Caramelized Onions, Rice Plate, Sunset and a Cardinal

April 21, 2025

On Friday (April 18), I pulled out my food processor. I put some butter, 1/4 cup, into my large Dutch oven, put a piece of parchment paper down on my induction stove top, moved the heavy Dutch oven onto the large burner and set the temperature setting to 3 (medium low).

While the butter melted, I started processing ten pounds of large onions.

I cut the ends off four onions, quartered them, peeled the quarters and ran them through the food processor. I dumped the food processor bowl of sliced onions into the hot melted butter and gave the onions a stir.

I repeated the process until I had processed five pounds of onions. At this point, I added a tablespoon of salt to the onions and stirred the salt in. I placed the lid on the Dutch oven to let the onions start to sweat. I would not add this much salt for five pounds. This is the total amount of salt for the ten pounds.

I had another five pounds of onions to process. I cut off all the ends of the onions, quartered them, peeled the quarters, and placed the quarters onto a platter. I ran the quarters through the food processor in batches until the bowl was full.

Once the food processor bowl was full, I dumped it into the Dutch oven. I repeated this until all the onions were processed. The original five pounds had sweated down significantly, while I cut up the second five pounds of onions into quarters, allowing space for the additional five pounds of onions.

The Dutch oven had been filled to the top twice.

While the onions cooked down slowly, I made supper.

The Com Thit Nuong Sa recipe comes from my “Cook’s Illustrated” May & June issue of 2025. I sent Bruce to the grocery store the day before I made this recipe. When Bruce got back from the store, I created the marinade and started the pork chops marinating. The grocery store didn’t have the Thai chiles, so Bruce picked up Serranos as a substitute. I had broken Jasmine rice from Misfits. It might not be exactly the same as Vietnam’s com tam (broken rice – rice broken/splintered during processing), but it worked well.

When it was time to cook the pork chops, I cooked them on the portable gas grill with some asparagus. The asparagus was my own addition to the plate. I had some delicious ripe cherry tomatoes which I used instead of larger less tasty grocery store tomatoes.

I am very happy with the flavor profile of this recipe. I love Vietnamese cooking and we don’t have any close Vietnamese restaurant in the area. I want to be able to cook some of my favorite Vietnamese dishes.

Bruce loved this recipe as well.

After dinner, we sat outside on the porch. A cardinal flew down and landed under the sunflower seed bird feeder.

My camera isn’t as good as my Oxford, Mississippi blog friend’s camera. She gets gorgeous pictures of cardinals.

We got to enjoy another beautiful sunset.

Then the mosquitoes came out and we retreated inside.

The onions had completed their caramelization. That deep color is just from the onions cooking slowly, being stirred occasionally. The only things in the pot is butter, sliced onions, salt and a spoon for stirring.

I put two flat quart bags of caramelized onions in the freezer and 1 flat quart bag of caramelized onions in the fridge.

I’ll use the caramelized onions to make French onion soup, caramelized onion dip, a sweet onion spread for sandwiches, etc. It goes great on biscuits with bacon.