Easy Turkish Sumac Onions Recipe (Turkish Onion Salad) (2024)

FAQs

What are the best onions for salads? ›

Red Onions: The salad onion. While you can cook with it, it's less overpowering than white or yellow onions, making it ideal for uses that require raw onion. The colour fades as you cook them. Great for Greek salad, on burgers, etc.

Just peel and slice the red onion as called for in your recipe, then submerge them in a bowl of cold or ice water. Let them sit for at least ten minutes, stirring once or twice, before draining and using them in your recipe. For added flavor, you can also soak the onions in lime juice, lemon juice, or vinegar.

To soften the taste of raw onions, slice them thinly or cut them into larger chunks and soak them in very cold water for about 15 minutes. This will soften the taste, making them ideally suited for a salad.

Soak them for at least 15 minutes (longer is even more beneficial), properly drain, and eat away! Submerging them in cold water takes away that intense, sharp bite from the raw onion. The cold water helps the enzyme that causes onions to have their pungent flavor to leach out.

Yellow Onions – We consider this the all-purpose onion, and personally, it's the one we use most often. Yellow onions have a nice balance of astringency and sweet in their flavor, becoming sweeter the longer they cook.

You can get rid of the strong taste by soaking sliced onions in ice water for 20 to 30 minutes or by sprinkling them with an acid such as vinegar. Onions soaked in ice water will get very crisp while those sprinkled with vinegar will soften a bit, but they will lose the strong taste and become sweeter.

When preparing raw onions, soak in cold water before hand to remove some of the pungency and soften the flavor. However since soaking too long will dilute the flavor, soaking in cold water for 5 to 10 minutes is recommended. Squeeze out excess water before using.

But Do This First! Christine graduated from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, France, and she has worked at Cook's Illustrated and CHOW.com. She lives in San Francisco and loves teaching cooking classes.

Adding raw onions to your salad in summer can offer a variety of health benefits due to their rich nutrient profile and unique compounds.

Then you just have to wait long enough for the vinegar to do its job, rinsing away the harsh sulfurous compounds, softening the onion, and giving it a pleasantly tart pop of flavor. If you use red wine vinegar, my personal favorite, the onions also turn an amazing hot-pink color.

What type of onion is a Vidalia? ›

The Vidalia is a type of sweet yellow onion. They're different from other types of yellow onions because of their high sugar content and low sulfur content. Most onions contain about 5 percent sugar, while Vidalias contain a whopping 12 percent.

The theory behind drinking onion water is based on onion's natural anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial effects. Along with ginger, garlic, and turmeric, onions are known to fight off inflammation, oxidation, and harmful bacteria and viruses.

Cut onions in cold water.

By cutting the onions while submerged in cold water prevents the gas from leaking out into the air.

Wait 10 minutes, then serve. The salt softens the onion's fibrous texture and mellows the sharpness of their flavor. There are other ways to tame raw onion, of course. You could soak slices in lemon juice for 20 minutes, which lends a slightly pickled flavor, as in this Tomato and Herb Salad with Sumac.

A simple and quick way to do that, according to chef Rick Bayless, is to pour boiling water over the chopped onions. That's pretty much all you need to know. This step makes the onions much mellower and is an easy alternative to sauteing onions in a pan for 10 minutes to take the "flame" out of them.

White Onions

They're a good choice for dicing and serving raw on sandwiches and salads or in fresh salsas.

If you're adding raw onions to a sandwich, salad or salsa, a white onion, rather than a yellow, may be the way to go. As their names suggest, white onions have white papery skin and a white interior, while yellow onions have more of a golden hue to their flesh with a dark yellow or brown skin.

Basically, if you're going to eat an onion raw, the white onion is what you want to reach for. And while they're pretty mild on their own, you can further tame their flame by slicing one thinly and giving it an hour-long soak in cold water—they'll be so sweet, you can practically eat them like a salad.

There are several different types of sweet onions, but some of the the most popular varieties are Mauis, Walla Wallas, and Vidalias. They don't have the sharp, pungent flavor that other onions do, which makes them great raw in salads or on sandwiches.