You’re right, it doesn’t matter. It just seems like an unnecessary affectation on an American message board. YMMV.
Without knowing the recipe, I’d almost certainly round up to the nearest full onion.
Yellow for cooking, red for eating raw.
Correct, but “brown one” at least comes closer to rhyming with “onion” than “yellow one” does.
(chef’s kiss)
Actually, after making a pot of French onion soup today, I need to correct myself on that. The Spanish onions I was cutting up today did have a light greenish-yellow flesh. I guess I just mentally have always rounded that up to “white” but in comparison with the white onions I also used, the difference was obvious. It’s like when people call it “white cabbage” that it confuses me, as that type of cabbage is green but, indeed, its interior is more-or-less white or very pale green. I still call it “green cabbage.”
I don’t really like onion. Fresh onion needs to be very finely diced. I strongly dislike dishes with large pieces of onion.
The easy answer for this is, if possible, leave the onions out and provide fried shallots. They are a common addition to Asian dishes. I think everyone I know keeps them around to add onioniness to anything. One of the best extras for your kitchen, you can throw them on everything - salads, hot dogs , burgers, sandwiches, rice and noodle dishes. And if you don’t like onions leave them off .
I usually buy yellow. Sometimes sweet for a bit of variety.
I don’t know what the diced onions in a bag from Trader Joe’s are but if I’m being lazy I buy those.
I also took a longer look at onions at the grocery yesterday. The Spanish “yellow” skins are plainly brown and the sweets are straight yellow. I needed an onion for the soup I was making and bought a sweet one to try. Just bland, not very sharp & not very sweet but crisp, kind of like jicama or maybe a mild daikon.
I don’t know if this is one of those weird things where people’s perception of colour is based on the naming of colours (like that thing about the Greeks saying the sky was green or whatever), or if we just have different onions here (UK). The standard onions here have a sort of light nut-brown outer skin; inside they are pale greenish white. I don’t know that I have ever seen one that I considered ‘yellow’ here.
(I know that yellow is a weird colour and in some senses, brown is just dark yellow)
That description exactly matches the “yellow onions” in my US home. I don’t know why they are called “yellow”. But yellow is similar to light brown.
Before they fully ripen for storage, they are more of a yellowish-buff colour. Maybe it comes from that. I find that in a some UK/US language differences, the US version of a word seems (to me) a little closer to the soil than the UK in one way or another - perhaps simply because of the comparatively more recent pioneer/colonial history of the US