Crispy Beer-Battered Onion Rings

The onion ring occupies curious territory in American cooking. We treat it as an afterthought, a basket filler, something the kitchen throws in because the fryer is already hot. This is a mistake. A properly made onion ring, with its shatteringly crisp exterior giving way to sweet, almost molten onion, deserves the same attention we give any fried food worth eating.

The secret to great beer batter is temperature. Everything stays cold. The beer comes straight from the refrigerator, ideally from the back where it's coldest. The flour gets chilled. When that cold batter hits 375-degree oil, the temperature differential creates an explosion of tiny bubbles. Carbon dioxide from the lager expands violently, forming the lacework structure that makes beer batter so impossibly light. Warm batter produces dense, greasy results. This is physics, not preference.

I learned to make onion rings at a roadhouse outside Portland, Oregon, where they served them in paper-lined baskets with malt vinegar and homemade ranch. The cook, a woman named Della who'd worked the fryer for thirty years, showed me how she kept her batter bowl nested in ice the entire service. Her rings shattered when you bit them. The sound carried across the dining room. That's what we're after here.

Choose your onions with care. Vidalias from Georgia are my first choice when summer arrives, their sweetness unmatched. Walla Wallas from Washington State run a close second. Maui onions work beautifully if you can find them. What you want is size and sugar content. Storage onions, the yellow globes available year-round, will work in a pinch, but they lack the sweetness that makes a truly memorable ring.