In Pursuit of the Perfect Onion Ring | What’s Eating Dan?

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Dan shows you how to fry up delicately crisp, golden onion rings that run circles around restaurant versions.

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– I’m the kind of guy who, when given the opportunity, will always substitute onion rings for French fries. And it’s not because onion rings are consistently better than French fries. Because let’s be honest, we know they aren’t. I’ve eaten so many disappointing rings over the years.

No, it’s because when an onion ring is great, it is sublime. So you can chase after the perfect onion ring all over town or you can try to make them right at home. Today, we are in pursuit of the ultimate onion ring. Let’s look at some ugly onion rings so we know what we don’t want. We have soggy, greasy rings, rings where the coating is falling off, specimens where the onion stays intact and only the coating comes off. Ugh, that one makes me shudder. There are rings where the coating has separated

And the onion inside is then burned. And there are countless other sad situations that I don’t need to scare you guys with. My perfect onion ring is batter fried, golden brown, and well-seasoned with rich onion flavor, it’s crispy on the outside with a tender ring on the inside.

To get there, we’ve got a lotta testing to do. First off, let’s start with the onions. You can make onion rings from any type of onion, but that doesn’t mean it won’t pay to be choosy. Many onion rings at restaurants are made with a sweet variety of onion, such as Vidalia.

That sweetness is a nice counterbalance to the savory crust. But it also comes at a price. And I don’t just mean more expensive, which the sweet ones usually are. I mean the cost of less oniony flavor. Check this out. This is how onions line up on a pungency scale.

We have our sweet guys, like Vidalia and Walla Walla, white onions, like those used extensively in Mexican cooking, red onions, which tend to be both sweet and relatively pungent, and finally, yellow or Spanish onions. Onion pungency is created when cell walls are damaged, and an enzyme called allinase catalyzes reactions

Between sulfur-containing compounds called thiosulfinates to produce volatile, flavorful new compounds. The more pungent varieties of onion contain more of those initial thiosulfinates due to both their genetics and the growing conditions. Varieties like Vidalia, on the other hand, are bred to develop much more sugar. And also, since they are grown in low-sulfur soils,

They develop less of the thiosulfinate compounds. So they taste both sweeter and less pungently oniony. Now, if you’re saying to yourself, “I don’t really notice that much difference among onions,” try each raw side by side. You’ll see a huge difference. Yellow onions pack a sharpness that will stick with you.

Now, if you were doing this onion side by side taste test on a date, which I highly recommend because it is a good time, don’t worry, because you’ll both have onion breath. So it’s not even like a thing. The cool thing is, we don’t really have to choose

Between the lovely, nice sweetness of a Vidalia and the real pungent richness of a yellow onion. Because we can season the onions directly. So we’ll choose yellow onions for their big flavor and add some balancing sweetness with confectioners’ sugar. Didn’t see that one coming huh?

The sugar’s super fine grind means it dissolves instantly and blends right in. But we can do even more. And by even more, I mean even more onion flavor. By reaching for our second unusual ingredient, onion powder. Dehydrated and dried forms of ingredients sometimes get a bad rap. But ignoring them means ignoring

An incredible source of flavor. Here’s an example. I have a recipe for a strawberry sauce that contains both freeze dried strawberries and fresh strawberries. The freeze dried strawberries absorb the water from the fresh strawberries and essentially double the intensity of the strawberry flavor, because they bring no water to the mix.

In our case today, I can also double down on onion flavor with just a few sprinkles of onion powder. Okay, are you thinking what I’m thinking? Let’s batter these up. Batters are fabulous for fried food because they contain everything that is needed for a perfect crust. Here’s what I mean.

For starches to form a crispy coating, a few things need to happen. The starch needs to hydrate, gel, and then dry out. Check out this experiment. I have a pot of oil at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Watch what happens when I sprinkle in dry flour. It foams up and simply disperses into the oil.

Now look at what happens when I take flour that has been mixed with enough water to form a batter. You can see how the hydrated starch forms a gel when it gets exposed to heat. We get little clumps that stay together. As the water is driven out of that gel,

It leaves empty pockets in its wake. Once the water is gone, the starch hardens around that porous structure. And we get something that is crispy and delightful. Now, you can dredge onion rings in seasoned flour, but then you are relying solely on the moisture on the surface of the onions to hydrate it.

