Copyright Slate
Recipe for Disaster is Slate’s column about the things recipes get wrong—and how to fix them. If you’ve noticed a recipe annoyance, absurdity, or outright lie, file your complaint here and we will investigate! Like the great George Costanza once said, “I gotta focus. I’m shifting into soup mode.” 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. I quickly ascertained that these onions, large and hefty, could probably smash the windshield of the police vehicle parked out front of the store (not that I was fantasizing about that sort of thing, obviously). I took one home to weigh, and it—a big boy of the yellow variety—came in at a whopping 412 grams (“large” onions are usually estimated to be between 225 and 275 grams, depending on whom you ask). Forget medium or even large; this was jumbo onion territory. Later, I scooted down to the farmers market, where I located, rather easily, beautifully delicate, orblike true medium onions (these the size of a baseball) and, farther along from those, all-too-rare small onions curled into a tiny basket typically meant for berries. (Sometimes, the farmers market is obnoxiously cute.) All of the small onions weighed between 65 and 85 grams, and the mediums approached but rarely exceeded 200 grams. So it’s possible to get aromatics that aren’t totally overgrown, but you do have to go out of the way to the farmers market to pay farmers market prices. Lan Lam, the deputy food editor for America’s Test Kitchen, confirmed my suspicions. “The larger chains seem to carry softball-sized Spanish and white onions,” she tells me. “And onions from the farmers market vary quite a bit in size. It comes down to the purveyors that individual buyers purchase from.” Our disgruntled reader is dead-on: Grocery store onions are too damn big. Moreover, depending on where you shop, onion sizes can be … erratic. So why don’t recipe writers just give accurate measurements of how much they want in the dish? And what the hell is “half a medium onion,” anyway? In this quick video interview with two ATK cooks from 2018, they detail that a medium onion is about the size of a tennis ball. “We always say that one medium onion yields 1 cup of prepared product,” they note. “So if you have a bigger onion, you just adjust accordingly.” I bring up this somewhat old video (the basic calculations of which Lam reconfirmed) for a reason: This was 2018, and today, seven years later, after a pandemic in which the entire bleary-eyed world spent a lot more time in the kitchen, I submit that home cooks (like our reader) want measurements. Precision. It’s not enough to just tell someone to “adjust accordingly,” not when digital scales are becoming more commonplace in the kitchen, and when we demand exactness in every area of our daily routine. I mean, we’re getting a ball-strike challenge system in Major League Baseball for a reason—society has grown mostly weary of unnecessary inaccuracy. Cooking, like baseball, isn’t life-and-death (discounting mussels and oysters, which can actually kill you. I suppose a baseball at the right speed could also kill you, but follow me here). If we can make something that’s a pastime easier, more precise, then we should. That’s the modern thinking, anyway: If we have the chance to optimize, we take it—never mind what might be lost in the process (more on that later). So why not just list “1 cup finely chopped onions” instead of “one medium onion”? “This sort of gets into how recipes are written,” explains Lam. “An ingredient list often doubles as a shopping list, and it needs to be succinct and clear. If you’re at the store, ‘one onion’ is a lot easier to shop for than ‘1¾ cups of coarsely chopped onion.’ ” At the Kitchn, most onions are labeled as medium or large in recipes, but with a catch: They’re also listed by weight, usually in pounds (most grocery stores do still have scales, even if hidden in a back corner), or by volume. The volume measurements aren’t exact, but they do give cooks something firmer to grab onto when enacting a recipe. The idea is to get people used to the idea of what a medium onion will amount to, roughly, when diced. Christine Gallary, the senior recipe editor for the Kitchn, echoes Lam in explaining that onions are listed by size to make shopping easier: “When developing or editing recipes, I always try to think what is most helpful for someone shopping in the grocery store and prepping at home.” But there’s no rule that says you must list onions only by size. “At the Kitchn, we like to give two indicators for onions,” Gallary says. “We generally start with size (small, medium, or large) because that’s easy to eyeball in the store, and then we give a volume measurement for the amount after it’s prepped.” However, she tells me, the Kitchn considers a medium yellow onion to be 1½ cups when diced, a quantity that is considerably higher than the single cup of finely chopped onion that Lam says is standard at ATK. “It’s not a perfect system,” admits Gallary, “but, to be honest, since onions are almost exclusively used in savory cooking, a little more or a little less will probably not make a big deal in the final dish!” More pedantic individuals probably won’t be satisfied with that answer, but I find myself agreeing with her: A slight increase or decrease in the onion likely won’t significantly affect the dish, especially when the onions are cooked. (Raw onions, naturally, should be used sparingly and judiciously.) The whole debate raises a good question: Are we being a little too precise in our savory cooking? In soups, stews, pasta dishes, and stir-fries, is it really that important to specify the amount of onions down to the teaspoon? “When there’s leeway regarding the size of the onion, we’ll just call for one onion or maybe one large onion,” says Lam. “But if the details matter, we’ll call for one large white onion, finely chopped (1½ cups). It helps you when you’re shopping and when you’re cooking.” With regard to Cook’s Illustrated and ATK, Lam says that they “love scales and the precision they allow.” However, when it comes to onions, she admits that, within reason, there are simply very few recipes in which the exact weight of the onion matters. “We trust home cooks to make the right call.” And with that, we have the major theme that emerged for me in this story: trust. Most recipes aren’t written for the novice, for the trepidatious beginner, for the entry-point recipe-makers. They’re for the people with paying subscriptions (hello, Slate Plus subscribers!), the NYT Cooking commenters, the people who know a thing or two about a thing or two in the kitchen. When I revisit the reader’s question, I can’t help but worry we’re becoming a little too scrupulous with regards to cooking at home. What makes cooking such a gratifying creative endeavor is the ability to change, to taste and feel, the sensation of cooking. Turning every aspect of it into a mathematical equation—well, I’d argue that you lose something of major importance. Not to mention that pursuing an exact, uniform measurement of onion is chasing a mirage. Even the most fastidious recipe writers, like J. Kenji López-Alt of Serious Eats, know that there’s no such thing as a perfect measurement when it comes to onions, which will always vary in size, flavor, and potency. According to López-Alt, “In fact, flavor, moisture content, sugar content, etc. can differ greatly between onions, which means that you’re both wasting your time by worrying about that level of precision and also creating a less consistent product by relying on your scale instead of your tongue or your other senses.” Still, there’s little I love more than wasting my time in the name of onion journalism. So I found an industry-standard tennis ball–sized medium onion and weighed the damn thing. This one came out to 207 grams (a little big), and I had to obtain it at the farmers market. (Grocery chains really do need to start carrying a range of sizes again!) I cut one end clean off, split the onion in half, peeled it, then made a horizontal incision in both halves before chopping. I ended up with a cup of diced onions plus a few extra tablespoons, adding up to nearly a cup and a quarter. It wasn’t the ATK standard cup I was aiming for, but that’s OK. Measuring onions will never be an exact science, and personally, I’m happy that it isn’t. Some things in life just shouldn’t be optimized. Maybe I had a little too much onion on my hands, but, dear reader, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my onion investigations, it’s that becoming obsessed with measurements doesn’t actually lead anywhere meaningful. What’s lasting in the kitchen is your instincts, because you’ve got them—and, as the many great recipe writers I’ve interviewed say over and over again, they trust you to make the right call.
