The World of Onions

Every onion has its own place on a menu. Figuring out where to put it and how to cook it, whether you sweat it, braise it, roast it or leave it raw, changes every dish. Every cuisine has its staples, and the onion is one of them. The onion you pick and the way you use it can make, break, change or reinvent any dish you're working on.

That's why my favorite ingredient might be the onion family. There isn't one onion. There are dozens, and they follow the kitchen through the whole year.

Spring

Ramps, scallions, spring onions, young leeks. Think green. Slice the bulbs and pickle them, eat them raw, or lay them right on a salad. Ramps are wild and slow to grow, so we treat them like the short season they are.

Summer

Sweet onions, Maui onions, and fresh red, white and yellow. Raw salads, gazpacho, bruschetta. This is grilling and roasting season. Our pizza ovens run hot, and onions roast and caramelize beautifully in them. They don't even need a pan.

Fall and winter

Storage onions, shallots, leeks. This is when the onion goes underneath the food. Mirepoix. Soffritto. Soups, ragù, braises, stocks. The sweetness and depth a cooked onion gives a sauce is something you can't really cook without. And a cured storage onion isn't old produce. It's built to keep and built to cook.

Shallots, all year

Shallots could be their own story. I use them every month of the year, roasted, chopped and turned into the caramelized shallot drizzle that finishes one of our pizzas. Pickled in balsamic, they're a whole different ingredient.

Onions on the pizza

Our True Sicilian follows the Palermo sfincione tradition. Onions caramelized with the anchovies make the base, the way it's been done in Sicily for generations.

Next up is an onion pie we're developing now: white, yellow and red onions in layers, maybe a shallot drizzle on top, with the mix changing as the seasons change.

I learned what an onion can do from my mother's Easter lamb. Cook it long enough and the onions become the sauce. That's the goal every time: cook it so the person who never tried it becomes a fan.

Stay tuned.

Chef Joseph Catalano
Teglia Pizza Bar, Montclair, NJ