Ingredients · Spice

Onion

Allium cepa · Amaryllidaceae (amaryllis family)

Onion
Dried onion, in three grinds: granulated blooms in oil, minced rehydrates into pieces you can see, and powder disappears into a dip or a rub. Twenty-seven products carry it. Drying takes 96 per cent of the water out and, with it, the sulfur compounds that make you cry — which is the whole reason dried onion exists. What is left is toasty and sweet rather than sharp.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partBulb
KindSpice
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromCentral Asia (proposed origin)
TasteToasty, sweet and savoury; none of raw onion's sharpness

How to use it

Granulated into rubs, chili and long-cooked things. Minced where the texture is wanted — meatloaf, burgers, stuffing. Powder into dips, dressings, ranch, and anything smooth. A guide from McCormick, for its own product: one tablespoon of onion powder stands in for one medium onion. Like dried garlic it scorches, so keep it off dry high heat.

With food

Beef and every ground meat. Potato. Sour cream and buttermilk. Tomato. Cheese. Beans. Bread stuffing. Eggs.

With spices

Garlic, always. Paprika and black pepper. Celery seed. Thyme, sage and marjoram for poultry. Cumin and chile for Tex-Mex. Mustard powder.

With tea

Not a tea ingredient.

Its story

Where it comes from

The wild ancestor is not known. Iran, western Pakistan and Central Asia are the proposed homelands, and the plant has been grown and selectively bred for at least seven thousand years. Most dried onion in North American trade is grown and dehydrated in California — Vacaville and Gilroy both built industries on it — but lot origin here is unconfirmed.

What happened

Onions and their relatives are all over the Yale culinary tablets from around 2000 BC — the oldest known recipes in the world, which one Assyriologist described as obsessed with every member of the onion family. Egyptians read eternity into the onion's circle-within-a-circle, buried them with the dead, and placed them in the eye sockets and ears of Ramesses IV. Pliny catalogued Roman beliefs that onions helped the eyes, sleep, mouth sores, toothache and dog bites. In Numbers the Israelites remember Egypt's onions in the desert. Chicago takes its name from the Miami-Illinois word shikaakwa, the wild allium that grew there: a Frenchman named Joutel wrote in 1687 that the place was so called on account of the quantity of garlic growing in this district, in the woods. And in the twentieth century California's dehydrators turned the onion into something that keeps in a cupboard.

On the shelf with it

Sold on its own, and in these blends.

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