About

Cost: $ $ $ $ $

Difficulty: • • • • •

Time: 1h00

Serves: 4

Roots
SERVES 4

As a young chef, I would often think that the more ridiculously labour-intensive
I made a dish, the better it would be. Of course, this is nonsense and made life
very difficult. It certainly takes a confident chef not to overcomplicate recipes and
now I feel a lot more comfortable knowing when to stop. A few years ago, I used
to do a fish dish with ‘onion sauce’. The sauce would take three days to make: 25
kilos of white onions were cooked incredibly slowly to create a small, sweet ball
of caramelised onions. In the meantime, two meat stocks were made and then
reduced over the sticky onions. A bottle of Madeira and some more burnt onions
were added and by the end of the third day a wonderful sweet, velvety sauce
would be complete. It was delicious but for me and the sauce chef Nick it took
over our lives. The sauce was not just hard work but an obsession, so much so that
when we sat down for a beer at the end of the day our colleagues would complain
how badly we smelt of onions!

A couple of years later I thought I had seen the back of it, but Nick’s onion
obsession had not ceased and he refined the onion sauce, making the process
much simpler and the sauce much lighter.

Posted by Orion Books • Published 25th April 2018 • See Orion Books's 81 projects » © 2024 Tommy Banks / Orion Books · Reproduced with permission. · ROOTS by Tommy Banks, 5th April 2018, hardback, £25, Seven Dials. Photography by Andrew Hayes-Watkins

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Step 1
Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F/Gas mark 6. Lightly
oil the chicken wings and space out in a roasting tin.
Roast for about 15 minutes. Turn the wings over in their
fat and roast for another 15 minutes at 180°C/350°F/
Gas mark 4, and finally for 15 minutes at 170°C/325°F/
Gas mark 3 after turning them over again. They should
be very brown and sticky. Pour the fat out of the tin and
discard, but deglaze the caramelised goodness with a
little water and reserve.
Step 2
Meanwhile, place the halved onion in a lightly oiled
heavy-based ovenproof frying pan, with a similar pan
placed on top, acting as a weight. Sizzle over a high
heat for a good couple of minutes then transfer the
onion (still sandwiched between the pans) to share the
200°C/180°C oven with the wings for 15–20 minutes.
The onion should be soft all the way through and
blackened on the cut side.
Step 3
Combine the wings, deglazed juices and blackened
onion in a stockpot with enough cold water to cover
everything by a good inch and bring to the boil.
Turn down to a simmer and cook for about 3 hours,
skimming off any scum as it rises to the surface. Strain
the stock through a fine sieve and then a muslin cloth.
It should make around 1.5 litres.
Step 4
While the stock is cooking, heat a little oil in another
large pan and add the sliced onions and salt to taste.
Cook them over a high heat for a minute or so, before
turning the heat right down and letting them completely
wilt and soften. Increase the heat a little and allow
them to caramelise and stick to the pan, scraping and
stirring each time just before they actually burn. The
mixture will eventually be a very deep brown colour, and
extremely sweet and sticky.