Homemade Onion Rings?

Anyone got a good recipe for onion rings? I made some from scratch years ago, but I can’t find the recipe. I’ve got a hankering.

Onion rings are super fun to experiment with. I don’t really have a recipe as such, I kind of eyeball it. Basically, a flour drudge is a terrific canvas on which to experiment.

My personal favorite is a mix of seasoned flour and then put a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos in the food processor and make a “chunky flour” out of them. Add to the mixture and proceed as usual.

But if there’s a “big secret” here it is. And BTW I know this isn’t a secret, it’s spelled out in most recipes. Every ingredient must be ICE COLD right up to the point where the onion hits the hot oil.

I read this in several different places, but I kind of blew it off and got mediocre results in the process. Then I took it seriously and the difference is night and day. So just saying don’t do what I did, that ice cold thing actually is the whole ball game.

I chill the onions in salted ice water before slicing, then bag them in a zip loc and put them back in the ice water. You want that onion to be like 32.1 degrees, as close to freezing as possible. Do the same with whatever liquid you use (milk, condensed milk, etc), get the batter down to .1 degrees above freezing. Then dip and fry within .02 seconds. Do NOT allow the raw ring or batter to warm up at all.

I had some excellent onion rings that used a taco seasoning, so next time I try these, that’ll be what I try to recreate.

Grouse

This method nerds out quite a bit but it works – freezing then thawing the sliced onions removes that membrane really well and makes the batter adhere to the onion, prevents the onion from sliding out of the fried ring. The batter recipe here is also pretty versatile, I use a similar one when I fry fish.

Regardless of technique/recipe, Grouse is right about keeping all the ingredients, especially the batter, as cold as possible before it hits the oil. Good luck!

https://www.seriouseats.com/2015/09/the-food-lab-foolproof-onion-rings-excerpt.html

zooks wrote:

This method nerds out quite a bit but it works

Being a scientist by day, this is right up my alley. Thanks.

Ralph Wiggum wrote:

Being a scientist by day, this is right up my alley. Thanks.

In that case, if you need an excuse to buy your very own laser thermometer, here it is.

“Honest, honey, I NEED this laser thermometer. I’m making onion rings.”

Grouse

We have used this recipe a few times and they are really good. Just the onion rings, not the sauce.

https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/guy-fieri/beer-battered-onion-rings-recipe-1948867

Late 1970’s, Johnson lake very close to the border. Hunting and fishing with some good friends. We caught some walleyes and shot a few grouse and decided to have a dinner fit for a king. The guy doing to cooking sliced up a few onions and made a batter from pancake mix and made onion rings out in the middle of nowhere on a Coleman stove.

That was the best dinner I ever ate, ever.

S.R.

My guess on keeping everything cold is that it allows the batter to cook before the water in the onion turns to steam. Nothing blows batter off deep fried food like steam.

Patting fish filets dry before applying batter and using only egg as a wash helps.

biggill wrote:

My guess on keeping everything cold is that it allows the batter to cook before the water in the onion turns to steam. Nothing blows batter off deep fried food like steam.

Kind of…

Keeping ingredients cold, especially the batter, helps reduce gluten formation, which is the enemy of this type of cooking. That’s also why all these type of batter recipes state that you should stir to barely combine, mixing/kneading saturates flour granules and activates the gluten proteins.

High gluten food items are things like baguettes, which are dense and chewy and full of huge air bubbles. When you’re making batter for things like muffins, pancakes, and this kind of deep frying, you want a smooth, soft texture with the tiniest air bubbles you can get. The recipe I included uses vodka for part of its liquid and the alcohol also helps prevent gluten formation.

Regarding steam when deep frying, that’s actually a good thing. When you drop something into hot oil, the bubbles you see is steam escaping the item being deep fried.

The pressure of the water inside the food item turning to steam is higher than the pressure of the oil pushing into the food item and it actually prevents oil from saturating the food item when cooking, which is why temp control is important – too low of temp and steam doesn’t get released fast enough, which saturates the food with the cooking oil; too high of temp and the batter is browned before the food inside is fully cooked via steam release.

That was really nerdy for a Friday morning, hope that helps though.

https://www.seriouseats.com/2016/12/use-vodka-for-crispier-fried-food.html

Good detail on vodka added to batter

Shore Lunch beer batter is the best with big Vidalia onions.

I tried out the recipe in the link that zook’s provided this weekend, and I kept everything nice and cold. It made about 2x what we could eat, but DAMN, they were good!

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Looks good