Alton Brown has a newish (Jan 2026) video on mirepoix. It coincendentaly showed up after I viewed this thread yesterday.
Yep - I’m subscribed to the new Alton Brown Cooks. And soup/sauces options are the times I normally do a sweat because it’s a good idea where color and a more subtle blending of flavors is a must.
I remember a fairly dark beige cream sauce I produced because I caramelized my onions in the past. Sure, I personally liked the taste better, but the appearance wasn’t as attractive, and someone who didn’t have a strong preference for onions would have found it too onion-forward.
It’s not like I’m cooking for other people much these days, so who cares?
I learned sweating from recipes and/or Cooking shows. Mom was not a good cook and I was not a willing pupil. Sweating was absolutely logical and necessary to me because I cannot stand the taste of raw onion but sweated, sauteed, or caramelized onions are a synergistic and delicious ingredient. A little minced garlic just before adding main ingredients or liquids is wonderful. Burn, even browning the garlic will ruin the dish.
Hear, hear. One recipe shortcut that causes me to think less of the writer is when instructions say to add garlic and onion at the same time when sautéing. (It’s okay if sweating.) Martha Stewart apparently does that; I don’t have any of her cookbooks but I did download a recipe of hers from the internet, so unless it wasn’t really her recipe, she gets no respect from me.
I know, it’s an awfully fine distinction for everyday cooking, and I’m not claiming I would personally taste the difference in otherwise identically prepared dishes. But cooking well is often a collection of seemingly trivial steps; skip any one of them and you might be okay. But follow all of them, and your results will be far superior to just “throw it all in a pot at once, apply heat, done!”
I think I’d notice the difference. But maybe she doesn’t brown the onions. Or maybe she likes the flavor of browned garlic.
In general, i prefer not to brown garlic. But we have a recipe for pasta fagioli that starts with browning a few cloves of garlic gently in olive oil, and then discarding the garlic and using the infused olive oil, and it’s fantastic.
Yeah, there definitely are culinary uses for browned garlic - it is a popular flavoring in Indonesian snacks, for example. The taste is just not among my preferred flavors.