What a quaint 20th century atavism. These days we "move fast and break things". /s

Definitely.

But I might not read it super carefully when recipe planning at the start of the week, which can result in scheduling mistakes.

Yeah except they often don’t.

My favorite is the ‘30 minute recipes’ that involve overnight marinating, carmelizing onions, etc.

I assume it's just people mimicking/cargo culting content creators, who are indeed being oppressed by the dark forces of the algorithm and the de-mometizer.

To be fair, YouTube (and probably other platforms) used to literally block stuff like that, and the substitutions did get by it.

IMO this boils down to big platforms being pressured to moderate, because some horrible things are shared there, and the cheapest moderation is blindly flagging words. People discussing things like games get warned/banned/shadowbanned by machines for using banned words, and everyone is getting used to self-censor because the appeal is as useful as a second navel.

TL;DR: self-censorship is so prevalent because it saves online platforms money.

> Most of this is self-censorship by people who believe they are being oppressed by all-powerful dark forces,

What a ridiculous take. Many platforms and games actually prevent you from posting certain words, or flag or otherwise penalize posts if you include them. In some cases, this is completely explicit, i.e. you'll get a message saying "cant' post that."

Instead of playing a guessing game of which platform censors what, it's common just to avoid such words by censoring, euphemisms, or synonyms.

It not /all/ about triggers it's partially driven by the algorithms on some social sites like TikTok or Youtube where there's some evidence and a lot of speculation that mentioning or including certain words can cause the recommendation algorithm to suppress your videos etc. That leads to a lot of homophones etc popping up like "sewer slide" or odder non mentions like unalive popping up. Because the really big channels care about maximizing reach for monetization reasons it shows up strongly in peoples feeds which drives wide adoption.

Definitely agree. I don't understand how "thinking harder" about what the word MIGHT be solves any problem. I might just be part of this older generation who is hard trained on reading and not skimming, I don't know. I've never found anyone who appreciates this sort of censorship to ask them to help me understand.

I've heard that adding sugar kick starts the caramelization.

You can multitask.

Not sure what you meant about the gaslighting.

I don't know about "chefs", but line cooks who haven't been to culinary school are generally trained to call this kind of faux-sweetened sweated onions "caramelized." Because, when a recipe calls for "caramelized onions" (and isn't an all-day background task like making a pot of onion-soup stock... which isn't generally something they'll be tasked with anyway), the onions as shown in the video are precisely what they'll be told to make. (Because it's fast. And because, for many recipes, it kinda-sorta works.)

That being said.

Caramelized onions should be a dark (nearly black) and warm brown color, not a neutral clay-soil brown. (Picture brown-sugar boba pearls.) They should have no water content, and should be visibly syrupy in texture. They should smell buttery + nutty + toasty; and should be extremely sweet, in that complex caramel way, with no trace of the original onion flavor remaining.

The onions in the video are none of those things.

These properties are all corollaries of what caramelization is, when it comes to onions: you're not only breaking down starches inside the onion into sugars, but then also fragmenting some of the resulting sugars into volatiles (diacetyl, furfural, etc), while polymerizing more of the resulting sugars into various caramel compounds.

The onions in the video have merely finished the first step: sweating. The cells of the onion have broken down, releasing simple sugars and water; but despite a few minutes' pan frying after breakdown, they're still wet and gloopy (and have quite a bit more cooking to go before they stop being so), because onions contain rather a lot of water, and rather a lot of sugar, and simple sugars are hygroscopic, i.e. they really want to hold onto nearby water.

The goal of caramelization is the same in an onion as it is in candy-making: you need to heat the sugar up until it melts and begins to react with things around it, both building up (polymerizing) and breaking down (fragmenting.)

Sugar melts well above the boiling point of water. So you can't caramelize anything until all the water is gone.

And that's why caramelizing onions takes around 40 minutes. 10 minutes on high heat to sweat the onions (as in the video); 20 minutes on med-high to drive off all the water; and a final ~10 minutes with careful watch-and-adjust temp control to actually caramelize the sugars, without burning them.

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In theory, you might be able to make this process happen faster... but not with any random store-bought onion, the day you buy it. You'd need to 1. freeze, and then thaw, the onion (to break down its cells), and then 2. desiccate the onion (i.e. keep it in a bone-dry environment with convective air) to pre-purge the lysed water from it. The result would be a "ready-to-caramelize" onion that would let you skip the first two phases of cooking. (The result would also now be incredibly non-shelf-stable, becoming a pile of mush after a day or two.)

Some people throughout history (who perhaps originated the idea of being able to caramelize an onion in 10 minutes) may have done both of these steps purely by accident! In fact, insofar as onions are storage vegetables often kept in a root cellar for months before consumption, and insofar as some root cellars can both get to below freezing and be very dry inside, I could see most historical people cooking onions for winter recipes having gotten this "speed hack" for free without even trying.

But an onion you buy at the store will have gone through neither of those steps. Caramelizing an onion the day you buy it will take 40 minutes, full-stop.

Yup, I wish they'd just be honest and say 'sautee onions for 10 minutes to a dark drown' or whatever. But if they were, I guess they'd sound less fancy?