Is it just my imagination, or have onions gotten huge recently - like in the last couple of months? Just bought a 3 lb gab of yellow onions and it had four onions in it, all about equally sized. Every other bag was the same. All loose onions are also huge. No difference in size between a regular yellow onion or a sweet Bermuda onion. My wife just picked up a red onion which is almost as large as a cantaloupe.
I am guessing that the answer is COVID related. Either onions are staying in the ground longer because of a shortage of labor to harvest them, or the large uniform onions I am seeing would normally be headed to restaurants and are now in the retail distribution chain.
We recently drove to the east coast and back - all along I-40 I noticed flatbed semis loaded with big bags of very large, uniform onions. Multiple trucks per day, all heading east. Don’t recall seeing them in previous years. Am I noticing some shakeup in the onion cartel or something?
I think there is something to this. I saw an article about supermarkets selling out of the smaller domestic sized packets of flour. There was however a surplus of catering sized sacks as demand from the catering industry slumped. So supermarkets have starting stocking the large sacks. I imagine it’s the same with onions.
They’ve been ungodly huge for a couple decades now, around here. I haven’t noticed them being any bigger than usual… though in the nets, they are usually the “normal” size. I don’t see the big ones in those. But the loose onions? Holy cow. Like 12-inch softballs.
Huh, I hadn’t thought about it, but now that you mention it, the latest bags I’ve bought have had some giants. Yesterday I only used 1/2 an onion where normally I’d toss in a whole one, because it was so big.
It seems to be a seasonal thing. For a while onions will be baseball size then suddenly they’re softball size for a few months, then they go back to baseball size again. I figure better growing conditions during some parts of the year.
I saw something similar about carrots. Someone had ordered carrots from a grocery store and ended up with just a few, because the individual carrots were so big.
Sorry, searching for an article doesn’t seem to be so fruitful at the moment.
I don’t know the cause, and I really don’t care. I prefer big onions. Onions are a bitch to cut up, and the really small ones don’t have much yield, yet you still risk slicing off a finger or two. The worst were the red onions that looked “flattened.” There was nothing to grab on to while cutting!
Back when I worked in restaurants, the prep cooks would cut up HUGE onions, bigger than a softball, and I don’t recall ever seeing anything that big in a grocery store.
Yeah, big onions are nice that way. I’m fond of shallots (they are important in Indonesian cooking, which has been a big influence on my culinary development since I lived in Indonesia for nearly 2 decades) but damn, they are a lot of work just to peel and chop, because they are so small. A big onion is quite efficient by comparison.
I’ve noticed the same thing, at least a little. As well, much of the produce shortages of April have subsided. Our local stores never ran out of any produce, but we were seeing ordinary stuff like potatoes & lettuce & whatever looking pretty picked over. Not now.
Overall I WAG it’s about 20% seasonality and 80% restaurant vs. grocery store supply chain changes due to COVID.
Speaking of shallots …
What amazed me the other day was shallots that filled my hand. Sometimes shallots are about the size of unshelled walnuts. These were almost diameter of tennis balls and about 1.5x that big along their axes.
Despite the flavor differences I generally substitute onions into recipes calling for shallots just because of the hassle of cleaning & dicing so many small bulbs. No such worry with these mongo shallots!
Just got garlic yesterday and noticed that while the bulb is normal size, most of the individual cloves are gigantic - like 2x normal size. I am finding them harder to dice than the normal size cloves.
And I want my normal sized onions back. I want to use a whole onion, not 1/4 of a mega-onion and have to store the rest of the smelly thing in the fridge.
I personally like bigger onions. It’s not that much more work to slice a big onion vs. a small onion, and cooking it stinks up my kitchen equally, so I just cook the whole thing, use what I want, and put the remainder in the freezer.
I pre-dice 3 or 4 raw onions into a ziploc & keep that in the freezer. Makes it very low-effort to add onion dice to some eggs, a quickie sauteed veg, a burger, whatever. And when I am making a large dish that needs, e.g. 2-1/2 complete onions I go ahead & dice all 3 and put any excess into the ziploc.
Eventually the ziploc runs low then I dice a couple more onions into it.
I had to do my shopping today so in response to this thread, I took careful note of the specimens my Plains state grocery store stocked. The red and white onions seemed about normal but the yellow ones were like Chernobyl grade freaks. I selected one supposedly 5# bag that contained a total of six onions. The handy scale in the produce area reported an actual weight of 5.8 pounds so yeah, big onions in my local store.
