"Feel the air, folks; it's finally soup season-our fridges are stocked with carrots and crunchy stalks of celery, our pantries are equipped with onions, and our eyeballs are scanning the internet (and hopefully some cookbooks) for the next great soup recipe. This month's column is inspired directly from a concerned reader, whose perturbation lies with those aforementioned onions-which these days seem to be arriving at the market the size of a rec-league softball:"
"So many recipes call for "a small onion" or "half a medium onion." What the hell is that, exactly? Have you been to a grocery store lately? They sell only one size of onion, and they're about three-fourths pound each! Even the staffers of Cook's Illustrated use this format, and they pride themselves on their accuracy. Is it that impossible to specify "¼ cup diced" or "1 cup chopped" or "4 oz of onions"?"
"I immediately felt that this reader was on to something, but just to be sure, I dutifully snooped around my local grocery store conglomerates. Indeed, massive onions dominated the selections. Grocery bins are rife with big, clunky melon-looking alliums. I thought about taking one, gargantuan and tumbling as they were, and rolling it down the aisle like a bowling ball, just to see how far it would go."
Recipes commonly instruct cooks to use "a small onion" or "half a medium onion" without standard definitions. Supermarket onions frequently arrive oversized, leaving cooks unsure how much to use. A typical store carries large, heavy onions that differ markedly from the implied sizes in many recipes. Precision can be improved by listing onion amounts as weight or measured volume, such as quarter-cup diced, one cup chopped, or specific ounces. Clear measurements reduce confusion and produce more consistent outcomes when preparing soups and other dishes that rely on onion quantity.
Read at Slate Magazine
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]