I once heard onions described as the bass player in a dish.  You may not notice when they're there, but you sure do notice when they're not.

Gotta admire making a 16min video about such a common but important ingredient like onions. Everyonion should see this as an introduction to basic life/cooking skills!

Can't believe Adam didn't bust out his microscope to look at the cells. I loved that biology lesson at school.

I gotta say, i really love Adam's radio-style scripting and delivery. Super punchy, exactly what you need to know, with all the detail, as quick as possible. You get the whole picture, but he never belabors a point.

0:35 of course it's Polish people doing the onion research lol

I love it when Adam does "Not an ad" sections just admiring food establishments he enjoys for the internet to witness.

6:04 Gordon Ramsay wants to know your location.

Onions 202:
-if you don’t care about the texture, but want caramelized onion flavor, add some baking soda when you start to sauté them. This will cut the caramelization time in half, but also break down the cell structure.
- Add some water to the pan when you start sautéing onions and cover it for about five minutes to help extract the water from the onions. Then you can boil off the water quickly and get to the actual browning part much faster.

In Swedish, our word for garlic literally just means "white onion", so for the actual white onion we're discussing here, we instead call those "silver onions". They're not terribly common here so it causes less confusion than you'd think.

I honestly screamed NO when you said to compost the tips of the green onions and leeks! Those are some of the absolute best parts!

Adam's cooking 101 videos make my day. Two things I'd like to share:

- The radial method is actually worse for evenness than the grid method. The edge pieces are a lot bigger than the center pieces. Kenji Lopez-Alt shared a huge improvement on the radial method: just imagine the center of the half-onion is some distance under the cutting board(about 60% of the onion's height is perfect). Kenji's method results in even pieces and it's much easier than the normal radial, because you don't need to rotate the knife so much.

- If you put a bit of baking soda on your onions, they will caramelize a lot faster.

watching Adam speak Arabic was not in my bingo card

1:59 satisfying to see that you have done your homework. I think this is the first time on cooking YouTube, I’ve seen somebody even mention the reducing sugars and contrasting them to “sugars” in an explanation of the Maillard reaction

@2:55 Who else was expecting "Well, step 1 is to sharpen your knife" ...  "which you can do with the help from today's sponsor, Pronto!"  😀

Lots of tips for making caramelised onions quicker or easier but I find the best option is to start the onions in shallow water and as hot a heat as I can get, then you cook until the water evaporates away before then proceeding with the method in the same way Adam recommended.
While the method doesn't normally take me any less or more time than cooking them without water it makes the first period of time a much less active cooking process with the onions not being at any risk of burning or unveningly cooking, while the end result is the same.
Suprised this video didn't get into any quick caramelised onion tips but I guess that's more than fertile ground for a dedicated video.

Glad to see some proper shallot representation in this video. Much appreciated!

Fun onion tip! You can simmer a whole steak in pureéd onions for a bit for a really good steak! The onions tenderize the steak a bit, introduce some sugars to brown when you sear the steak, and add some delicous onion flavor. Plus, if you do a lot of steaks, you now effectively have a beef flavored onion juice that is heavenly as an addition to sauce.

Adam, since you are a man of details, which in why you channel is great, I think you slipped on translucent vs transparent.  After sweated, they do becomes translucent, meaning they let sometimes light throughput.  You are right that they are not transparent, you cannot see through them.  I cannot beleive I have become the person who his nothing better to do than to make corrections in the youtube comment section, yet here we are.  Thanks for the video!

Props to you because you made me watch 16 minutes of just onions

3:31

The word "perpendicular" is so refreshingly great to see. It took me forever to learn that "against the grain" actually means "opposite to the direction of it" - even that definition is a bit confusing to me (because what does opposite even mean). When you say an object is "against" another object, you usually mean that's lying next to that other object. It makes me tear my hair out knowing how confusing the wording of "against the grain" is when the perfect word, "perpendicular", is readily available.