1. To sweat onions, drizzle some oil in a pan and add chopped onions. Cook on a low heat with lid on. It’s important to let onions cook gently, without colouring.
2. Sweated onions are ready when you can squash them between your finger and thumb. Be patient, sweating is a long process. Depending on how many are being cooked, onions can take as long as 20min upwards.
3. To caramelise onions, melt butter over a high heat. When it’s foaming, add sliced onions and cook on a medium-high heat.
4. Continuously stir onions so they don’t catch. They’re ready when golden in colour and completely soft.
Use your skills to make these triple-tested recipes:
Jazzed-up onions recipe
French onion soup recipe
More midweek meal recipes
Traditional enamel oblong pie dish (16cm), Lakeland. Easy induction frying pan (20cm), Kuhn Rikon UK. Classic glass measure mug (0.5 litres), Pyrex. Chopping board, oil pourer, wooden spoon, glass ramekin, chef's own.
An experienced and highly skilled team of food writers, stylists and digital content producers, the Good Housekeeping Cookery Team is a close-knit squad of food obsessives. Cookery Editor Emma Franklin is our resident chilli obsessive and barbecue expert, who spends an inordinate amount of time on holidays poking round the local supermarkets seeking out new and exciting foods. Senior Cookery Writer Alice Shields is a former pastry chef and baking fanatic who loves making bread and would have peanut butter with everything if she could. Her favourite carb is pasta, and our vibrant green spaghetti is her weeknight go-to. Lover of all things savoury, Senior Cookery Writer Grace Evans can be found eating crispy corn and nocellara olives at every opportunity, and will take the cheeseboard over dessert any time (though she cannot resist a slice of tres leches cake). With a wealth of professional kitchen know-how, culinary training and years of experience between them, they are all dedicated to ensuring every Good Housekeeping recipe is the best it can be, so you can trust they’ll work (and if they don’t – we’ll have the answer for why*) every time (*90% of the time the answer is: “buy an separate oven thermometer”!).
