PRESERVING ONIONS: Dehydrate Your Own Caramelized Balsamic Onions - Homesteading Family

[Music] hey everybody its Carolyn from homesteading family and when you get to this time of year this kind of late winter time you have to start really paying close attention to the foods that you have stored in common storage those are often things like your garlic your onions maybe any pumpkins you have left or winter squash potatoes anything like that you need to start checking over their quality and using them up or turning them into something else and I went back to the pantry the other day and notice that my big batch of onions that I have stored we're starting to get a little bit soft there were a few that didn't look good so I went ahead and put those out in the compost pile but I want to take the ones that I have left before they go bad and preserve them in a different way so today I'm going to show you how to make an absolute amazing treat out of your onions that are starting to get maybe a little bit soft and that is going to be dehydrated balsamic caramelized onions these are so good to either top a meal like a roast chicken or a beef roast or they add a nice touch to something like sandwiches or even a go over a green bean casserole these are delicious and amazing and you're gonna be amazed at how simple these really are so the first thing we need to do is go ahead and slice up our onions you're just gonna do these guys in nice thin slices I'm not going crazy and growing paper-thin but probably an eighth of an inch and I'm not being too worried about being exact we're gonna cook these guys down for a nice long time so they're gonna really kind of break down anyways and we're just gonna do however many onions we have on hand to get this done with all right I'm just finishing up this last onion and I'm not crying yet but my eyes are starting to sting hey if you find any bad spots in your onions while you're doing this go ahead and just compost the entire onion you know onions that have bad spots have a tendency to have that flavor throughout even the good-looking parts of that onion and they can really disfavor something and make an entire dish not taste good so I don't mess with trying to cut out the bad parts of an onion I just go ahead and compost the entire thing all right now we want to move on to the cooking process and this is where we're actually going to be caramelizing these onions and so you want because this is going to be a long slow low cook you're gonna want to go ahead and make sure you have a heavy-bottomed pot or pan of some sort one of these cast-iron skillets is ideal for this now you can see for the amount of onions I have this skillet is going to be crowded with the onions in it and that's perfect for caramelizing the onions you they do really do best with a little bit of crowding in the pan it just helps to get them releasing all their juices before they start to scorch too much and we want our cast iron to be hot when we start but not burning the way we're gonna start this is just to put a very little amount of olive oil into your pan you could use another oil but because we're gonna dehydrate these we don't really want them to oily so we want to kind of keep that as minimal as possible and we're just gonna spread that around and then we're gonna go ahead and get these onions right in there and we're gonna let that slowly come on up to temperature just maybe scooching it a little bit at a time you'll be amazed at how quickly this is actually going to cook down now you do want to especially for the first few minutes pay attention to it so that you don't get scorching on the bottom and move them around however you need to you know just to kind of give them a real light little move because you're wanting these onions to release their juices and to slowly caramelize the sugars that are in the onions I know we don't think of onions as very sugary but they are actually quite sweet and have a lot of sugars in so we're gonna just give this a few minutes to get going and then I'll be right back and I'll show you what to do next well these onions have now been cooking for about 15 minutes on low and you can see that they have cooked way down from where they learn they're very easy to stir for the amount that was in there originally now and you know they're just getting nice and soft and they're still releasing a lot of their liquid in their juice but at some point here they're gonna start drying out and we don't really want them to Brown too much on the bottom so we just want them to continue to cook nice and slowly and so as we see that the liquid level in here is starting to dry off we are going to start adding some balsamic vinegar now I know everybody's gonna want amounts and exact amounts but you know this is one of those things you just have to do kind of I feel and this is just some balsamic vinegar and we're just gonna go ahead and put a little bit to start in here enough to just give maybe a really light coating on all of these onions as we're stirring them and we're just gonna keep doing this for about the next half hour these I would expect to take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour total for this amount now right now I'm sitting here and because I'm talking right in front of this I'm stirring it constantly and kind of stringing up a small Makem but you know for that whole 15 minutes that these cooked I