Skip to main content
Main

Fried Onions

Fried onions are sliced onion rings coated in flour, fried in lard, and served as a side dish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Fried Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the onions and cut off the roots and stems.

  2. Slice them crosswise and separate the rings with your fingers.

  3. Season the rings with coarse sea salt and coat them in flour.

  4. Place the coated rings in a colander and shake off excess flour.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the rings in hot lard until nicely colored.

  2. Drain on a napkin and serve.

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 flavor that becomes mellow when fried.
Flour
Forms a dry coating that crisps and browns in the hot fat.
Lard
Conducts heat for frying and adds fat that promotes browning and crispness.

The step that matters

Frying in hot lard until nicely colored. If the lard is not hot enough, the flour coating absorbs fat and turns greasy instead of crisp. Too much heat can scorch the coating before the onion softens, so the rings should be watched closely for color.

“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.

More fried onions recipes

Parmesan 3 See all 72 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes