Kyl Haselbauer has 20 years of experience working in fine-dining and modernist kitchens, including Bar Cotto and Anchovies &amp; Olives in Seattle. He is also the owner of Bright Spot, a café and coffee shop in Seattle.

Kyl Haselbauer

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that caramelizing onions takes way longer than any recipe would have you believe. Until now.The issue most cooks have with following instructions for caramelizing onions is that the process is deceptively simple. Three ingredients—onions, butter, salt—cooked in a standard-issue pan ... how complicated could it be? But as soon as you get the pan on the hob, complications set in. How high is “medium-high” heat? Does it matter if you use a 2-quart pan instead of a 3-quart pan or a Dutch oven? When you read that the onions should be “thinly sliced,” how thin are you going to cut them? 1/2-inch slices? (Please, no.) 1/4-inch?All of these variables affect the rate at which the onions release water, break down, and the sugars they contain slowly start to caramelize. But even if you use a recipe that eliminates these variables (and you follow it exactly), one variable will still remain: the amount of heat you apply. And that’s because most cooks are working with imprecise sources of heat: gas or electric burners of various sizes. However, if you set the cook temperature precisely and regulate it so that it stays as close to constant as possible, the amount of time it takes to transform the onions from raw to any cooked stage you like will stay pretty much constant, as well. (There will be slight variation depending on how closely you follow the recipe’s procedure and, say, the exact water content of your onions.)With a Control Freak Home induction burner, you can do that. We took the process a step further to generate this caramelized onion visual doneness guide. The procedure for each level of doneness is essentially the same: Cook sliced onions gently, covered, and stir occasionally until they’re cooked to your liking. The only variance between types of onions is the frequency with which you have to stir them, but even for the darkest caramelized onions, the process is almost entirely hands-off. Aside from providing visual references for the different degrees of caramelization you can achieve by cooking onions in butter, it also illustrates how the steady application of heat at a set temperature can produce wildly different textures and flavors by adjusting the cook time.

Precision Caramelized Onions