Sarah's Oven Caramelized Onions

So I screwed up at the grocery store and bought too many onions and since these are the expensive organic onions I didn't want any to go to waste. I love caramelized onions, but don't usually have time to make them. This is an oven method that takes a couple of hours, but you can do other things while they're cooking and cook a whole lot at once.

I used:
3 lbs organic onions
2 T olive oil
2 T butter
some salt

You also need:
Deep lidded oven proof pan
Some kind of timer


Preheat the oven to 425˚


Cut up your onions like this:

I have a kitchen exhaust fan that sounds like a 747 and sucks the dust bunnies from the attic, so onion tears aren't an issue for me. If you don't have a kitchen fan, you might want to consider a pair of extremely practical and oh so fashionable Onion Goggles.

Heat up the oil and butter in a deep oven-proof pan with a lid (I use a cast iron dutch oven) then throw in the chopped onions and stir to coat with the oil. Sprinkle in some salt - I used about 1/2  teaspoon, but you can use more or none at all.

Put the lidded pan into the preheated oven. Yes mine looks like this. So much for getting the self-cleaning model.

Set the timer for 15 minutes.
You are going to stir the onions every 15 minutes for about 2 hours, so it's a good time to get stuff done around the house. Or watch movies on netflix.

They will go from looking like this:

To looking like this:

All done!

I put them into an ice cube tray to freeze in small portions for using in recipes, but I don't recommend you do this. They were really hard to get out after they froze. Next time I will probably just freeze  separate little mounds on a sheet of freezer paper

 Also a word of warning - this method will make your house smell like onions for days after. Best done on a nice day when you can open windows and when you aren't expecting company!