Spring onions.
Plus, my recipe for barbecued continental salad onions with charred pepper romesco sauce.
Welcome to ingredient, where once a month I take a deep dive into some of my favourite seasonal and store cupboard ingredients. This month I’m focusing on spring onions: the light, fresh spring salad allium that's so much more than just a garnish.
Additionally, at the bottom of this post you’ll find my recipe for Barbecued Salad Onions (because we’re talking all the alliums you’d grab under the heading of ‘spring onion’ in a British supermarket or farm shop today!) with a Charred Pepper Romesco Sauce. As always, two more spring onion-centric recipes are already in production for paid subscribers to receive later in the month.
To receive these recipes, plus access all of the recipes from past newsletters as well as my Kitchen Cupboards interviews, you can upgrade your subscription here. And, if you fancy exploring the archives for more inspiration, last April we were focusing on Harissa: the pleasantly oily chilli paste with a hint of spice who can name yogurt, lamb and fresh mint among it's favourite playmates.
Spring onions. They’re a cheap, cheerful salad-friendly onion perfect for slicing, shredding and just as good as a garnish as they are in salads. In stir fries they can be added in the end for verdancy and crunch, or they can be cut into fat, finger-sized lengths and used as a vegetable proper. Poke places will have bowlfuls of them ready finely chopped for sprinkling over your bowl of fishy goodness, and if you cut them into long, thin shreds and soak them in a bowl of ice water, they form pretty curls perfect for garnishing. Don’t bother with the water and pair them with cucumber batons and hoisin sauce, you’ve got the perfect accompaniment to crispy aromatic duck or slow roasted pork stuffed into wafer thin Chinese-style pancakes.
When I say ‘spring onions’ in this context I mean the thin, pencil-like white bunches sold in practically every supermarket with white tips and green tops, secured with a blue rubber band. They’re cheap, cheerful and what in America are referred to as scallions - even in our shops, depending on where you are they’ll be labelled as either spring onions or salad onions.
Except, I’m also talking about what America calls spring onions here: lumping in those who have been allowed to grow broader and fatter. Ones more suitable for heartier dishes like my barbecued spring onion recipe below, bonus points if you’ve grown them at home or obtained the slightly more exciting purple-pink tinged variety that count red onions, rather than white or brown as their most immediate relatives.
It seems as a nation we’re less fussy about what we lump in under the spring onion label. As long as it’s a long mild, crunchy onion with green tops and a crunchy white bulb we’re happy. Though, when it comes to understanding both thin scallion-style spring onions, and the fat ones, I find the two chapter introductions in American cookbook and utter allium gospel Onions Etcetera: The Essential Allium Cookbook by Kate Winslow and Guy Ambrosino the most illuminating. I’ve snapped the pages for you so you know what I mean when it comes to sizes and shapes.
As a gardener spring onions are a lovely crop to grow, as part of what I call the ‘foolproof’ salad triumvirate of cut and come again lettuce, spring onion and radish seeds. They pretty much always come up, are easy to sow, and even if they never get fatter than a knitting needle they’re still delicious. To make them grow into something really impressive, however, over the years I’ve already learnt that they need plenty of water and good soil to really thrive: and as I mentioned, the red / pink / purple varieties are always more exciting, with a good level of visual impact on the plate even if the flavour difference is negligible.
Deciding what to cook this month, I wanted to lean into the different ways spring onions usually appear in my kitchen, starting today with on the barbecue: we’ve always grown bumper crops of spring onions as a family, and we always cook as many meals as possible outdoors so we’ve been charring them for as long as I remember. With today’s recipe I’ve levelled this up slightly by going for the biggest ones I could get my hands on to yield both charred stem and soft, creamy, sweet onion bulbs, and paired them with a loose, chunky take on a charred romesco sauce because, if you’ve already got the fire going why on earth would you use jarred peppers instead? (Though my smooth, all year round romesco would also be good here too!)
For my next two recipes, I’m still doing some testing but expect to explore a bit more both how spring onions bring something special to the table as the sort of edible garnish you’d miss if it were removed, and as a salad ingredient in a perfect sharing dinner to bridge the gap between now where we’re pretty much done with soups and braising, but perhaps need to seize the odd sunny day to make something like the barbecued spring onions below (though the keen eyed amongst you might spy the rain drops on the plate, snapped seconds before the heavens opened and a thunderstorm rolled in!)
Barbecued Continental Salad Onions with Charred Romesco Sauce
Serves: 2-3 (easily scaled), Preparation time: 10 minutes, Cooking time: 35 minutes
I’ve called this recipe ‘Barbecued Continental Salad Onions’ because that is what the label says for the jumbo spring onions I picked up in Waitrose on the way to my parents house (and outdoor kitchen) to barbecue them, but in reality any spring onion or spring-onion type allium will be delicious here, charred on the barbecue until slightly smoky, and doused in the excellent sauce which will also work well with chicken, lamb and shellfish.
If you’re cooking thinner, more pencil-like spring onions, skip the pre-cooking and you’ll get a more impressive char. But, you’ll then be missing out on the soft, sweet middles of the barbecue bulbs with this foil cooking method my Dad, the outdoor cooking expert in the family developed. It’s up to what you can source where you live.
6 continental salads onions (or roughly 10 regular ones)
flaky sea salt
1 large red romano pepper (approx. 150g)
small handful skin on raw almonds1
1 1/2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil (something with a not too peppery flavour)
2 tsp sherry vinegar
1/8 tsp sweet smoked paprika
Prepare the barbecue for cooking over indirect heat, with plans to switch up to direct heat later on. If you’ve got one a closed lid / Big Green Egg-style barbecue will work best for this recipe - it was tested in a Kamado Joe heated to roughly 200C.
Trim any scraggy dried ends off the green end of the spring onions, and the hard root off the bottoms. Wrap them tightly in a foil parcel with both a generous pinch of salt and good slosh of water. Remove the core from the pepper, split it in half and remove the seeds.
Cook the foil packet of onions over an indirect heat for 20 minutes. Cook the pepper elsewhere on the barbecue (type of heat does not matter as much) until it is soft and charred. Then remove it to cool enough to chop.
Carefully remove the onions from their foil packet and cook over a direct heat for 15 minutes until charred.
Meanwhile, finely chop (by hand with a large knife for a good texture, not in a food processor) the almonds, followed by the cooked pepper. Stir together with the olive oil, sherry vinegar and paprika, seasoning to taste with more sea salt.
Serve the charred onions on a warm platter with the sauce spooned over the top.
When you’re already doing the spring onions and the pepper for the sauce on the barbecue, probably alongside a few more other items to make a meal also toasting the nuts is a step too far for me, so I use skin on almonds to add extra texture, interest and flavour. But if you want to go for it choose skinless nuts instead.