English Peas, Spring Onions and Roasted Almonds

Just cooked English peas, sautéd spring onions and roasted, salted almonds are a delicious combination of tender sweet, sweet pungent, and crunchy just salty. You can set this side dish next to grilled fish or chicken or mashed potatoes and a roast. It's...

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Bulb Vegetables Category Archive

Spring Onions, Green Onions and Scallions

Young onions offer a range of taste from mild and smooth to pungent and biting. You can eat raw young onions whole with a dipping sauce or chopped in a green salad or potato salad or pasta salad. Raw green onions chopped make a colorful topping for sauces or baked potatoes.

Onions cooked become mild and even sweet. Young onions require less cooking than mature onions since they are not very pungent to begin with. Just a couple of minutes of sautéing will mellow a young onion that has gained any bite. You’ll find cooked young onions mild enough to serve at breakfast.

So what do you call young onions? Spring onions, green onions, or scallions? Here we go!

Depending upon the maturity of the onion and where you live, you will pick up a bunch of young onions and say, “I’ll take these….”

Are they spring onions, green onions, or scallions?

Here are the differences:

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Onions

Onions come in a wide range of sizes, shapes and colors, as well as specific varieties.

There are fresh onions and onions for storage. There are onions for eating raw and onions for cooking. There are mild onions and pungent onions. There are onions that grow best where the days are short and onions that grow best where the days are long. There are green onions, white onions, yellow onions, and bronze onions.

There are so many kinds and uses for onions that old-time produce workers will compliment colleagues by saying, “that fella really knows his onions.”

But when it comes to onions in the kitchen or at the table, there are basically three kinds of onions: bunching onions—also called scallions, spring onions and green onions; bulb or common onions—also called dry onions, storing onions, or cooking onions; and pickling onions.

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Chives

You’ve tried fresh chopped chives added to sour cream and served as a filling for a baked potato.

But how about chives added to sour cream to serve with borscht and tomato soup?

Fresh picked and snipped chives are a tasty garnish or flavoring in omelets, scrambled eggs, salads, and soups. Chives are also a perfect flavor partner for asparagus, butter, chicken, cream, cucumbers, fish, leeks, and seafood.

Chives are at their flavorful best when tender and green in spring. But you can keep a clump of chives in a pot on the kitchen window sill and have fresh chives to cut most of the year.

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Shallots

Shallots have a sweet, delicate flavor and aroma.

They are more subtle than onion and less pungent than garlic.

Shallots are most often used as a condiment to enhance the flavor of other foods, but they can be cooked alone as a vegetable.

The sweetest shallots come to market in mid-summer. Fresh green shallots with the subtlest of flavor start coming to market in spring. Dry shallots are available year-round.

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Soft-neck and Hard-neck Garlic

There are hundreds of named varieties of garlic, but all of them can be categorized into two major types: soft-necked and hard-necked.

The stalk that grows up from a garlic bulb is called a “neck.”

The stalk of soft-necked garlic is pliable and soft at maturity. The stalk of hard-necked garlic is stiff at maturity.

Soft-necked garlic is strong flavored and stores well because it has several protective outer layers of papery skin.

Hard-necked garlic is mild tasting and best used soon after harvest since it has only a few layers of papery skin and thus keeps poorly.

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Garlic

Garlic is one of the most common vegetables used for flavoring other foods. It is also one of the best-tasting cooked vegetables.

A whole garlic clove sautéed in oil will have a sweet, delicate flavor.

A whole garlic clove cooked slowly will have a mellow, nutty flavor.

Cut garlic—raw or cooked—will be pungent and hot.

Minced or crushed raw garlic will be the most boldly potent of all.

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Leeks

The most esteemed member of the onion family is the leek.

The flavor and fragrance of leeks are more subtle, more delicate and sweeter than onions

The ancient Egyptians held leeks in high esteem as did the ancient Romans, who considered leeks superior to both onions and garlic.

The leek is essential to many fine dishes—the popular cold soup vichyssoise—which has been made in France for centuries, the Scottish cock-a-leekie, and stews such as the French pot-au-feu.

You can find leeks at the farm market year round, but their peak season is October through May.

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Torpea Onion—the Red Torpedo

There is an onion that comes from Torpea in Calabria, Italy that you will enjoy. It is a mild or “sweet” flavored red onion—many say the sweetest-tasting onion in the world--that will be a welcome addition to the preparation of many meals, and, if all else fails, you can just about make a meal of this onion itself.

Torpea is a seaside village almost 400 miles south of Rome on the Tyrrhenian Sea. The gardens there are filled with bougainvillea, verbena and jasmine. The hills rising from the sea around the village are quilted with orchards of lemons and limes, olive groves and fields of vegetables and onions.

It is said that the Phoenicians—one of the great peoples of the ancient world—introduced onions to Torpea. If so, it would only be a guess where Torpea onions really originated because the Phoenicians were explorers and traders who roamed far and wide across the then known western world more than 3,000 years ago. Certainly in Torpea this onion found a perfect meeting of soil and climate from which it developed.

Today the Torpea onion—which is known in Italian markets as Torpea Rossa--is said to be the most popular onion in Italy and Europe. Those grown in the fields around Torpea are said to be extraordinarily “sweet.” If you stop in at your farm market this week, you may find Torpea Rossa onions grown close to where you live. They will be labeled sweet Italian onion, Italian red onion, Creole onion and--most commonly—red torpedo onion.

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