Know your onions

Indian lamb, cashew stew: Brown-fry is unique to Indian cuisine. Compared to browning, the technique calls for more oil — and more attention. (Bill Hogan/Chicago Tribune)

Leah Eskin Home on the Range

July 15, 2012

The story begins with "Once upon a time;" the recipe begins with "Onions."

Both have the same effect: to set the mood. Onions get right to work scenting the kitchen savory, flavoring the oil sweet, deepening the color and complexity of the dish as it unfurls.

Leah Eskin
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Not that every opening line reads alike. The recipe may suggest a mere sweat: low heat until limp. It may insist on caramelize: low heat all the way to a deep, sticky sweet. It may specify the saute: medium heat, until golden. Or it may brave brown: medium heat until crisp — usually reserved for liver-and-onion duty. Then there's the deep-fry, best known to the onion ring.

I had assumed the onion spectrum ran from pale to sticky to crisp. An assumption, like most, that proved clumsy.

I was enlightened while cooking curry with friends. The recipe I'd been assigned called for onions, brown-fried. Which called for me to look perplexed. And, giving in, to read the instructions.

Brown-fry is unique — or so the cookbook claimed — to Indian cuisine. It sizzles in the zone between saute and deep-fry. Compared with browning, the technique calls for more oil — about 2 tablespoons per cup of onions. It calls for more heat — a medium-high flame. And it calls for more attention — constant stirring until the onions turn a deep crisp/tender brown.

It's a lovely method and yielded a lovely stew. It's good to know that even "Once upon a time" can be refreshed. And refreshing.

Indian lamb and cashew stew

Prep: 1 hour
Cook: 1 hour 15 minutes
Serves: 6

Ingredients:
¼ cup vegetable oil
2 cups finely chopped onions
2 pounds ground lamb
2 teaspoons finely chopped garlic
1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger root
3 teaspoons garam masala or ground cumin
2 teaspoons ground coriander