, will not be very interesting. However as soon as the onions are included with different components to kind a sauce, the colour isn’t sometimes noticeable. 

The Takeaway

Including baking soda once you’re cooking onions is a good way to hurry up the browning course of. Nonetheless, this system works greatest in recipes that don’t depend on (1) onions retaining their construction or (2) the candy taste of onions. However if you happen to’re like me and wish (or, actually, are pressured) to whip up a channa masala each month, baking soda is simply what you could save on time.