Soaking onions in ice water helps smooth out the taste and removes the harsh bite that onions can have.
These beer battered onion rings are light and airy. They don’t have any sort of breading, making the whole process a little quicker. To begin with, onion slices get soaked for about 10 minutes in a bath of ice water. This process mellows out the taste of the onion and removes the harshness from it.
If you prefer not to use beer, I think you stumbled upon the wrong recipe. But if you’re still reading this and don’t want to use beer or you don’t have any available, you can just as easily substitute club soda in place of the beer. Either way, the carbonation is the important part. It’s what gives the batter a lighter texture than if just regular water were to be used.
These onion rings fry up puffy and light. Feel free to cut the amount of baking powder in half if you want less volume in your onion rings.
I’m not focusing too much here on the temperature of the batter either, as I feel the onion rings come out just fine as is. But if you want to take it a step further, you can chill the batter in the refrigerator.
Cold batter helps prevent it from absorbing too much oil. Using ice cold or very cold water is an important step in making tempura batter by the way. It’s part of the reason tempura comes out so light. This isn’t tempura though, so I’m not too worried about it. I feel that chilled beer or club soda is just fine.
Many people like using large Vidalia onions because they’re naturally sweeter. These sweeter onions contain more water however, so you will need to cook them for just a bit longer to make up for this. Other sweet onions are popular choices as well, but personally, I’m just fine with good old yellow onions.
Onion Rings – Beer Battered Without Breading
By: Semiserious Chefs
Serves: 4 – 6
Ingredients:
- 2 large onions cut into 1/4 inch- thick slices and then separated into rings (I prefer yellow, but you can use whatever you like)
- Ice water for soaking
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 cup cornstarch
- 1 teaspoon garlic powder
- 1/2 – 1 teaspoon baking powder (adjust this according to how fluffy you like your onion rings. This recipe uses 1 whole teaspoon, which makes them more puffed up)
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1/4 teaspoon pepper
- Pinch of cayenne pepper (or to taste)
- 1 1/2 cups beer, (chilled) or just go ahead and put the whole 12 oz. bottle of bear in!
- Oil for frying
Directions:
- Let sliced onions soak in a large bowl full of ice water for 10 minutes then remove and pat dry with a towel.
- Reserve one cup of flour in a separate bowl and set aside. This will be used for dredging the onions rings in.
- Begin preheating the frying oil over medium heat until it reaches 350° F (roughly 175° C). Cast iron dishes work well because they retain heat and keep the oil a consistent temperature. Just make sure you have enough oil to completely cover the onion rings. An inch or so of oil should be fine.
- In a large bowl, whisk together remaining cup of flour with the rest of the dry ingredients.
- Whisk beer in with dry ingredients until a smooth batter is formed. You don’t have to over mix here.
- Taking a few onions rings at a time, place them in the first bowl with the flour and turn them to fully coat them with the flour.
- Next, using a fork or tongues, dip the coated rings in the batter making sure they get fully coated and then gently drop them into the hot oil.
- Cook the onion rings for approximately 3 minutes, flipping once halfway through. Remember, frying in small batches is much better than trying to fry everything at once.
- Remove onion rings and let dry on a wire rack.
- Serve with your favorite dipping sauce and enjoy.
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