French onion dip
Units
Temperature
Servings
Ingredients
The onions
- 500 g onions, about 2 large, sliced thin rounded
- 30 g butter rounded
- 15 ml olive oil rounded
- 5 g fine salt rounded
The dip
- 300 g sour cream rounded
- 80 g mayonnaise rounded
- 10 ml white wine vinegar, to cut through all that sweetness rounded
- 5 g coarse black pepper rounded
- 10 g chives rounded
Method
Method
- Slice the onions thin and put them in a wide pan with the butter, oil and salt over medium-low heat.
- Cook 40 minutes, stirring every five. They will sweat, then go translucent, then pale gold, then finally dark and sticky. The last ten minutes are where all the flavour arrives. If they catch, add a splash of water and scrape.
- Cool them completely. Warm onions will thin the sour cream and it will not thicken again.
- Chop them roughly, fold everything together, and rest two hours.
Notes
- There is no fast version. Sugar does not help and heat does not help; both give you browned onions rather than caramelised ones, which taste burnt-sweet rather than deep. Forty minutes on a low flame is the price.
- The vinegar is doing real work. Half a kilo of caramelised onion is very sweet, and without an acid the dip is cloying.
- Nothing French about it. The name came from American soup-mix marketing in the 1950s, and the dip is usually made from a powdered sachet. This is what the sachet is imitating.
- It keeps 5 days and is genuinely better on day two.
Ingredient substitutions
- Sour cream can be Schmand, which is richer, or Greek yogurt, which is sharper and lighter and makes a good higher-protein version.
- Do the onions in bulk. They freeze perfectly in a flat bag, so caramelise a kilo and keep half for next time. This turns a 45 minute dip into a 5 minute one.