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

FAQs

What is the best onion for salad? ›

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.

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.

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.

Wintering onions are fantastic for roasting, they stand up to the intense cooking and add great flavor. Yellow and white onions are used in stocks, soups and stews.

Red onions

All types of onions are good for you, but this dark reddish-purple variety, sometimes called purple onion, has especially high levels of quercetin and other helpful plant compounds known as flavonoids. Flavonoids give many fruits, vegetables, and flowers their colors.

Sure, you can totally put raw onions in a salad without cooking them. Raw onions give a strong and tangy taste to salads, making them more interesting.

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.

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.

When added to the hair and scalp, onion juice can provide extra sulfur to support strong and thick hair, thus preventing hair loss and promoting hair growth. The sulfur from onions may also help promote collagen production. Collagen in turn helps the production of healthy skin cells and hair growth.

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.

Why put sliced onions in water? ›

All you need to do is give the sliced onions a good soak in a bowl of water before serving them. This one simple step tames the bite of the raw onions and mellows out their flavor.

Since slicing and dicing releases the odor and flavor, the more finely you chop an onion, the more flavorful it will be. On the other hand, a process like boiling an onion will break down the enzymes that spur the chemical reactions creating a less pungent flavor. Different levels of heat can control levels of flavor.

Red onions are sweeter and great for eating raw or in salads. Yellow onions are not as sweet and are more often used in cooking. There are also white skinned onions that are great eaten raw and in salads.

White onions are probably the strongest-tasting onion on this list. They're typically used in Asian and Mexican dishes, as well as potato and macaroni salads. You can also sauté them, making them ideal for French onion soup or any other food in which you want to add sweet or sour flavor.

Uses: If you are making a salad, mixing a salsa or topping a burger, white onions are the best choice thanks to their short finish. In other words, their flavor doesn't last as long on your palate as other onions. If you wish to tame their flavor, you can slice them and soak in cold water for an hour before using.

Most salads will benefit from some green/spring onion/ scallions. They add a nice onion flavor without overwhelming the salad. However, a pickled red onion is also very nice in a number of salads. My advice is to test a few variety's with the other ingredients and see what works best for you.

Sweet onions get their own category. Vidalia onions are a particularly mild yellow onion grown around Vidalia, Georgia. Crunchy and sweet, they're excellent served raw in salads and salsas. Walla Walla sweet onions are another brand of sweet onions, grown in Walla Walla, Washington.

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.