So, I’m trying to find a decent, easy, no-fail crock pot recipe to test out. I’m not much of a cook, but I can follow a recipe. I just don’t have the TIME to cook. Which is where the crock pot comes in. Fire it up when I leave for work in the morning, and come home to a ready-to-eat meal.
Last week’s attempt was 40-clove garlic chicken. I’ve had similarly-named entrees in restaurants, and LOVED them, but I didn’t have to live with the aroma for a week. And why did the house smell of cooked cabbage more than garlic? Answer me that! I don’t think cabbage has ever been in my house, at least not as long as I’ve lived in it.
Now to today’s question. I’ve found several poultry recipes in an old Sunset Crockery Cook Book, and many call for “shallots.” Wikipedia provides a much-more-than-required-definition, but also states that it is sometimes shallots are confused with “scallions.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen a shallot, but I can identify green onions. Could my circa 1992 cook book actually mean scallions? Would using scallions over shallots have much of an impact? If it were up to me, I’d leave out onions all together, but Mr. H. likes them and I wouldn’t want to mess up the meal for him just because of my repulsion to onions.
A shallot is a mild-flavored onion-like plant where the “bulb”, rather than being a single layered unit like a normal onion, is comprised of cloves like garlic. In short, shaped like garlic, tastes like onion.
Scallions, of course, are green onions – and we’ve recently had some that had a definite bulb rather than the cylindrical white section normal to scallions/green onions. But, note this from Wikipedia:
Presuming you’re from the US, it looks to me like scallions = green onions and shallots = multiplier onions" (i.e., with garlic-like cloves within the corm or whatever it is). In Australia, though, it looks like either plant might be what the writer meant by “shallot” – presumably the effect of Australian beer on the cookbook author!
A shallot is in the allium family, which means its related to onions and garlic. But a scallion is not a particularly good substitute. A shallot tastes halfway between onion and garlic, and looks like an oversized clove (or cluster of cloves) of garlic in a brown skin.
A finely minced shallot will all but disappear into what you are cooking. They are the best way to get oniony flavor into a sauce that you don’t want any chunks in. I’ve never come across any recipe that seems to confuse shallots and scallions.
Originally South Australia, but I’ve just migrated to Tassie.
If it turns out I’m wrong about the spring onions thing*, it’ll still be hilarious to have been corrected in a cooking thread by someone with the username TastesLikeBurning.
The majority of images for both searches confirms what I think of both of them as looking like, but it also shows a couple of images here and there to back up what you’re saying. Maybe we’re just weird over here.
Tis’ true–In the past, '50’s-80’s in America, some cookbooks used green onions, spring onions, scallions, and shallots interchangeably which led to some misunderstandings. But when I refer to a shallot, I am referring to the dried, onion like, sweet, garlic, bulb, that is without the green stem. The true shallot… as it has been recently popularized (last 20 years) in America. The shallot as green onion is colloquial Midwest, however. About the only thing that I might feel comfortable calling a shallot per American parlance are “ramps”, from my culinary perspective.
Use the specified amount, replacing 2/3 with scallions and 1/3 with garlic and it’ll work just fine. Or just use the 2/3 scallions, if the amount in the recipe is small: shallots are generally milder.
The difference for me, personally, between scallions and shallots is several hours of extremely smelly gas. Shallots are the only allium that don’t give me teh evil farts the next day, so my wonderful house-husband, who does 95% of the cooking around here, uses them as much as possible.
If you generally dislike onions, you may find that shallots are an exception, since they are a little different. Or you may find that you can’t tell the difference.
Shallots keep much longer than scallions, by the way, as the former is all root, whereas the latter is mostly leaf.
In the first illustration on this page, the smallest item is a shallot. (In my area, they tend to be more purple than brown.) Scroll down the page for another illustration plus a definition:
Even though it says the white part of a scallion is an acceptable sub, I don’t think I’d ever do that; I’d just use regular onion, very finely minced.
The first illustration on this page shows a scallion/green onion.
