Chips, dips and dorks.

Caramelized onion dip, aka "crack dip." © Ryan Schierling

Onion dip.

This is not a subject lightly traversed in this household.

Your mother might tell you to get a dry packet of Knorr's or Lipton Onion Soup Mix and stir it up with some sour cream and mayonnaise, and I would promptly tell your mother to get bent.

That's not onion dip. Nor are the tubs of "Onion Dip" or "French Onion Dip" or "Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil Whipped With Dehydrated Onion Pieces" next to the sour cream and margarine products at your local grocer. They are simulacrum. Amalgamations. Abominations. (And I hold deep-seated reservations.)

This onion dip is three ingredients.

It sounds easy. Too easy. But it's not. It takes 24 hours to make, and do not take those 24 hours lightly.

Five of them are spent cooking onions on a slow, low flame. You'll weep bitter tears cutting a metric ton of onions, and soon, your house, your clothes, your hair-do, will all smell like simmering onion. It permeates everything and will be all you can think about. It's like Great Depression-era cooking. But you'll ultimately be rewarded with an onion dip that's like none other.

So here it is:


Caramelized Onion Dip

8 baseball-size white onions, chopped
32 ounces sour cream
1/2 cup Worcestershire sauce (aka Woozy)

Get out your biggest skillet, put it on a low heat (gas mark 2, or "low" on an electric range). Cooking oil, olive oil, whatever... put a good thin layer on the bottom of the skillet. Start piling the sliced onions in. Make note of the time (as you will be tending to your onions on a semi-hourly basis) and walk away. Have a cocktail. Have another cocktail. Check your Twitter feed. Download that Japandroids album you've been meaning to get and IM Starkey that a pony-size Chicken Fried Steak horseshoe at D'Arcy's Pint is just half-assed.

Go stir your onions

Continue to do so intermittently for the next five hours (paying particular attention to the last hour, and especially the last half-hour, as the batch is supremely caramelizing at this point), until the eight full-sized onions you started with have reduced themselves gloriously to about 1 1/2 cups of brown gooey onion goodness. Turn off the stove.

Onions, hours 0-5. © Ryan Schierling

Shovel those hot onions into a bowl and refrigerate them until they're cool enough to mix with that sour cream I was talking about earlier (about four hours in the fridge). After the onions have chilled, spoon them into a large mixing bowl with the 32 oz. of sour cream. Add 1/2 c. Worcestershire sauce and mix very thoroughly. Ridiculously thoroughly. Put plastic wrap over the top and refrigerate for the next 15 hours.

Don't even think about taste-testing until the time's up. Trust me. Just wait.

Stir it up well.

And then, be prepared with at least two large bags of Wavy Lay's (Ruffles just don't hold up to this) for what will be your new guilty, guilty pleasure.

Oh, and Super Bowl, Super Bowl, party dip, something something.