Pickled Red Onions aren’t just for Tacos

Here’s why you need them in your life and, most importantly, how to make them. Your own batch of pickled red onions!

Pickled red onions work on three aspects to bring your food to the next level.
First is taste my offering a mouthwatering acidity. Which as you should know is one of the two ways to bring more taste to food, the other one is salt.

Second is through texture by bringing in crunch – which is very important especially with food that lacks it like eggs.

Then the third one is color, their vibrant purple-red color brings contrast as it’s not a very common color and works very well on top of numerous foods.
So keeping these three things in mind, pickled red onions can be a very powerful tool in your condiment arsenal.

As far as the recipe goes it’s not too complicated: cut the onions in thin slices, add the aromatics and pack them tight in a jar, then top with a hot pickling liquid. There are some subtle aspects you need to know about though. Like the fact that the taste of onions is affected by how you cut them. These aromatics are a good base to start at but you can add a lot more things in it, so experiment with it.

As a finisher, I prepared a quick snack to try them on – a good example of how you can take something as simple as toast with eggs and elevate it to something more by just adding pickled onions on top.

Quick Pickled Red Onions

While you might know that you need pickled red onions for tacos here's a little more detail as to why you need them in your life and, most importantly, how to make them.

Servings 30 servings

Prep Time 30 minutes mins

Cook Time 5 minutes mins

Equipment

• 1 L / 34 oz. pickling jar

Ingredients

• 4 large red onions ( about 230 grams / 10 oz.)
• 200ml (7 oz.) water
• 400ml (14 oz.) red wine vinegar
• 2 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp granulated sugar
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 tsp caraway seeds

Instructions

• Cut each onion in half, take off the ends and then thinly slice them from root to stem.

  Add all the cut onion in a 1 L / 34 oz. pickling jar and press it down as you go, it should be pretty tightly packed in there.

  When the jar is halfway full take the garlic cloves, crush them a bit just to open them up and add the to the jar along with the bay leaf.
• Once all the jar is full add on top the caraway seeds
• Take a small sauce pan and place the water, vinegar, sugar and salt – bring it to a boil and as soon as it starts to boil take it and pour it over the onions in the jar.

  Cover it with the lid and let it cool off completely on the counter before placing it in the fridge.
• These could be served straight away but I highly recommend to let them sit in the fridge overnight to allow them time to get infused with the garlic, bay leaf and caraway seed flavors.

Video

https://youtu.be/rv_GZx6lnUw

Calories: 80kcal

Course: condiment

Cuisine: Mexican

Keyword: onions, pickled, vinegar

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I’d love to hear how it turned out! Leave a comment below, or tag me with @solozaurcooking on Instagram and hashtag it #solozaurcookin.