Kitchen Garden Forum

All the cooking programmes and recipes in magazines at the moment say to use red onions. Why? They have a coarse texture, a very strong flavour which is horrible raw, and they turn an unappetising grey colour when cooked.

There are some lovely white varieties which are sweet, mild and tender. They turn a lovely golden colour when cooked and are generally much pleasanter to eat. White ones usually keep better in store too.

My husband is a red onion afficionado for some reason. I grow both but he greatly prefers the red ones raw in any salad and he also chops red ones up very finely to include in a cheese scone mixture. We tend to use the white ones for all other cooking purposes. To be honest ,t haven't noticed any great difference in storage capabilities but perhaps that's because we use a lot of them and I don't grow sufficient to have the luxury of a long term storage problem.

All my onions have done well this year i have about 70 red ones drying at present as well as shallots and 2 other variety of onions,i like the reds nice on salads or a cheese sandwich

I just find them too strong - they dominate everything if you eat them raw and you can't get rid of the taste for hours. Perhaps it is a man thing, or perhaps I just don't like such strong flavours. I do like garlic though - cooked.

I love red onions but I have a hiatus hernia and cannot eat raw onions red or other, or iceberg lettuce. If I take my tablets before I eat red onions I don't have such a bad reaction. But cannot eat iceberg, tablets or no tablets. We have grown red and white onions this year and they are looking quite good.