Can You Fry Onions in the Microwave?

If you love cooking with onion, you know that it can take some time to get onion ready to add to recipes. Preparing your onion by frying, it can take even longer.

Sometimes onion is the most time-consuming part of the cooking process when you are using it in a recipe.

Onion can be time-consuming to prepare, and it doesn’t keep for long once it has been cooked. This can be one of the more frustrating things about cooking onion even though it is delicious.

People often wonder if there are better ways to prepare their onions when they need to add them to recipes of various kinds.

Thankfully, there are some shortcuts that you can use, such as chopping your onion with a food processor.

You can also fry your onions in the microwave if you are short on time and are worried about getting them ready to cook.

If you want to learn more about whether or not you can fry onions in the microwave, you need to keep reading!

Frying Onion in the Microwave

The first thing that you need to be sure that you are doing is storing your onions properly. Storing your raw onion in the right kind of container can make a big impact on its freshness and flavor, so you will want to be certain to use this tip.

Also, make sure that you do not try to store chopped onion for too long since it will go bad or, at minimum, lose flavor and texture. Onion kept in the fridge will only be good for a couple of days.

The best way to prepare your onion to fry it in the microwave is to make sure that you chop it up right before you use it.

This can be made easier through the use of a food processor, but it does not really take that long to chop up onion by hand, especially if you are going to cook it in the microwave.

Once your onion is chopped up, the process of cooking it in the microwave is really easy. Remember that you might need to experiment a little with cooking time in the microwave.

Some microwaves cook at very high power, and this can change the cooking time greatly for your unique situation.

Test out the cooking time carefully the first time you prepare onion in this way so that you do not make a big mess in your microwave and ruin your chopped-up and prepared onions.

  1. Put your chopped onion into a microwave-safe bowl. Make sure you use a round bowl so that the onion will stay moist at the bottom of the bowl with the butter and other seasonings that you are using. You do not want to try and fry the onion in the microwave in a flat dish or Tupperware as it will just dry out and not taste very good.
  2. Put in olive oil and salt to taste. You will want to stir with a fork or spoon to make sure that the onions are all coated before you start cooking. Your onion will cook for a total of 12 to 13 minutes, and you will need to stir in between every four minutes of cooking time. Make sure to pull the onion apart as you stir so that it cooks evenly. This cook timing is based on an 1100-watt microwave, so you might need to adjust your cook time for your own personal microwave.
  3. The onion will shrivel first, and then they will want to clump up. Once you have started pulling apart the clumps of onion, they should begin to brown. The browning stage happens really quickly, so make sure that you do not put them in for too long at this stage of the cooking process.
  4. Add other seasonings as desired to make sure that you have the right flavor profile for your unique recipe’s needs. You might need to add different ingredients for different recipes, so plan in advance to add liquid flavorings and other items before you start microwaving your onion.

You can also make your fried onions with butter if you wish. You will just need to adjust the amount of butter for the number of onions that you are making.

Too much butter will lead to soggy onions that are not any good to eat even after being cooked for the full 11 minutes. Too little butter might make for dried-out onions that are not edible or that burn.

You can adjust for some of the difficulties with dried-out onions by lowering the cooking temperature and changing some of the cook settings on your microwave to reduce the cooking time and temp as needed.

Frying Onion in the Microwave is Easy

Frying onion in the microwave is a very easy process and one that you will not regret learning how to do.

You might have to do a little experimentation to figure out what the right cooking time is for your unique microwave. Still, once you have figured out the proper cooking time for your onion, you will be able to make fried onion easily and quickly in the microwave.

Microwaving food can lead to the same delicious and crispy results, you just want to adjust the way that you prepare the food a little bit.

Make sure that you adjust your cooking time for an onion that is prepared in butter versus onion that is made with olive oil, and don’t forget to add your spices and seasonings to the bowl before you pop it into the microwave.

Onion that is cooked in this way is just as good as an onion that has been fried on the stove, and you will save so much time as well as a lot of cleanups.

Onion is a delicious part of many recipes, and you will love cooking with it in this easy way.

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