Cooking Onions & Change
A favourite memory of mine is my Dad cooking down onions. He used them to make his version of potatoes au gratin, thin layers of potato, cheese, and those soft, sweet, browned onions.
It’s a slow process to cook onions well. Apply too much heat too fast, and everything burns.
But slice the onions thin, turn the heat way down low, cover, and stir occasionally, and magic happens.
There’s science behind it.
First, the rigid structures of the onion rings get broken down as the water evaporates, and the pectins and polysaccharides that are holding it all together begin to collapse. You’ll see the onion getting soft and translucent.
Then, and this is what makes you cry, the sulphur compounds are released. The sharp and bitter are removed.
Now, natural sugars are released. Or really, they’re now made findable. They were always there, but locked into the rigidity of the cell walls and overpowered by the sulphur compounds.
And finally the caramelization occurs, as the onion turns golden brown. The Maillard reaction, that chemical process that makes grilled meat so tasty, allows for new complexities and depths of flavour to emerge.
Perfect.
I do love a good metaphor.
And I suspect this won’t be the last newsletter that plays around with the idea of food as guidance for how we lead change. Just the other day, I read this great article about what it takes to make the perfect cacio e pepe … which is both simple, and amazingly tricky to get “just right.”
