How to Saute Onions without Burning Them - Jo's Kitchen Notebook (2024)

Do your chopped onions always catch in the pan before they are cooked properly? Here are my tips to keeping your onions soft and not brown and bitter.In some dishes, like curries, it’s actually good for the flavour of the dish to get a brown edge on the onions before adding the rest of the ingredients, but if you want to soften your onions and not singe them, there are a few things you can do.

1) Use enough oil

This is my #1 tip. Even if you don’t use any of the other tips below, this one will make a huge difference.The oil in the pan distributes the heat more evenly around the onions so you don’t get those edges that catch on the bottom of the pan.

I used to use less oil (about 1-2 teaspoonfuls) to try to make a meal healthier, but I found the onions were turning dark brown on the edges before they were cooked properly. Onion actually absorbs some oil when it starts to cook, so you need extra to compensate. Once the onions are cooked through, they will release oil back into the pan again. Try measuring out a tablespoon of oil,the amount most recipes recommend.

You can remove extra fat later in a number of different ways: Drain the onions on kitchen paper; cook your meat in with the cooked onions then drain both in a sieve; or remove fat from the surface of a sauce with kitchen paper or a spoon.

2) Make ’em sweat – use salt and a cold pan

Adding the chopped onions to the pan while it is still heating up and sprinkling with some salt helps draw out water contained in the onions so they sweat and soften instead of browning.

3) Be patient

Don’t whack up the heat trying to make the onions cook faster, it won’t work. Keep the heat low to medium and give the onion its gentle 7-10 minutes for the best results.If you’d rather not stand and stir for all that time, here are 3 less hands-on methods:

1. Add water or stock and simmer the onions to cook them*.
2. Use butter instead of oil, keep the heat low and put a lid on the pan. Butter has a higher water content and the lid keeps the steam in, allowing the onion to sweat in lots of moisture instead of browning.
3. Use your microwave. Toss the chopped raw onion in a little oil and season with a little salt, cover and microwave for 2-4 minutes until soft, stirring after 60-90 seconds. The length of time this will take depends on your microwave and the amount of onion you are cooking, so keep an eye on it.

*Simmering onion to cook it only works with stock or water. I have found that onions, and potatoes actually, will not soften properly in a tomato-based sauce/soup or a roux-based sauce, they need to be sautéed or boiled first. I don’t know why exactly, it probably involves a deeper knowledge of chemistry than I have!

Extra Tip – Sautéing Garlic

What is with all those recipes that tell you to put onions and garlic into the pan at the same time?! Onions take 7-10 minutes to cook and garlic takes at most a couple of minutes. It also burns very easily and that makes the whole dish taste acrid. If your recipe says to add them at the same time, ignore it. Wait until your onions are almost cooked before you add the garlic.

I hope you found these tips helpful. If you have a cooking question, leave a comment below or on my Facebook page!

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