Asians especially the Chinese and Malays will know this very well. It's actually, deep fried onion or shallot. My son calls it mini onion rings. If my daughter could speak well, she would probably called it fried alphabets because she is always showing me how each on them looks like alphabets and sometimes numbers. I see a 'D' there. ;)
They love this on all their food and if I didn't stop them, they would most likely treat them like tibits and finish it at one go. :P My mother used to make this but she doesn't like to do it because she always burned them. So what she did was to fried them with lots of oil and kept them together with the oil and we drizzle our noodles or porridge with the oil and scoop out some of the fried shallot them at the same time. It's more like a flavoured oil.
For me, I want my flavoured oil AND my fried shallot. However, my flavoured oil only allows me for 1 or at most 2 cooking. A friend who made the best fried shallot I have tasted told me the trick to making nicely brown and crispy fried shallot is not using a lot of oil but just the opposite. Enough oil to just about cover the finely sliced shallot just do. Add a tiny pinch of salt and fry the shallot over low fire.
You have to constantly but gently stir it so the shallot will brown nicely. Be prepared to stand over your stove for at least 15 minutes stirring to do this. Drain them from the oil and spread them on paper towels to remove excess oil and keep them an airtight container.
You can use it as a garnish or top some on your bowl of
noodles. As for the remaining oil from frying, you can use to drizzle on your food as a flavoured oil or use it as the oil for your stir-fry. It smell really nice.
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