Onions are used as a base for many dishes all around the world, from pasta sauces and soups to stews and vegetable dishes.
The most popular way to prepare onions is to fry them. Fried onions caramelise, which brings out their natural sweetness and flavour. But, if you are trying to avoid oil, for one reason or another, boiling onions can be an option to include the healthy vegetable in your diet.
Boiling onions is as simple as peeling them, adding them to a pan with boiling water with a bit of salt and leave them for around 10 minutes. Drain them, and they are ready to go! Boiling onions will get rid of their bitterness while still retaining a subtle onion flavour.
Onions are perfectly safe to boil. Even if you undercook or overcook them, they are still safe to consume, as long as they are fresh. While being healthier than fried onions, boiled onions cannot be the best option if what you are looking for is flavour and crispiness. But these can be helped with some tricks:
- Add some flavour: You can make boiled onions more flavourful by adding ingredients to the water you are boiling them in. Aromatics, bay leaves, cloves, peppercorns, herbs, or garlic cloves are good options.
- Use stock: As well as adding extra flavours to the boiling process, you can also just boil the onions in stock. Use half a stock cube in a pan of water to make the onions rich and flavourful
- Keep your onions together: By keeping an onion whole instead of slicing it, you can make sure you don’t risk overcooking and make it mushy.
With boiled onions, you might not get the sweetness you get with fried onions, but the reality is that boiled onions are better for you. Especially if you use onions every day. By boiling them you can remove a form of fried food from your diet.
M&P Engineering has a lot of experience in manufacturing onion peeling machinery and is proud of its famous Large Onion Peeling Machine. This machine is in the forefront of food production globally, with many thousands of units sold worldwide. It can peel, top and tail onions of different sizes using self-adjusting knives. It also uses a dry peeling process, to avoid waste slurry. You can see it in action here.
As well as onion peeling machines, M&P Engineering also supplies depositors, fillers and fresh-cut machinery to cover a wide range of food production needs. Watch our Carousel Grid Cutting Machine in action here.
To find out more about M&P Engineering and our products, please contact us here.