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I was luckily enough to take a trip to the onion capital of the world last week, Vidalia, Georgia.
If you've never been to Vidalia before, you're not missing much. I'll be completely honest, I didn't see one damn onion field the entire time I was there. Granted it was like an hour, but I pretty much saw the entire town and there were no onion fields. That being said, there were onions present. I stopped into a nice little Vidalia Onions store and purchased a 10 pound bag of Vidalia onions.
I figured that friends and family would be chomping at the bit to take some of these onions off of my hands. Boy was I wrong. I think there were 45 onions in the bag and I was able to give away 6. That's a lot of onions. You don't think about it, but there is really no good way to use 40 onions. The unfortunate thing is that Vidalia onions don't store as well or as long as other onions because of the high sugar content for which they are so prized.
I looked every where to find someway to preserve onions, especially sweet onions, for as long as possible. Here are the best options I could find:
- Storing in a cold dark place
- Storing in the refrigerator wrapped in paper towels
- Pickling
- Storing in pantyhose
- Freezing whole, slice or diced
Unfortunately, there are no cool dark places in my house so storing them like regular onions was out of the question. I decided to take a hybrid approach for most of the onions. I put 20 of the onions inside the legs of pantyhose and tied knots around each onion to prevent them from touching. Apparently bad things happen when onions touch inside a refrigerator. Those have been in there for a few days now and I have not seen any adverse effects.
Being so hot and humid here in Cleveland the last few days the onions that were not in the refrigerator already started sprouting. Once onions sprout they being to lose their flavor quickly, so I had to do something with them. I decided to slice the onions very fine on a mandoline, sauteed them until they were very soft and bagged them for the freezer. This way I can always use them in soups, sauces or any other dishes in which I may wish to use them.
I have learned my lesson though, don't depend on others to take free onions when you buy in bulk.
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