A pro who knows weighs in on onion slice-ery: I read the piece on cutting onions, and as far as being more or less oniony, the less times you cut the onion (and the sharper your blade is), the less damage you’ll do the cell structure, resulting in less of the sulfuric compounds mixing and […]
READ ONAn onion tart isn’t an easy thing for me to quantify, since I generally just wait until I have a baseball-sized mass of puff pastry scraps in my freezer, then make one. I’ll give it a try though. About 10 ounces puff pastry About one cup caramelized onions (see recipe under the Components menu) 1-2 […]
READ ONAn email came in earlier today contesting my assertion that slicing an onion from pole-to-pole versus cross-wise results in any fewer irritant-dispersing cross-cuts of the onion flesh. I’m no expert on onion anatomy, but I was taught that cutting the onion from top to bottom, then slicing inward toward the center, yields a milder tasting […]
READ ONHere’s a good article from yesterday’s Toronto Globe & Mail on pairing wine with dessert. Very interesting stuff.
READ ONMembers of the allium family are unique in the vegetable kingdom in that they store much of their energy in short-chain sugars. Whereas most types of plants “lock up” sugars in the form of very long-chain starch molecules (which growing shoots later break down into usable sugar via special enzymes), onions store much of their […]
READ ONIf the onion is known for possessing any single quality, it’s of course the tear-inducing miasma it gives off when it’s cut. This is the onion’s defense mechanism against being eaten my large mammals such as ourselves. Its design is ingenious. Each cell contains not one, but four different offensive chemical compounds. Left alone, those […]
READ ONA question came in last night as to why Alsatian onion tart is considered a wintertime dish as opposed to a summer one, since onions are harvested in the summer months. The answer is, while I don’t know much about onions, I believe that it’s only the sweeter varieties (like Vidalia onions from Georgia) that […]
READ ON…of different types can be found growing wild the world over. However the large-bulbed varieties that we find so enjoyable today are thought to have originated in Central Asia somewhere. Though no one knows what the wild ancestors that produced the modern onion looked like, one thing is for certain: the onion has been part […]
READ ONIt’s been called to my attention that some of you Firefox users out there are having trouble reading the web site. Which is to say that since the weekend the Firefox browser has been warning people that they’re accessing a “forged” site, whatever that means. Rest assured that the entirely of the IT department here […]
READ ONMy new friend Greg over at SippitySup.com reminds me that there is another French version of Alsatian onion tart, known under the vaguely vulgar-sounding name of pissaladière. The main difference between the two is that being a Provençal dish, it’s got plenty of anchovies mixed into the topping. Ours will be the classic onion and […]
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