As it occupies my mind often lately, I’m going to continue posting about preserving food for a bit longer. Next up, onions.
There are lots of choices for preserving onions. Vidalia onions will store for several months in the fridge if you wrap them in paper towels, although to me that seems like a lot of paper towel use, and many of us don’t have the fridge space for that. You can also store onions whole in old pantyhose if you tie a knot between each onion and hang them in a dry, cool place – and I don’t mean a hipster bar, by the way. Most people recommend cutting the pantyhose at each knot to get an onion out. If this seems wasteful to you, you can save the pieces to tie your tomato plants to stakes next year.
You can dehydrate chopped onions, but I hear this makes the entire house smell like onions, and then it’s hard to rid the dehydrator of it. You can also do this in the oven, but it won’t help the Eau de Onion scent, and it probably takes up more energy to do it that way.
Finally, there’s freezing, whether it’s whole, in discs, or chopped. Freezing chopped onion is how I’m preserving mine, so now that I’ve dried the tears, I can show you what I did.
First, get some good local onions.
And then peel and chop. I started with the Vidalias.
To make them easy to separate once they’re in freezer bags and to minimize frost, I spread them out on wax paper on a cookie sheet before putting them in freezer bags. Here they are with a layer of red onions on top.
And after they’ve frozen overnight, they’ll go in freezer bags. Then I can scoop some out as needed. They won’t be good raw as it does change the texture, but they’re fine for cooking. I wish Vidalia onions were in season all the time since they’re sweeter and milder than other types, but this is the next best thing.
If you freeze them whole, be sure to wash, core, and peel them first.
That’s it! Pretty easy, no? Once the crying stops, that is. 8`[
