Chef John's Copycat Awesome Blossom Onion Bites!

Awesome blossom onion bites. Trying to deep fry an onion blossom at home is not a great idea, nor is eating at the strip mall too often. To get started, we'll mix together our awesome blossom sauce, which starts with some sour cream, to which we will add a little bit of mayo. Then we are definitely going to want to include a nice big spoon of horseradish, and then we'll finish up with a little bit of ketchup, and then we'll take a spoon and give this a thorough mixing. But I really wanted it to taste extra awesome, so I decided to add a few shakes of cayenne, and then I gave it another mix and another taste. And then we'll move on to the only actual prep we have to do, which is dicing one onion. What we'll do is transfer two cups of these diced onions into a mixing bowl. Sprinkle over a teaspoon and a half of kosher salt. Mix this salt in, and then let it sit for about 15 minutes. So what we'll do is transfer those onions into a strainer, and we will rinse those very, very thoroughly under cold running water. What we'll do is let that drain for a couple minutes. Beginning with a nice big pinch of salt, as well as some freshly ground black pepper, followed by garlic powder, and then we'll finish up the dry ingredients with a little bit of cornmeal, followed by some all-purpose flour, some baking powder. So I'm going to stir all that together first, and then add the milk at this point. And then we'll continue stirring until we've formed a very thick batter, which it should look like this. Now we'll heat up some oil in a skillet, and once our oil's hot, we can start transferring in rounded tablespoon portions of the batter for about 3 minutes. We'll go ahead and flip those over. Give the other side about 3 minutes or so, or until these are beautifully brown and nice and crispy around the edges. Once our awesome blossom bites have fried for about 6 minutes total, we will remove those from the oil, and we'll go ahead and serve those up to our awesome blossom sauce, which I'm going to garnish with another shake of cayenne. We want these to be extra awesome, which I'm happy to report they were.