How To Make Fried Onions In A Rice Cooker

Fried onions are an important ingredient in many recipes.  Stir-fries, pasta sauces and ground meat recipes often start with frying the onions.  Here’s a very interesting way of frying the onions – in a rice cooker!

The onions in the above picture were cooked by yours truly in the rice cooker :) To fry the onions, you need a special kind of rice cooker – a multi-purpose fuzzy logic rice cooker that has a “Bake” function.

You might be thinking – why on Earth would you want to be frying the onions in the rice cooker?  Don’t you have a frying pan? Well, making fried onions in a rice cooker has 1 distinct advantage – you don’t need to watch them.  You can just put the onions in the rice cooker, press the button and walk away.  Can’t do it on the stove – the onions will burn… but they won’t burn in the rice cooker.

Using a rice cooker, you’ll put the onions in there, and go get other things done… when you come back, the fried onions will be ready.

To cook onions in the rice cooker, you first need to chop the onions – the same way as you’d chop them if you were cooking them in a frying pan.

Pour the oil in the rice cooker bowl.  You need about 1 tbsp of oil for 1 onion.  Next, add the chopped onions to the rice cooker bowl.

Here’s the picture of chopped onions in the rice cooker:

Imporant: keep the lid on the rice cooker open.  If you close the lid, the onions will not cook properly.  The lid must stay open.  It’s very unusual and counter-intuitive to use the rice cooker with the open lid, but that’s how you make fried onions in the rice cooker – with the lid open.

See how the lid is open on the picture below:

Set the rice cooker menu to “Bake”, and set the time for 30 minutes.  Press the “Start” button and make sure the lid stays open.

If you are near the rice cooker, stir the onions once after 15 minutes.  If you don’t stir it, they’ll be fine too, they just won’t be as uniform.  When the timer beeps, your fried onions are ready!

The rice cooker automatically switches to “Keep warm” function, so if you don’t take out your fried onions right away, they’ll be fine there for hours.

Here’s the picture of the fried onions in the rice cooker:

Learn more about rice cooker with Bake function.