Vegetables
Onions
Five to eight minutes, and the cut decides everything: halves collapse sweetly, slices char at the edges.
What it does in fast-moving hot air
An onion is layered sheets of high-water cells separated by thin membranes, and heat travels along the layers far better than across them. A halved onion presents a large flat cut face that caramelises while the layers behind it steam in their own moisture and go sweet. A slice is mostly edge, and edges are thin, dry fast and go from caramel to bitter in about a minute — which is why the published temperature for slices is one level lower than for halves. Loose rings are also the classic food a fan lifts and throws at the element.
Why the cut matters
Onions are in the catalogue as a cooked vegetable in their own right rather than as an ingredient, because the published guidance treats them that way: halves and slices get different temperatures and different times in the same chart.
Cooking pages
- Onion halves — Five to seven minutes, and the cut face does all the work.
- Onion slices — Six to eight minutes, one temperature level below halves.
There is deliberately no cooking time on this page. A food does not have one — a cut, at a thickness, in a state, at a loading, in a particular appliance does. That is what the pages above are for.