Freezing Sweet Onions

Sweet Onions

I put about 30 pounds of sweet Candy onions in the freezer this week. That’s a random guess, actually – who has time to weight them?

The first few batches were raw – I simply peeled and chopped the onions, two at a time, bagged them up, and threw them in the little freezer compartment of the fridge. It was obvious real fast that I either needed a new freezer or I’d just have to accept that many of the sweet onions I grew this year would rot before I had a chance to eat them.

Fortunately, I picked up my copy of Canning for a New Generation: Bold, Fresh Flavors for the Modern Pantry to look up the instructions for canning tomatoes, and just happened to see the author’s favorite way to freeze onions. Melted onions, she calls them.

It’s easy. I used my turkey roasting pan, which I filled up three or four times (over several days). Lots of tears, in spite of peeling under running water. It helped, I’m sure, but still – that’s a lot of onions.

Once they were cut up and in the pan, I added some olive oil and salt, baked at 400 degrees F, stirred every 20 to 30 minutes, and in about 2 hours they were done. And they really did melt into a much smaller space. That pan was packed full when it went into the oven.

Roughly Chopped Onions in Roasting Pan

Here’s the difference between my original raw frozen onions (two in a bag, on the right) and the melted (oven-caramelized) onions on the left (16 in a bag).

Raw and Oven Carmelized Onions in Freezer Bags

I put the cooked onions in ice cube trays, and two cubes equal one onion. Or thereabouts. And now my house smells like onion soup. Which reminds me – maybe that’s what I should have for dinner tonight…