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

FAQs

What is Turkish sumac? ›

Sumac is a spice that is popular in the Middle East. It is related to the poisonous shrub by the same name, but the culinary variety is safe to use and easily identifiable by its vibrant red berries (poisonous sumac is white).

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.

It's made from the berry fruit of the Rhus Coriaria shrub, which were originally grown in parts of the Mediterranean basin, then spread to Europe. The berries are dried, then ground and sifted to get rid of the bitter inner seed. The coarse crimson-colored powder is then bottled as a spice to use in cooking.

People dry and powder these berries for use as an herbal medicine or culinary spice. Sumac is rich in a variety of nutrients and antioxidant compounds. Early research suggests it may be beneficial for blood sugar control and relief of exercise-induced muscle pain.

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.

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.

Then you just have to wait long enough for the vinegar to do its job, rinsing away the harsh sulfurous compounds, softening the onion, and giving it a pleasantly tart pop of flavor. If you use red wine vinegar, my personal favorite, the onions also turn an amazing hot-pink color.

Frequently people ask if they can use this method of infusing onion or garlic in their home cooked meal then fishing it out before eating. Unfortunately, the fructans will leach out into the meal along with the flavour as they are water soluble and likely to cause upset your gut.

Why pour boiling water over onions? ›

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.

Onions may cause symptoms of gastrointestinal upset, such as heartburn, bloating, abdominal discomfort, nausea, and vomiting, in susceptible individuals, which may aggravate symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome in affected individuals. These symptoms are relatively more common when eating onions raw rather than cooked.

While soaking red onions in water for a period of time can alter their texture, flavor, color, and odor, it's important to remember that prolonged soaking or exposure to water can also lead to loss of nutrients.

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.

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.

Also known as scallions or green onions, spring onions are in fact very young onions, harvested before the bulb has had a chance to swell. Both the long, slender green tops and the small white bulb are edible, and are good either raw or cooked.

If you don't have any yellow onions on hand for your next soup or sauce, white onions can be substituted with minimal differences in the end result. However, we wouldn't recommend eating yellow onions raw for your salads and sandwiches, unless you don't mind the more pungent flavor and aroma.