probably walked by and stirred them once or twice so you don't have to babysit these just exactly so I'm gonna put just a little bit more in here and just to keep some liquid all the way across the bottom and I'm gonna go ahead and let these cook for about another half hour until they are just really melty soft they should just kind of dissolve in your mouth when they're done alright we are back and these onions have now been cooking for about a total of an hour and you can see they are very very soft but they aren't burnt at all they're just really well cooked that dark brown color is coming partially from the caramelization of the sugars in the onions from that low slow cook and partially from that balsamic vinegar and the smell is amazing if you tasted one right now they're a little hot so I'm not gonna eat one they're amazing and I've gotta warn you if you start eating them right now you may not have very much left to put onto the dehydrator trays because they are just an amazing food they go great with everything and at this stage you just want to eat them plain they're so good but we're gonna go ahead and get these guys right on to our dehydrator sheet now this she has the fruit leather Teflon sheet on it if you don't have one of these you can use some parchment paper and now I'm just gonna go ahead and kind of spread these loosely onto this dehydrator sheet now if you don't have a dehydrator you could put these on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet and you could put them in a very very low oven meaning like a hundred and fifty degrees what you're looking for with these is to get them all the way dry and very kind of crispy because they're cooked they're gonna have a kind of light texture to them when they dry but you do want them to be crispy for long-term storage all right we're just spreading these out making sure we don't have spots that are too thick on our sheet here and kind of trying to make it even so that it dries evenly we're gonna go ahead and stick this into the dehydrator at about a hundred and fifty degrees if you have a thermostat just switch it on if you don't have a thermostat probably in about four hours I'm going to start checking them and make sure that they're completely crispy all the way through before I turn them off I'll come back in a few hours and show you what that's like now these onions have dried for about seven hours and even in the thick parts you can see on the bottom sites of them they are not at all damp there is no feeling of moisture in them at all and I'm gonna kind of get one of the thicker clumps here and just break it apart to make sure that even in the center of it there is no feel of moisture at all and they aren't I would describe this somewhere between leathery and crispy depending on where you pick up you're gonna want to check each of your trays and different sections from your tray just to make sure that in any of the thicker spots there is no moisture because of course moisture is the enemy of any dehydrated food and that's what's gonna ruin your food if you have any moisture left I am going to go ahead and store these by just breaking them off here they've stuck a little bit but you know they just peel right off and we're gonna go ahead and put these into a glass jar to store them that I can shut down with an airtight lid that way no moisture can get in there and away them but on the other hand no moisture can get out of that jar either so if there's any moisture that's left in here it is gonna come out and it's gonna start condensing on the sides of the jar and it will cause mold so a great idea if anytime you're going to store some dehydrated food is to just keep an eye on it for the first week or so that it's in storage and see if any condensation build-up if it does you'll need to take it out and dry it even more checking thoroughly to make sure that it hasn't already started to mold if you catch it before the food itself has molded you'll be fine all right now these will store back in a dirt cabinet for well easily up to a year at about the year mark they're gonna start really decreasing in quality which food right food means that it's gonna lose kind of that real good sharp flavor that's something like a balsamic caramelized onion is gonna have but it's also going to start losing its nutritional content so you want to use it up probably by about the Year month which is perfect because they'll be gone then just in time for you to restock next year at the same time all right now let's talk about how we can use these guys now you can use these to top something like a casserole you can use them in a casserole you could break them up nice and fine and put them in a salad you could use these when you're cooking a roast of some sort that would be great you can even rehydrate those by adding some warm water to them and letting them sit for about half an hour and then using them rehydrated in whatever you're cooking guys enjoy these wonderful onions take care good bye [Music]

Channel: Homesteading Family

Views: 42,506

Keywords: homestead, homesteading, homesteadingfamily, homesteading family, family homesteading, diy, make your own, dehydrating, preserving, old-fashioned preserving, preserving onions, dehydrating onions, onion powder, make your own onion, what to do with onions

Id: Jcn-Vx_pVi0

Length: 12min 8sec (728 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 12 2018