Onion Ring Disaster

I love onion rings. All types. Big thick soft beer battered onion rings. Crispy crunchy thin onion rings. Even Burger King (or McDonald's) onion rings. But what I don't like is deep frying at home. So when I realized we had one yellow onion left at the end of our fridge clean-out, I decided I would try to find a way to make baked onion rings. After some searching, I found a recipe that looked really delicious (here) and my mind was made up. I was going to make my own onion rings.

The recipe seemed fairly straightforward. First, I pulled together the main ingredients for the onion rings - an onion, an egg, panko bread crumbs, flour, milk and spices.

The spice blend was a variation of what was in the recipe - salt, pepper, paprika, cayenne, garlic powder, onion powder and thyme (we're out of oregano).

As I combined the spices together (I love spices), I was really excited for the onion ring experiment. These were going to be so good!

I chopped up the onion into rings.

I set up my three working bowls - one with flour, one with the batter (flour, egg and milk), and one with the bread crumbs and all the spices. I followed the instructions and dredged and dipped them in each bowl, one after the other. 

And ended up with this.

The two large rings on the right side were the first two onion rings I breaded. They look fairly evenly breaded. The ones in the middle were the last ones I breaded. The bread crumbs and spices are clumpy and barely sticking to the onion where I pressed them on after pulling all the bread crumbs off my fingers. What did I do wrong? I imagined that I would just dredge the onions through bowl 3 and the bread crumbs would just lightly coat them all. I never imagined all that clumping and how difficult it would be to actually get them to stick (to something other than my fingers). The onion rings in the recipe's photo look lovely. All even and crisp and not clumpy. (Also, not red, which is my fault, since instead of "1 teaspoon creole seasoning," I made the recipe for creole seasoning and added it to the bread crumbs. Oops. Failure at reading directions there.) I don't know where I went wrong. Is it because the ratio of bread crumbs to spices was off? Could that really be it? (It took me over 24 hours to realize that was even a possible explanation...)

I managed to get through two of the horizontal onion slices, which made one tray of onion rings, before I just gave up. I popped the tray into the oven for 15 minutes, stuck the rest of the onion "rings" in a skillet with some arbequina olive oil and a similar spice blend as the baked rings, and let them start to caramelize. The onions off the stove were soft, sweet and spiced nicely, unlike my baked onion ring disaster.

I don't doubt that this is a good baked onion ring recipe. It sounded easy and seemed to work for all the other commenters. The spice blend is good (if only I had put in an appropriate amount instead of an entire bowl full of creole seasoning). But I somehow completely screwed it up. They were really salty (that's my fault for not reading the directions correctly on the spices). They did bake nicely and had the right amount of crunchiness. But the breading process took forever, clumped everywhere and just didn't seem to dredge the way it should have. I don't know when I'm going to bake onion rings again, but I just hope they come out better than these.