Well, my story begins in twenty-dickety-twenty… I decided to take the ferry to Morganville (only cost a nickel, which had a bumblebee on it), so I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time …
… and fell over, the dadburn thing was so heavy.
I’ve been buying the big’uns (priced per each, so I’m getting away with a bargain), slicing them thick and throwing them on the grill whenever I do brats or just mixed veggies.
Charred peppers, zucchini and a massive Walla Walla Sweet Onion, and I’m a happy grillmeister.
Yeah, I bought one today, and it’s the usual “huge” size. Weighing mine on a digital scale, it was 1 1/4 lbs, 4.5" in diameter across the equator and 3.5" from pole-to-pole. Officially, they’d be classified as either colossal or super-colossal in size.
But, as I said above, we’ve had these at the groceries I shop at for ages. I’m sure I’ve complained either here or another board about how ridiculously large the things have been ten years ago. But maybe y’all are just getting the big ones now. Or maybe we get a different variety here. Who knows? The netted ones do tend to be smaller, like 3-3 1/2 inches in diameter, but the single ones have always been huge.
Until recently the huge onions have always been sweet onions like Bermudas, great for slicing thick and grilling. Now the regular yellow onions (a little strong for grilling, need to carnelian some) are the same size as are the red onions (which are definitely not sweet and are so strong they should come with a biohazard warning).
That’s interesting. For me, the red onions aren’t the strongest. For me, it’s white is stronger than yellow is stronger than red. But reds are stronger than Vidalias or Walla Wallas or that sort of thing.
For years red onions have been the mildest. For a while now (not sure if it was after we moved to AZ from the East Coast) the red onions have been lethal.
Pungency of the onion depends partially on the variety of the onion, but is also strongly affected by the particular soil it’s grown in.
And there are a lot of different varieties of red onions, a lot of different varieties of yellow onions, and so on.
The reds I grow have a more complex flavor than the yellows; but all alliums grown in my soil come out pretty pungent.
– Pungent onions actually often have more sugars than the sweet ones; they just also have more sulfur compounds, which masks the sugar, at least if they’re eaten raw.