One last entry for our winter preservation series! What to do with all those excess onions?
Well, just like with our garlic, we can also easily make home made onion powder! Onion powder is another pillar in the spice world and something you’ll often see as a base ingredient in other spice mixes. Though fresh onions are great, of course, onion powder offers the cook an easy way to incorporate great onion flavor in a way that doesn’t show the true source!
We again use our dehydrator to dry out those onions quickly. Surprisingly, onions can take quite a long time to dry out, even after you’ve diced them into small chunks. Be prepared for an 8 to 12 hour session with that dehydrator! Onions have a surprising amount of water in them, all of which needs to be evacuated.
Fortunately, with onions, you’ve likely got a bit more time before they start to grow again and you need to think about alternate preservation. But, we generally try to tackle it with the rest of our winter preservation, just so we can put the dehydrator away for the winter.
Now, this topic isn’t exactly ground breaking if you’ve followed our recent posts. It’s a very logical leap that if you can dehydrate and grind up garlic, you can do the exact same thing with onions. You can also combine onion powder with a quality, natural salt to make a solid onion salt. Again, start with 2:1 ratio of salt to onion powder and work to your particular taste.
So, let’s talk about some stuff you might not know about your home made onion powders! It doesn’t have to be plain old simple onions!
You can do the same exact process with caramelized onions. In this case, you’d caramelize the onions prior to the dehydration process, offering the home cook an extravagant and caramel infused onion powder. Another technique is to roast the onions on the BBQ or oven, right up to the point of getting a nice char. Chop these up, dehydrate them and once powdered, you’ve got a smoky, roasted and umami forward onion salt. Both of these preparations offer the home cook something really special and different from what everyone else has!
If you want to get really crazy with your onion powders, start with a quick pickling recipe. If you can hold yourself back from eating them all, you guessed it! You can also dehydrate and prepare pickled onions just the same! This will give you a surprisingly different kind of spice to work with, one that will deeply challenge you as a home chef!
Then, you can of course get into red onions. Some say that you can’t taste the difference between red and yellow onions, but we beg to differ. Maybe we are so called “super tasters,” but the essence of red onion is starkly different from the white and yellow counterparts. Ever seen a red onion powder or red onion salt? Well, you can make that happen!
So, I think that’s “really” it for our winter preservation series. The countdown is now on, the next two months are going to rip by and we’ll be starting our 2025 garden! Looking forward to it and as always, thanks for following us!
