If you never had one, go to Chili’s and order one (apparently they are at Outback Steakhouse as well). Delicious. Just a fun take on an onion ring with some sweet dipping sauces. It’s probably one of my favorite appetizers at Chili’s, so I thought the homemade version would make a delicious addition to our blog.
After making a delicious dinner, we hiked over to the grocery store for a few items needed for the blooming onion – basically all we needed was an onion. We came across a yummy recipe claiming to replicate Outback’s blooming onion; looked delicious and simple.
A sense of accomplishment came over me after cutting up the onion – it was beautiful.
After seasoning the flour and making the batter, I put oil in a pot and let it heat up on the stove. After several minutes, I tried dropping in some batter to see if the oil was hot enough. The batter was taking a little longer than expected, so we decided to wait a few more minutes to let it heat up to the recommended 350-400 degrees.
As we waited, I doused the onion in the flour, shook it off, and then soaked it in the batter. Took me some time, but I covered the onion, and each petal, with batter. We in good shape.
It was time for the frying. Fatima went to to put the onion in the oil – a battered blooming onion is very difficult to pick up, especially if you’re trying to place it in hot oil without trying to burn your fingers. We balanced the onion on a giant sauce spoon and dropped it gently in the oil. And bubble, bubble, toil and trouble it went.
At first, we were like “Phew! How long until we turn it over?” And then we were like…
The oil bubbled over the top of the pot and onto the stove. I ran over to remove the oil from the stove to a safer place to let it cool, aka off the burner. Then this happened…
Well not quite like that, but more like this (without the rag)…
And Fatima, without even thinking (must be that quality Resident Assistant training coming back into play), ran into the hallway to fetch the fire extinguisher and came in like…
Maybe not exactly like that, but when she came in, she was ready to extinguish the fire. But the fire had gone out after the oil burned away. So we turned the burner off and let it cool off before cleaning up the mess we had created.
I took the onion out of the pot of oil and let it dry out. Parts of it tasted fine, but for the most part, it was finished. A great opportunity to apply the Pinterest meme, “Nailed It,” to our epic fail…
It looks like, we’ll be staying away from homemade fried food for a while. We don’t blame the recipes or the instructions for our mishap, that was our own fault. An onion is almost 90% water – what happens when you add water to hot oil? Nothing good happens, that’s for sure. HOWEVER, we saw a baked version of the blooming onion that we want to try. Probably a safer and healthier version to the one we tried to make.
I think things would have worked out a lot better if we had a deep fryer. Wish list for the next apartment – must have a built in deep fryer so nothing like this happens in the future.
