Smoked Onions
Smoked onions are easy to make. If you love caramelized onions — try making smoked caramelized onions outdoors on your smoker. The wood adds a delicious smoky layer to the intense complex sweetness of the caramelized onions that is perfectly complementary and delicious.
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I make smoked onions on my Traeger Grill whenever the weather lets me.
Caramelized onions are one of my favorite side dishes to serve with countless main courses and they also freeze well so I tend to make them in big batches and then store the rest.
Serve smoked onions with literally everything — bacon and eggs, on hamburgers, with BBQ pulled pork or a nice pork chop with some barbecue sauce, butter-basted steak, even fish dishes like smoked trout.
Serve them alongside other side dishes for a dinner party or BBQ too like smoked tomatoes, bacon wrapped dates, blitva, scalloped potatoes, risotto etc.
You can also use them in recipes like my nduja pasta recipe or French onion soup.
Smoked onions go everywhere and with everything, so let me show you how easy they are to make.
Ingredients
- Onions | Any onion variety can be smoked and caramelized but I prefer yellow onions myself
- Butter or Lard | You can use either, or a mixture like I prefer. You can also use olive oil if you prefer.
- Salt | Any salt, but I usually use kosher salt or sea salt. Avoid iodized salt.
See recipe card for quantities.
Equipment
You need either a cast iron, stainless steel, or carbon steel pan or an enamelled cast iron Dutch oven.
Instructions
The Stages of Onion Caramelization (With Pictures)
Caramelized onions are the result of the sugars present in onions breaking down in the presence of heat into hundreds of different compounds, and the maillard reaction in which sugars and protein break down into different and complex flavours and aromas.
You can see that happening in these photos as the smoky onions caramelize and darken. This will take about an hour and there are no good shortcuts to it.
You can start this process indoors on you stovetop and the fish smoking the onions on your pellet grill smoker, or do them start to finish on the grill. I’ll give to directions for both.
Dice your whole onions. This size is good that you can see in the photo. They can be a bit thicker but it’s best not to do them any thinner. Choose your wood chips, I love hickory.
Add your fat to your cast iron (or stainless steel or carbon steel) pan. Here you see lard and butter, my personal favorite.
Add your raw onion to the pan. The pan can be cold, it really doesn’t matter. It’s okay if the pan is very full, this is a long, slow cooking process.
You can start off with higher heat to get the caramelization cooking process going. Monitor and stir almost continuously until your onions soften and begin to take on a color like the one in the photo. At this point you can lower the heat to the lowest setting and spend less time monitoring and stirring.
The next stage of caramelization. Note how the onions are shrinking as their water evaporates. I check on them every 5 minutes or so and give them a big stir.
They are almost done when you see this color. If you started them indoors on the stovetop, this is the point where I would transfer them to the smoker.
And this how perfectly smoked onions to caramelization will look. Some people will push it a bit further but this color is absolute perfection to me.
Hint: The best pans for smoky caramelized onions are cast iron, stainless steel, or carbon steel. Do NOT use teflon/nonstick anything, you will not get these results.
Substitutions & Variations
The best fats and oils for caramelizing onions
- Lard
- Butter
- Bacon grease
- Ghee
- Duck fat
- Tallow
- Olive oil
Storage
Store caramelized onions refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 5 days or frozen for 4 months.
FAQ
This is a slow and low process. I keep my Traeger at 220° and at this temperature you will have perfectly caramelized onions in just over an hour, the same amount of time as you would doing it on the stovetop.
For even sweeter, more intense caramelization and a deeper colour, you can go up to two hours. You cannot rush the process or you will just end up with burnt or weird mushy onions. There are “hacks” out there that promise quicker caramelization, but I don’t think they work all that well.
Technically yes, but the end result is just really gross. The onions will dissolve into an unappetizing mush with a weird chemical background flavour. Similarly, sugar does not speed up the process either. You just end up with sickeningly sweet onions and extra sugar that doesn’t need to be there.
Cast iron, stainless steel, or carbon steel. Try to avoid nonstick, it will take too long. Enamelled cast iron works if it is all you have, just not as well.
For making smoked caramelized onions on a Traeger Grill or other smoker, you will want something that can go directly on the grill grates.
Smoked Onions {Perfectly Caramelized}
Ingredients
- 5 large Onions or however many you're using, sliced
- ½ cup of your fat of choice and more as required. I prefer a mixture of butter and duck fat or lard.
- Sea salt
Instructions
- I think starting off with a cold pan makes for a better end-result, but it doesn’t matter much either way.
- Place the sliced onions, fat, and a pinch of sea salt into your pan.
You can then proceed in 1 of 2 ways:
- If you plan on caramelizing your onions to a very deep rich brown (about 2 hours) I recommend starting them off on the stove top for the first hour before transferring to the Traeger Grill for the final hour.
- If you plan on the level of caramelization shown in my pictures (about an hour) you can start the onions immediately on the Traeger Grill — preheating not necessary.
- Keep the temperature of your Traeger Grill NO HIGHER then 250°-275°
- Check on the onions every 15-minutes and give them a good stir with a wooden spoon. Add more fat if required.
- Check and make sure that your pellets are not running low!
- In about an hour to an hour and a half you will have achieved the brown colour in my photos, remove onions from heat, add more salt if you would like, and either consume immediately or refrigerate for up to 5 days.
Wow. Without having ever seen this, I just literally did this exact thing (down to the duck fat) for my French Onion Soup and stumbled upon this at the very end, looking around at recipes to see if I missed any “secrets”.
Well Done, cuz what I just made is amazing!
Is there anything better than French onion soup? I doubt it.
Thank you for this! Turned out exactly like yours 🙂