What’s the Difference Between White, Red and Brown Onions?

What’s the Difference Between White, Red and Brown Onions?

What’s the deal with white onions? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a recipe that explicitly called for them. And yet there they are, in every Aussie supermarket. How are they different? What do people use them for? What is the meaning of life?

The following infographic from MyFood Blog has all the answers you’re looking for. (Well, maybe not the last one.)

What’s the difference between red, white and brown onions?

As the MyFood Blog notes, white onions are a milder variant. Like the red or ‘Spanish’ version, they are a good choice for salads and other meals that require raw, uncooked onion. Brown onions, meanwhile, have a more pungent flavour and are best suited for cooking. Here’s the infographic!

The accompanying blog post also recommends the following prep tips to keep the tears away:

  • Refrigerate: an hour before you plan to get slicing, pop your onions in the fridge. Slicing a cold onion is a surprisingly effective technique for keeping those tears away.
  • Rinse: it may sound like a strange idea, but try peeling under cold, running water to prevent the eye ‘sting’ that prompts those tears.
  • Cut: use a sharp knife to do your slicing and dicing, and ensure you don’t slice too close to the onion’s ends, as this is where many of the ingredient’s ‘irritants’ can lie.

You can read a more detailed guide on how to cut onions without crying here. Incidentally, there are plenty of other types of onion not covered here, including chives, shallots, button/baby onions and leek. Thankfully, these versions are less likely to cause tears.

[referenced url=”https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2017/03/google-is-lying-to-you-about-onions/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/qlvxhtqzet6lqdslcc95.jpg” title=”Google Is Lying To You About Onions” excerpt=”A little under five years ago, I got angry about a piece of fake information, and I decided to do something about it. I was reading a recipe in the New York Times, and the recipe told me, as many, many recipes had told me before, that it would take about 10 minutes of cooking to caramelise onions.”]

[Via MyFood Blog]

And if you want to start cooking with some of the above onions, here is a sweet guide to caramelising them at home.

This article has been updated since its original publication.

Lead Image Credit: iStock


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

Here are the cheapest plans available for Australia’s most popular NBN speed tier.

At Lifehacker, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


Leave a Reply