Home-grown onions are here, so make sure you get plenty in over the next few months.
An onion is the start of something good. While you muse over what to make for supper with the contents of the fridge and shopping bag, chop up an onion and set it cooking in a shimmering puddle of olive oil.
Countless meals involve a sautéed onion somewhere, but it’s not a step that can be rushed, so it makes sense to get one gently browning while you settle on the rest of the menu. (And in the unlikely event you don’t end up using your perfectly cooked onion, it’ll keep for a week in the fridge.)
You need at least 10 minutes to turn an onion from sulphurous to the properly sweet, translucent mass that provides the backbone and base notes for everything from carrot soup to venison casserole. Caramelised onions, that make onion gravy, French onion soup, and Alsace onion tart so delectable, take anything from 20 minutes to an hour.
Onions are a staple, an item it’s impossible to imagine cooking without, much like flour and butter. They are intrinsically British, like cheese and onion crisps, beef and onion pie, pickled onions.
Yet for much of May to September, supermarkets are stocked with onions shipped from the other side of the world. It turns out that onions are as seasonal as apples and pears. This year’s British harvest is right now, and it’s a bumper one.
According to AJ Paul, the slender, humorous man who gave up driving bus tours across the Sahara for farming onions on the Shotley peninsula in Suffolk, they had high sunlight levels and almost no rain from March to May this year. “We usually produce about 2,000 ton, but this year it’ll be 2,500 ton,” he said.
Crazy as it seems, this actually means less money for the farmer, as oversupply drives prices down and makes retailers fussier than ever. “We’ll be paid 50 per cent less per ton,” admitted AJ. “If you produce 10 per cent too much the price plummets.”
We were admiring the field of AJ’s onions, grown in the light soil which makes the Suffolk coastal sands so suitable for root crops. It is bolstered with added nitrogen and also sulphur, which according to AJ has been depleting ever since Margaret Thatcher’s government cut emissions from power stations. Onions love sulphur, absorbing it from the soil, and it gives them their characteristic bite. It also combines with the moisture in our eyes to form sulphuric acid, which makes us cry.
The onions, it has to be said, were looking somewhat dishevelled, long green leaves bent down like lopsided comb-overs. This, AJ explained, was the sign that it was time to “windrow” the onions. Two small red tractors were on the job, the first lopping off the leaves to about a handspan above the bulb, the second lifting them out of the ground, shaking off the soil and depositing them back on top.
Here they needed to stay to dry for a day or two on the soil. Weather permitting, that is, but with a light breeze and warm autumnal sunshine, it was a perfect onion day.
To see the next stage, we drove across the farm, past its protected heathland grazed by Hebridean sheep and Exmoor ponies. We swung into the farmyard, slowing for a flock of red legged partridge, and pulled up in front of the barns. It is here that the onions are sorted and finish their drying process, with vast fans blowing warm air through vents in the floor up through a depth of 12ft of onions, piled up in an area the size of a tennis court.
This drying, or curing, is crucial, closing up the neck of the onion so that the moisture stays in the bulb and no bacteria can get in. “The onions stay naturally dormant for 12 weeks, but after that they want to sprout,” AJ told me as we climbed the ladder to the eaves of the barn.
At last I understand why after the New Year any onions taken out of the fridge or cold garage sprout green plumes within a day. A short spike does no great harm, but as they grow longer they pull nutrients from the onion, leaving it soft and shrunken, and little use for cooking.
Chilling the onions in storage will take the onions through to April, and there have been experiments using minute amounts of ethylene gas, which prevents the cells elongating and sprouting, and seems to keep the crop until May.
Some producers spray their crop with maleic hydrazide, which suppresses the shoots. AJ doesn’t.
When we reached the platform at the top, AJ hopped over the barrier and began striding over the sea burnished of onions. “Are you coming? This is how we tell if the onions are dried enough. Listen.”
I slipped and lurched through the Allium ball pool, and sure enough as I reached the drier onions at the back the squeak underneath changed to a rustle and I slid ankle deep in the firmer bulbs.
Walking on onions is harder than walking on sunshine. But it still feels good.
Crazy as it seems, this actually means less money for the farmer, as oversupply drives prices down and makes retailers fussier than ever. “We’ll be paid 50 per cent less per ton,” admitted AJ. “If you produce 10 per cent too much the price plummets.”
We were admiring the field of AJ’s onions, grown in the light soil which makes the Suffolk coastal sands so suitable for root crops. It is bolstered with added nitrogen and also sulphur, which according to AJ has been depleting ever since Margaret Thatcher’s government cut emissions from power stations. Onions love sulphur, absorbing it from the soil, and it gives them their characteristic bite. It also combines with the moisture in our eyes to form sulphuric acid, which makes us cry.
The onions, it has to be said, were looking somewhat dishevelled, long green leaves bent down like lopsided comb-overs. This, AJ explained, was the sign that it was time to “windrow” the onions. Two small red tractors were on the job, the first lopping off the leaves to about a handspan above the bulb, the second lifting them out of the ground, shaking off the soil and depositing them back on top.
Here they needed to stay to dry for a day or two on the soil. Weather permitting, that is, but with a light breeze and warm autumnal sunshine, it was a perfect onion day.
To see the next stage, we drove across the farm, past its protected heathland grazed by Hebridean sheep and Exmoor ponies. We swung into the farmyard, slowing for a flock of red legged partridge, and pulled up in front of the barns. It is here that the onions are sorted and finish their drying process, with vast fans blowing warm air through vents in the floor up through a depth of 12ft of onions, piled up in an area the size of a tennis court.
This drying, or curing, is crucial, closing up the neck of the onion so that the moisture stays in the bulb and no bacteria can get in. “The onions stay naturally dormant for 12 weeks, but after that they want to sprout,” AJ told me as we climbed the ladder to the eaves of the barn.
At last I understand why after the New Year any onions taken out of the fridge or cold garage sprout green plumes within a day. A short spike does no great harm, but as they grow longer they pull nutrients from the onion, leaving it soft and shrunken, and little use for cooking.
Chilling the onions in storage will take the onions through to April, and there have been experiments using minute amounts of ethylene gas, which prevents the cells elongating and sprouting, and seems to keep the crop until May.
Some producers spray their crop with maleic hydrazide, which suppresses the shoots. AJ doesn’t.
When we reached the platform at the top, AJ hopped over the barrier and began striding over the sea burnished of onions. “Are you coming? This is how we tell if the onions are dried enough. Listen.”
I slipped and lurched through the Allium ball pool, and sure enough as I reached the drier onions at the back the squeak underneath changed to a rustle and I slid ankle deep in the firmer bulbs.
Walking on onions is harder than walking on sunshine. But it still feels good.
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