How Does Burger King Make Its Onion Rings?

According to customers, Burger King has the best fast food onion rings, but it's not because the chain carefully selects each vegetable or uses some secret technique. Rather, it's because the rings are actually comprised of fried dough with minced onion in the batter.

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Burger King Onion Rings have no Rings of Onion inside. The second one was is what I made. #burgerkingonionrings #papacaz #FoodTokTV

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One of the hardest parts of preparing good onion rings is making sure the breading sticks. Each layer is so smooth that it requires you to really thicken the batter, but this can mess with the crispy texture if you're not careful. By removing this step entirely, Burger King employees can better guarantee consistent quality and churn them out quickly. But it's the use of dehydrated minced onion that's especially interesting. Drying it concentrates the onion's natural sugars and brings out its full flavor while, at the same time, removing any excess moisture that could ruin the final product's texture.

The base of BK's recipe uses wheat flour, cornstarch, and yellow corn flour, creating a decent start to a crispy result and ensuring the whole process uses only shelf-stable ingredients. A bit of leavening agent helps everything puff up properly, mimicking the appearance and texture of a normal onion ring and preventing it from drying out to the consistency of a crouton. Fried in a typical high-smoke-point oil, the end result is almost indistinguishable from a traditional recipe, except you won't be pulling out the onion with a single bite.

While Burger King's process may be a bit unique, it's possibly easier to replicate at home than a traditional recipe. Since the dish requires a bit of prep time beforehand, you can even do most of the work in advance, keeping everything but the oil in the fridge.

The first step is to prepare the onions by either grinding them into a paste or substituting them with dehydrated onion. Using dehydrated onion provides a concentrated flavor that easily blends into your dry ingredients, while playing around with the proportions allows you to adjust the intensity. Mix this into your base of dry ingredients, and remember — if you are using the fresh onion paste, breadcrumbs are especially helpful because they absorb the excess onion juice, which keeps the interior filling moist and fluffy.

Squeezing the mixture into rings and chilling them for a few hours gives the shapes time to set. While you wait, feel free to whip up your standard onion ring batter to give them a crispy, puffed-up coating. Flawlessly cooked onion rings do best when the batter has a chance to chill as well, since the cold thickens the mixture before you drop it in the oil. From there, you can just use your preferred frying setup, temperature, and oil to finish your homemade copycat side dish.