Onion Tea Recipe

Onion Tea Recipe

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Posted 2021-09-11 by T. A. Rosefollow


Onion tea is a surprisingly nice tea, which is made by boiling onions and a sweetener, such as caster sugar, coffee sugar or honey. It makes a distinctive colour, be it made with red or brown onions, although I did favour the red onion version for having a slightly smoother taste. I'm adding some videos about this unorthodox yet increasing in popularity topic, with my step by step and photos thereafter.

The video below has some nice words to say about the topic, is assuring and describes boiling onions with a sweetener.



This video demonstrates a different method - by putting onion in a cup, adding boiled water and sweetener and then consuming after a small wait.



This is the popular Valentina's Kitchen version - it's got many hits and the recipe is done thoroughly but more importantly, different to the other two versions.



In my version, I will get red onions, cut them into eighths and add them to five teaspoons of sugar, completing the saucepan with water.

Ingredients are: five cups of water; five teaspoons of sugar, and one red onion cut into eight equal pieces, roots cut and discarded and skin left on - all in a saucepan on a stovetop.

The method is to add onion and sugar and top with the cups of water, then switch the stove on. Boil/simmer for five to ten minutes, as though you were making boiled water without a kettle and leaving it to boil a little longer. I've added photos of the finished product below - the onions cloud the saucepan so it's hard to see the colour of the finished product. It should be nice and bronze-coloured with the strong version having a reddish hue - look to the top of the cup in the photos while the iced version is slightly paler due to adding some ice and water. Either way, it's flavoursome, surprisingly smooth (so it's a bit brash to label it ' durian water', but it's more like a sweet and peculiar tasting cup of normal or Earl Grey tea. Serving - I like to ladle the tea into a cup, but you can strain it all in one go. There are numerous ways to strain/pour the tea; the YouTube videos also contain ideas about serving. It is a bit of a skill to ladle it in. I found I improved with practice - you need to half fill the ladle and lower gradually over the cup, holding the cup over the saucepan. Best to be careful when first try serving it this way - because it's sweet, so you can't really have spillage.

It seems instinctive not to add milk but adding honey or ginger is fine (probably a catch to this healthy drink is it would be disastrous in terms of taste but physically harmless with milk). It seems very healthy but it would be a hard drink to study (but it may well have been studied in the past, by various researchers). What Webmd.com implies linked here is that it's conventional science to say it reduces cholesterol and inflammation but it's less or unproven to say it prevents cancer. With the sugar, it is a bit unhealthy but really blends well with the onion taste. Although unsweetened is tolerable and it shouldn't be dismissed. I think adding a lid and cooking on low heat would help if the water was already boiled and one wanted to reduce fumes but due to the sugar and using milder red onions, the fumes aren't too bad.

I like to add some extra water to the saucepan after ladling out my first cup or two. That way, I can try a less sweet version (as it dilutes the tea but still blends with the onion pieces in the saucepan). I think the tea is mainly there either as a novelty or for health reasons - it's got its limitations, but it can be quite moreish if you like healthy drinks or if you strongly believe it is healthy. I suspect the brown onion version is a little bit more nutritious, but that's purely my inference, and I found the taste in the brown onion version to be reasonable, and not too overpowering.















Thoughts/Notes about Recipe:

Substituting with brown onions isn't too bad, red onions only slightly make it smoother, and provided you add onion skins to either, you'll get that fantastic bronzed tea colour - rather than a green tea-ish greeny-yellow - which happens when boiling brown onions minus the skins.

It does become a bit of a lesson in preventative health - for example, I found it relieved hypertension, getting me to focus on the cause, knowing I couldn't rely on onion tea to make it go away, although it is welcome relief from stress-based hypertension. I've seen conflicting evidence about onions - they're ultimately a mild food, but like all things are about moderation.

It really ought to be added, there are ways to pickle the leftover onion flesh - relish , or with added fruits/vegetables in a relish or chutney is a great way to think about the leftovers and their valuable nutrients such as dietary fibre. I tried pickling the leftover onions once, in malt vinegar, sugar and salt, and felt upon tasting the resulting pickles that they'd taste great with steak or burgers, but haven't had time to explore this concept much further - but the vegetable relish idea sounds promising.

I recommend it as a fun drink but not a fixture in the diet. Good with colds, coughs, and throat complaints but for heart conditions, I don't think it is all that crash hot. Apparently, people's heart health reacts very differently to onions - although they do improve heart health indirectly and long term by reducing cholesterol - so they can be good and bad for the heart, totally depends on each case. With the recent pandemic, it's a fairly relevant home remedy.

I hope this has presented some awesome ways to think about this super healthy tea, be it cold or hot or lukewarm, red or brown onion-based. It's a fun tea, and a great excuse to add healthy onions to the shopping list.

Photos by author 2021.

#food_wine
#raw_food
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%wneverywhere
83964 - 2023-06-11 06:48:01

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