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To Pry Onions

Fried onion rings made by boiling peeled onions, coating with flour, and deep-frying until crisp.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 32,460 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Pry Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Place peeled onions in a saucepan with cold salted water.

  2. Bring the water to a boil and cook for 7 minutes.

  3. Drain the onions and let them cool.

  4. Slice the onions into rings.

  5. Roll the rings in a floured cloth.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat plenty of cooking fat in a saucepan until boiling.

  2. Fry the onion rings in a wire frying basket until crisp and golden brown.

  3. Drain on paper and serve hot.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Onions
Provide the main body and sweet flavour of the rings once cooked and fried.
Flour
Coats the rings so the surface dries and crisps and browns during frying.

The step that matters

Fry the onion rings in a wire frying basket until crisp and golden brown. Fat must be hot enough that the coating dries and browns quickly. If the rings are added to fat that is too cool, they absorb more oil and turn greasy rather than crisp.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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