This meal is a callback to the discussion on low temperature caramelized onions from about a month ago. I did a batch of Vidalia onions that turned out looking great, but I didn't have a chance to use them right away -- into the freezer they went. I thawed it out last week and was treated to a bag of caramelized mush, presumably because of mechanical damage from freezing.
I turned the mush into one of my better attempts at the onion soup shown below. The soup includes the onions, chicken broth, fresh thyme, bay leaves, and dark mushroom soy sauce. There is a 63C low temp cooked egg in the middle that is hiding under a blanket of finely grated Pecorino cheese, a drizzle of aged balsamic vinegar, and black pepper (my only major error -- cracked the peppercorns too coarsely and got to choke on it at the bottom of the bowl). My favorite part is how an apparent fail turned out to be beneficial. The freezing broke up the onions enough to facilitate easy eating -- no spoonfuls of long, stringy onions flopping around.
Can anyone think of other cases where a pre-freeze step is actually desirable for improving the end product beyond basic preservation? I can recall freezing tofu for altering texture and freezing some foods to kill off parasites, but that's about it...
