- The dreaded worm. This is the most heinous of onion
ring crimes. It occurs when the onions aren’t cooked
thoroughly, so that rather than breaking off cleanly with
each bite, you’re left with a long worm of onion in your
mouth and the hollow shell left behind in your hand.
Dealing with the batter problems is a snap—we’ve
already got an awesome recipe for light, crisp, lacy, just-
thick-enough batter for our fried cod. But what about
splitting and worming? Splitting was a tough case to crack.
What could cause the batter shell to break open like that? To
figure it out, I carefully dissected an afflicted ring with a set
of tweezers and discovered that it’s not the batter that’s the
problem, it’s the onion. Every layer inside an onion is
separated from the next by a thin, papery membrane—you
can quite easily see it if you rub the inside of a raw onion