Caramelizing Onions

It takes time and attention to caramelize onions but there is nothing else like them.  Over the course of about an hour
a colorless odoriferous heap of lachrymator is transformed into rich brown kitchen gold.   To quote Tom Scocca's article
in Slate Magazine "In truth, the best time to caramelize onions is yesterday.  Often enough, you need to have them ready
before you can start on the rest of the dish.  Thus the recipe-writers' impulse to deceive.  Browning onions is slow work,
and it comes first.  So get a pan going after dinner, and they'll be ready when you need them.  Or throw the onions in a
crock pot and go to bed.   In recipe time, that's hours and hours.  In your time, the time that matters, it's less than five
minutes."   I agree with Mr. Scocca.
Caramelizing onions causes them to lose a lot of mass and volume: they shrink!  Caramelized onions freeze well.   If a recipe
calls for a half cup (125 ml) there is no reason not to make more, much more, and have some left over to keep for another
day.   In the example depicted here I have started with two cups of raw onions and finished with a little less than a cup.
I now wish I had started with six cups as I usually do when making onion soup.  Ah well.  Tomorrow is another day.

Ingredients:

Six cups (1.5 l)thinly sliced yellow onions
Three tablespoons (50ml) unsalted butter, clarified if you have it
One tablespoon(15 ml) olive oil and more as needed
A quarter teaspoon (1 ml) granulated sugar (helps the onions to brown)

Method:

Melt the butter and oil together in the bottom of a three or four quart heavy bottomed saucepan or casserole over
moderately low heat.  Add the onions, toss to coat them in oil and cover the pot.  Reduce the heat to very low and let
them sweat for fifteen minutes.  They don't need your attention; you can even go check your email.
After this fifteen minutes, uncover the pot, raise the heat slightly and stir in the sugar.  Cook onions, stirring frequently,
for thirty to forty minutes more until they have turned an even, deep golden brown.  You can slowly increase the heat
during this step but you must stir more often.  This is where my anxiety level goes up: I DO NOT want to scorch the
caramelizing onions but I also don't want to skimp on this step as this is where one builds the complex and intense flavor
that characterizes caramelized onions.   Actually, I have never scorched the onions.  Don't walk away from the stove,
watch carefully, stir almost constantly and add drops of additional olive oil as seems necessary.  When the browning
is done you have some kitchen gold.

These pictures are of two cups of sliced onions as they pass through the caramelization process.

These onions have cooked for fifteen minutes and have turned light golden.
They are not browned yet.

About fifteen more minutes of cooking and the caramelization or browning
has started. Notice the decrease in volume.

Caramelization is complete! Total cooking time was sixty minutes.