Sweet Onions

During a recent cooking class at Plate It Up!, I learned about sweet onions. Now I use nothing else. I discovered that they have a slightly sweet flavor (without giving up any of the classic onion flavor).

Sweet Onions also tend to be fresher. Sweet onions are fresh onions, picked and cured for a short time, then rushed to market. Storage onions, or regular yellow onions, are harvested in late summer and fall, stored in warehouses and delivered to markets throughout most of the year.

A Little History
About a hundred years ago, a retired French soldier, Peter Pieri, brought some onion seeds from Corsica to the Walla Walla region of the Pacific Northwest. At the time, Italian immigrant gardeners comprised the core of Walla Walla’s gardening industry, and several were Pieri’s neighbors. Impressed by the new onion’s winter hardiness, they and Pieri harvested the seed. This “French” onion developed over several generations through the process of carefully hand selecting onions from each year’s crop, ensuring exceptional sweetness, jumbo size, and round shape. Today Walla Walls are available in most Western US supermarkets from mid-June through late-August.

Vidalias were the first sweet onions to be promoted and distributed nationally. They first appeared in 1931 when Georgia farmer Mose Coleman discovered that the onions he planted were not hot, as he expected, but actually sweet. Willard Scott, the Today Show’s weather guy, made the Vidalia onion famous by munching on them like an apple on-the-air.

Sweet Onion Varieties
Today there are several varieties of sweet onion, insuring their near year-rouwn availability:

• OSO Sweet
• Texas Sweet (SpringSweet and SuperSweet)
• Vidalia
• Sweet Imperial
• Walla Walla
• Hermiston
• Maui

The OSO Sweet, grown in Chile, happens to be in season and available right now.

I’ve discovered a website that will tell you more about sweet onions than you will ever want to know:
http://www.SweetOnionSource.com

tags: Onions, Sweet Onions