Southern Tennessee Onions Casserole Recipe - Easy (2024)

FAQs

What kind of onion is used for stew? ›

Yellow onions are perfect for stews, soups, barbecues, roasts and sauces. Avoid eating them raw as they have a strong flavour.

Sweet onions are larger than yellow onions, with a light skin. As the name suggests, sweet onions have sweet flavor due to a high sugar content, making them great for sauteing and caramelizing. Sweet onion varieties include Walla Walla, Texas Sweets, Maui, and Vidalia.

Larger and slightly flatter than yellow onions, with lighter colored, less opaque skin, sweet onions contain extra sugar, making them good for caramelizing. Their larger size and sweeter flavor make them ideal for making onion rings.

Because of its uniquely small size and a taste sweeter than that of a common onion, it has also been used in dishes ranging from mid-20th-century American casserole dishes such as succotash to sweetly flavored onion relishes in Indian cuisine. It can also be used in stews soups or sautéed (fried) with other vegetables.

...or as a flavor base for sauces, soups, and stews. Yellow onions are the most common variety you should cook with. They have thin layers of white flesh and a tough, brownish-yellow skin.

Sautéing Veggies Is A Crucial Step

One of the best examples is cooking garlic and onions. Raw, these alliums are potent, pungent, and can be overwhelming. Once chopped and browned in fat, new aromas and softer flavors are developed. Cooked onion becomes much more sweet, and garlic is much less harsh.

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.

If you're looking for an onion that tastes amazing raw in salads, relishes or chopped as a garnish, go for sweet onions. “They just have that mild onion flavor with a touch of sweetness that you can use in a number of things.” Try our tried-and-true sweet onion recipes.

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.

Shallots have a sweet and mild (although pronounced) flavor, with a hint of garlic, and lack the bite you get with yellow or white onions. Shallots work especially well in dishes where they're eaten raw, like dressings and salads, and can seamlessly blend into delicate quiches and custards.

What kind of onion is good for omelette? ›

Personally I like the sweet tang that carmelized onions give to an omelette, but I can also get that same sweetness from a raw red Vidalia onion with the added benefit of a crunchy texture to compliment the other ingredients.

Vidalia, Walla Walla, Cipollini varieties are inherently sweet onions. These varieties have become extremely popular and for good reason. They are good cooked but they are very mild and are excellent eaten raw.

Pearl onions always have to be peeled before use, which can be tricky. The easiest way is to give the onions a one- to two-minute dunk in boiling water, drain them, and drop them into a bowl of ice water. Cut off the root end, then pinch the onion and the skins should slip right off.

Like other onions, pearl onions need to be peeled before use. Unlike their larger onion counterparts, pearl onions are trickier to peel thanks to their tiny size. The fastest way to peel pearl onions is to use a blanching method.

The Takeaway. For most cooked dishes, red and yellow onions are interchangeable, so feel free to use what you have on hand. But if you're looking for a gorgeous color—plus the antioxidant anthocyanins that come with that color—reach for spicy red onions and give your dish that dash of drama.

And while we prefer yellow for cooking, white for garnishing, and red for pickling, grilling, and everything in between, they're generally interchangeable: Switching between them won't ruin a dish, even if it slightly alters its flavor or appearance.

In this cozy beef stew, tender chunks of meat in a silky, savory, ale-tinged sauce share the pot with wedges of red onion and sweet nuggets of carrot. A little coriander and allspice add fragrance and depth to the mix, while a spoonful of tomato paste deepens and rounds out the flavors.

If you are cooking them, in almost all cases red onions, yellow onions, and white onions can be swapped for one another. "Flavor-wise, the cooked dishes will taste virtually the same using red, yellow, or white onion," says Weinstein.