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I keep on making things that when I think about it, would be enhanced with some pickled red onions.
Bean soup, liverwurst, salmon, and especially hot dogs and hamburgers would all be terrific with some pickled onions on the side.
All you really need to make pickled red onions is some sliced red onion, vinegar and sugar! There’s lots of leeway with the spices and herbs used.
For this batch I used cinnamon, cloves, star anise, bay leaf and red pepper flakes. You could easily thrown in some ginger, swap out the chile flakes for some cumin, or allspice for the cloves.
How to Make Pickled Red Onions
Ingredients
- 1 pound red onions (about 2 med or 1 large), thinly sliced
- 1 1/2 cups white vinegar
- 1/2 cup sugar
Spices
- 1/2 cinnamon stick
- 5 cloves
- 1 bay leaf
- 1 star anise
- Dash red pepper flakes
More spices (optional): Fresh ginger slices, allspice berries, oregano, garlic, cumin seeds, mustard seeds
Method
1 Blanch the onions: Blanch red onions in a saucepan of boiling water for 2 minutes. Drain in colander.
2 Boil vinegar with sugar and spices: While the water is heating in step 1, in a separate saucepan combine the vinegar, sugar and spices. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to simmer, cover and simmer for 5 minutes.
3 Add blanched, drained onions to the vinegar mixture. Simmer for 1 minute.
4 Transfer to a glass jar. Allow to stand until cooled. Will keep several weeks refrigerated.
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Links:
Molly's pickles based on the Zuni Cafe recipe from Orangette
Carnitas Tacos with Pickled Onions and Salsa Verde from Shared Appetite
Quinoa Veggie Burgers with Pickled Red Onions from Love and Olive Oil
Elise Bauer is the founder of Simply Recipes. Elise launched Simply Recipes in 2003 as a way to keep track of her family's recipes, and along the way grew it into one of the most popular cooking websites in the world. Elise is dedicated to helping home cooks be successful in the kitchen. Elise is a graduate of Stanford University, and lives in Sacramento, California.
How to Make Pickled Red Onions
Just made this recipe. I had a healthy but wrinkled jalapeño in the fridge, so I sliced that into thin rings and added it. I also added some caraway seeds (German twist, and Germans love pickled onions), some celery seeds and kosher salt. Just a 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon of each. Great pickles thank you! They will be adorning our salads, tacos and burgers for a while!
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Why are the onions blanched? Doesn’t it take some of the color out? I don’t blanch them, and they have a very intense color. And they are quite sweet without sugar.
Hi Kathleen, blanching removes some of the harshness of the onions.
Thank you for your reply. If you try these without blanching, you will find how mild the onions are, even sweet. This is how they make pickled onions, cebollas encurtidas, where I live in Mexico.
Great guidance here! I have also done it with whole turmeric and Italian herbs. Is the sugar really necessary? Perhaps for for fermentation? I haven’t used it yet and it’s still delicious.
Hi Eric, oh, what a great idea to add whole turmeric versus powdered. Include some black pepper and you have all those great health benefits of the turmeric. As for the sugar, these pickled onions are quick, sweet and sour pickles, not fermented pickles. The sugar is needed to balance out the acidity from the vinegar. But, if you are working with sweet onions, and you like the taste of leaving out sugar, great, go for it!
Oh, I always think I know better… so I used 50:50 balsamic and white this time. Turned out a bit too heavy! Best to go with all white vinegar, although I seem to remember using red wine vinegar last time with good results? The original recipe is a definite winner!!
We put them on homemade pizza (with pesto sauce). I’m making some tonight and looking forward to it.
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This sounds delicious! I recently made refrigerator bread-&-butter pickles, and this is now going into my arsenal!
If I want to use garlic and mustard seeds, how much of each should I try?
Hi Max! Well, a lot of this is personal preference/taste but I would start with a few cloves of peeled garlic and a 1 teaspoon of mustard seeds, on the conservative side, and take it from there. Let us know how it goes if you do it! Thanks for your question!