Apparently Schwartz started in Nova Scotia selling coffee and the founder’s son imported the first pneumatically tyred bicycle to peddle the first pure spices sold there. * The Romance of Commerce !
Now it’s owned by a conglomerate.
This being the 19th century, they had hitherto been extended with flour and such. **
** He sells us sands of Araby
As sugar for cash down;
He sweeps his shop and sells the dust
The purest salt in town,
He crams with cans of poisoned meat
Poor subjects of the King,
And when they die by thousands
Why, he laughs like anything.
For me Garlic and onion have different usagesmost of the time. Garlic is used as a spice/flavoring, Onion is used as a vegetable. So powdered or dried minced garlic is used in place of fresh fairly regularly, but powered onion would make no sense.
Shades of G.K. Chesterton’s whimsical poem about the British Empire at its zenith:
“So Lancashire merchants, whenever they like,
Can poison the meat of a man in Klondyke
Or water the beer of a man in Bombay –
And that is the meaning of Empire Day.”
I regularly buy granulated garlic and toasted onion from Penzey’s Spices of Wisconsin, who provide a superior product to the national brands on supermarket shelves.
The stuff in jars is predictable. Yes it’s probably mostly from China but they blend it to taste the same way every time. (That’s why you always get the scene of the grandmother in the kitchen for hours monitoring her sauce. Yes, she’s been cooking it all her life but she uses fresh ingredients so she doesn’t know how it will taste before she tweaks it. ) I use real onion and garlic, but I just tried a recipe and it said “a medium onion” which is 4"? 5"? yellow, white? And the last yellow onion I had was weird, the outer layers were hard as leather.
It’s not that precise. I would say about 3" is a medium onion. USDA says 2.5" apparently. Another source says 8 oz. I assume yellow onions unless otherwise specified, but white will do fine. Just use your judgment.
I use fresh probably 98% of the time - I don’t know that I’ve ever bought onion powder or granulated garlic (though I have bought garlic salt, but not in many years). I probably have some prefab spice mixes and/or curry powders/pastes around that use them. And I do use garlic paste once in a great while, usually for slow-cooked things like Crock-Pot curries that don’t call for sauteeing it first. (Ginger paste too.)
P.S. I use a LOT of onions in recipes where they are a large proportion of the volume of the dish (stews, curries, etc.) Dried would just not be the same thing at all - volume is also important.
I use fresh onions in virtually every savory food I make, even adding some to things, like pizza, that are already prepared. There is no substitute for fresh onion. Even with my limited ability to stand for long times in the kitchen, I’m still able to slice or chop up some onion.
Garlic can be a PITA. I try to use it fresh when possible, but often resort to adding minced garlic or powder.
Onion powder/granules is one of those products that appears to come and go on a whim. The only place I’ve seen it consistently stocked is Sainsbury’s. It may be depend on local demand.
Typically when I read that, it implies to me that the amount of onion is just a range of values, not a hard and fast number.
Cooking is rarely like baking; get 20% fewer or more onions in a recipe, and it’s usually imperceptible in the final analysis, while get 20% more flour or some other baking ingredient and it can make a massive difference.