It used to be that there two main types of onions:
Yellow – ordinary everyday cooking onions. Had, yes, yellow to rust colored skins, were basically spherical, and had an intense bite of flavor.
Salad onions: Red or purple or white/vidalias. Much milder in flavor, often eaten raw in salads and such.
But these past two years I’ve been buying bags of ‘yellow’ onions that are nearly as pale as Vidalias AND they have that squashed through the n/s pole shape that vidalia’s have always had rather than being spherical. And it seems to me that their flavor has been cut way down, nearly to being as mild as vidalias.
Basically, it looks to me like they’ve crossed bred vidalias with the yellow onions, or maybe they’re simply growing vidalias and mislabeling.
Hey, I like vidalias as well as anyone, but you’re screwing up my old recipes! When I chop up an onion and add it to my spaghetti sauce I expect to be able to taste the onion flavor in the end. With these wimpy new fake-yellow onions? I might as well be tossing in chunks of potato for all the bite they give.
I don’t know what’s up with your onions, but this isn’t it. Vidalia onions are produced by growing one of several ordinary varieties of onions in soil with an unusually low amount of sulphur (and, by law, that soil has to be in a legally defined region in Georgia for the onion to bear the label “Vidalia”.) A “Vidalia onion” is not a single genetically distinct variety of onion.
In recent years, Vidalias have become more popular and various varieties of onion which are similar to Vidalias have been grown more frequently in places other than Georgia. Sweeter varieties of onion have been around for a while, it is just that sweet onions have become much more popular in recent years.
There are now several types of sweet onions.
WallaWalla Sweets have been around for years, but didn’t travel well, so other states didn’t get the treat.
Vidalias from (Georgia?) travelled better, but weren’t as sweet. Now there are sweets from Texas, Peru, Chile and I’m sure a few other places. They all seem to be more expensive, by far, than the plain yellow ones that grow everywhere.
Are you paying more? maybe you’re missing the plain yellow onions that have been pushed to the back of the bus by all the sweeties.
“Oh yeah – the important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones…” -Abe Simpson