Week 23 - Crunchy

The Week 23 challenge came up as crunchy, and my first thought was spring rolls. B loves the spring rolls we get from Costco, and making some of our own, full of lots of healthy vegetables, sounded like a great idea. Unfortunately, the only spring roll wrappers I could find were made on shared equipment with eggs, so I didn't really want to do that. My next idea was baked onion rings, even though that didn't go so well the first time I attempted it, but I needed to find a good recipe for egg-free ones. After searching through some vegan onion ring recipes, I found one for crunchy baked onion rings on Shane & Simple, and they looked delicious.

The ingredients for our onion rings, adapted slightly from the original recipe (they're not vegan as we didn't have any non-vanilla plant-based milk and we added tzatziki), were:

- 2 large onions ($1.08)
- 2/3 cup milk ($0.25)
- 1/2 cup chickpea flour ($0.50)
- 1 cup panko bread crumbs ($0.40)
- smoked paprika ($0.10)
- garlic powder ($0.05)
- salt ($0.02)
- freshly ground black pepper ($0.02)
- tzatziki for dipping ($2.30)

I didn't end up using every ring that came from those two onions, because (1) I only wanted to make one baking pan full of onion rings, and (2) I didn't feel like breading all the tiny rings in the center. I probably could have just used one onion, but the recipe used two so I started there too. The rest of the onions went into our other side of zucchini, so they didn't go to waste. The onion ring portion of dinner came out to about $4.72 (including the dip), and the entire dinner came out to about $10.59. Not bad at all considering the protein was fish.


The steps for making the onion rings were:

1. Slice onions into rings.

2. Make batter by combining milk and flour. Make bread crumb mix by combining panko with spices.

3. Using a fork, put each raw onion ring into the batter, shake off the excess, coat in bread crumbs, and then place on parchment paper-lined baking pan.


4. Bake at 450 degrees for 25 minutes.

5. Serve with dipping sauce.


We ate our onion rings with some tzatziki on the side, sautéed zucchini and onions, and salmon burgers for a healthy, light dinner. So, how were the onion rings? Crunchy, for sure, so they definitely achieved the goal of the challenge. Probably needed a little more seasoning, but I didn't measure that and just eyeballed it. Also, since I am terrible at breading and dredging (as established multiple times on this blog), they were a little unevenly crispy and crunchy, and not as good as fried onion rings would be. I don't know why, when I try to make stuff like this, the bread crumb mixture always ends up really clumpy after the first few and then nothing sticks. There must be some simple, essential thing I'm missing here, but I haven't figured it out yet. I'm sure the recipe is fine; there is just something wrong with the execution on my end, because it's the same flaw every time that I can't seem to fix. Maybe I'll keep trying, or maybe I'll just keep waiting (in vain) for the day when Trader Joe's brings back their amazing frozen sweet onion rings that were so delicious and convenient out of the oven.