Please Cut Up Your Entire Spring Onion
We’re all trying—quite rightly—to waste less food. We pickle leftover vegetables, hang herbs and peppers up to dry, and eat leftover chicken on a sandwich the next day. But why are rubbish bins still full of the green tops of spring onions?
Many people seem to think that you can only eat the white and light-green part of a spring onion. What a waste, because you can use the green part for all sorts of things, and for some purposes it’s even tastier.
Cut up your entire spring onion
The white part has a sharper flavour and firmer texture than the green. That makes the white part ideal for frying. You can easily eat the green top raw, as a topping or stirred through a salad, for example. Both the flavour and texture are somewhat reminiscent of chives. Out of chives? Try some spring onion greens instead.
Mexican and Asian
Mexican and many Asian cuisines are impossible to imagine without the fresh flavour of this long onion variety. In many Chinese dishes, the white part is fried or used to make stock. Sprinkle the green part over the dish just before serving. Curious what else you can do with those green rings? Here goes.
Top it up
The easiest thing is simply to sprinkle it over everything. On your perfectly cooked scrambled eggs, for example. But soup too, such as a bowl of Japanese ramen, isn’t complete without finely sliced spring onion greens. Or go all out and make spring onion soup.
Oil
Do you, like us, always have sunflower oil in the cupboard? Then spring onion oil is easy to make. Pour it over noodles and you’ve got a favourite Chinese takeaway dish, but it’s also delicious over roast chicken, like in this recipe. You can also let all the flavours infuse into the oil and remove the spring onion afterwards; it will then keep longer than the version in which you leave the onion in.
Tuna salad
Spring onion greens are exactly what your tuna salad needs to cut through the richness of the mayonnaise and tuna. Your tuna melt will never be the same again.
Pancake
In China and Taiwan, you can buy them on every street corner: scallion pancakes. Spring onion pancakes are incredibly tasty and the perfect way to use up your leftovers.
Frying and grilling
“If you can eat it, you can fry it,” southern food goddess Paula Deen once said. And who are we to disagree? Dip your onion in batter and throw it in the deep fryer for once, just give it a try. Also delicious: grilling your entire spring onion: the onion develops a deep, roasted flavour that is nothing like the fresh flavour you’re used to from raw spring onions.
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