— Denise Tarasuk

So, um, this really kind of depends on personal preference and what you're making it for. If you're going to do a caramelization of an onion, it should be pretty brown by the time you're actually done with it. And that's quite a process if you're actually doing a caramelized um, onion. It's more of a process if you're doing it without oil. So if you're doing it with water, you have to deglaze many, many times and it could take you 15 minutes to 20 minutes to be able to get a true really brown, um, onion on the bottom of those. So if you want a very caramelized onion with that kind of almost sweet flavor, you want it to go very brown. If you don't want it to be like that, you definitely can go less. Um, most, uh, recipes and they talk about cooking an onion until it's transparent. Um, it's gonna still be kind of white or yellow depending on what color the onion is, but it is going to have just kind of, uh, it's not transparent like they say, it's just, um, you can just see the outside of it as lightened in color quite a bit. Now as far as garlic goes, I typically will do the onions first, especially if you're doing like a caramelized onion. Do the onions first and add the garlic at the end because garlic quick, it cooks much quicker than, um, onions do. So I will put the onions in at the very end of that. So I'm still getting the big flavor of the garlic but still cooking it, but it's not turning black because our uh, garlic can actually burn fairly quickly and it'll turn very bitter if you cook it too long.