So what you end up with is a thin coating that is only vaguely crispy and often, there are patches of flour that never hydrate and they come off as dusty in your mouth. Boo to that. Boo to that? I wrote that? I am a diehard batter boy, but that still leaves lots of choices. Should you use flour, cornstarch? What about the liquid? Water, beer? You all know where this is going, right? Okay, say it with me. Check out this experiment. First off, let’s look at cornstarch versus all-purpose flour.

I’m gonna use water as my liquid for now. I have one batter that is 100% all-purpose flour and another that is 100% cornstarch. I have a third that is 50/50 cornstarch and flour. Now look what happens when I dip an onion in each. The cornstarch has almost zero cling.

As we increase the ratio of flour, we get better cling, which will lead to a thicker coating. Okay, let’s take a look and a bite. The all-flour one has a slight toughness, which is thanks to the gluten formed in the batter. The cornstarch batter contains no gluten, so it’s definitely not tough,

But it didn’t stick well at all. That being said, the little bits that actually stayed on the onion are super crispy. The 50/50 batch is nicer than either, but it’s still not perfect. After playing around with ratios, we find the sweet spot with two cups of all-purpose flour and three tablespoons of cornstarch.

The cornstarch limits the amount of gluten that can form, so the crust is never tough. And it increases crispiness, perfect. Next up, let’s test the liquid component. I’ll just come out and say it, beer batters are awesome. But like, why? We’re gonna look at water versus carbonated water versus beer.

This will help us figure out whether beer is great because it’s carbonated or beer is great because it contains things like proteins and sugars that you don’t find in seltzer or water. The water-only batter produces rings that are light in color and have the least amount of microbubbles in the crust.

And remember, the porous structure of the crust is what makes it shatter when we bite into it. The seltzer is loaded with bubbles, but it’s still pale. This suggests that having some carbonation in the batter is valuable, but not sufficient. The beer sample is also loaded with bubbles,

But has richer flavor and better browning than the seltzer sample. The color and flavor improvement is thanks to sugars and proteins in the beer undergoing the Maillard reactions in the hot oil. I would rank these in order of preference from favorite to least favorite as beer, seltzer, plain water.

Beer, man, it just wins every time. Okay, let’s put this all together. We whisk confectioners’ sugar, cornstarch, salt, and onion powder together. I’ll take a tablespoon of this to season our sliced onions. For the batter, we simply whisk together flour, baking powder, cornstarch, and the remaining sugar-onion powder mixture.

As it does in baking recipes, the baking powder here produces carbon dioxide that will expand small bubbles in the batter. And now, in goes our beer, which will provide us with those lovely small bubbles. Okay, time to fry. Now, deep frying can feel intimidating,

But it really is just all about nailing the temperature. We’re gonna go with 360 degrees here, which is a little bit lower than most onion ring recipes. This allows the rings to spend a bit more time cooking so that the onion inside fully softens. Why does that matter?

Because fully softened onion means you don’t end up with that dreaded onion pull. Ugh. Oh my god, look at these beauties. In my mind, these are the Platonic ideal. Super bubbly, crispy, golden crust, tons of great onion flavor, and a tender ring of sweet onion inside. These are, they’re, I mean, they’re like,

Whoa, I think for the first time in over 80 episodes, I think I’m actually speechless. Eat ’em plain, dip ’em in ketchup, or whip up this creamy jalapeno dip. Whatever you do, do you, and just do it. Because this is how to eat onion rings. Big thanks to “Cook’s Illustrated” deputy food editor,

Andrea Geary, for her incredible recipe for onion rings. Now, if you enjoyed this video, hit the Like and Subscribe buttons and that little bell icon. Now, if you didn’t like the video, hit Like and Subscribe and that little bell icon. So I wanna know: Do you share my passion for onion rings?

Do you prefer French fries? Do you always get both? I showed you what my ideal onion ring is, and now I wanna hear about yours. Let me know in the comments and I look forward to talking to you down under. Why did I do that? You can grab today’s recipes at CooksIllustrated.com/WhatsEatingDan,

Which is also linked below. Thanks for watching and see you next time.