Know your spring onions

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Ramps

Chives

Spring onions

GREEN ONIONS, SPRING ONIONS, SCALLIONS

Whatever you call them, these mild onions, with their long, narrow greens and tender white bases, are essentially the same — or at least they’re interchangeable for cooking and eating purposes.

In most cases, they’re bunching onions, a type of onion that doesn’t form a bulb, even when fully grown. The ones you find at farm markets this time of year are planted in late-winter for spring harvest, so they’re often called spring onions.

Supermarket green onions or scallions are available year-round; in spring and summer, they might come from farms in New Jersey; the rest of the year, they’re shipped in from places like California and Mexico.

At farm markets, you can sometimes find green onions that are really immature globe onions, pulled from the ground before they form bulbs, or while the bulbs are still small.

These “baby onions,” which can be white, yellow or red, depending on the variety. They’re milder than full-grown onions and can be chopped or sliced like regular scallions or cooked and served whole.

RAMPS

These pungent onions are usually foraged from the woods, where they grow wild in the spring, appearing around late-March and disappearing by early-June. Sometimes called “wild leeks,” they look more like broad-leaved scallions, with slightly rounded bases and a purple blush to their stems.

Eaten raw, ramps have a stronger flavor than either scallions or leeks. But cooking mellows them, and professional foragers often sell what ramps they can find to chefs, who know how to show them off to best advantage.

Though they’re seldom sold in supermarkets, ramps are becoming increasingly available at local farmers markets. Grab them if you see them, because the supply is limited and the season short.

CHIVES

This perennial herb is a member of the onion family, and its delicate flavor combines hints of onion and garlic.

You’re likely to see two kinds of chives at farmers markets in the spring: young chives in pots, perfect for planting in your garden, and bunches of cut chives for use in cooking and salads.

The first leaves to sprout from an established chive plant in the spring are coarser and tougher than those that will grow later in the year, so they’re better if cooked briefly, rather than served raw as a garnish. (If you have a chive plant in your garden, cut it back almost to the ground after flowering, and new, tender greens will soon emerge.)

You can also eat the purple flowers that top the plants in spring; they have a mild onion flavor. If they’re large, break the blossoms into individual florets before adding to salads or pasta.

Caramelized Onions

The way I caramelize onions, it takes hours, literally. But what you wind up with is something close to onion-flavored jam: dark brown, meltingly soft, with a complex slightly sweet flavor. I know this works because it seems like once a month I still run into someone who cooks from that recipe. You never know what is going to strike a chord with readers (in fact, when I first wrote about it back in 1998, it didn’t get nearly the same reaction).

Part of the issue might be that some recipe writers seem to conflate “browning” and “caramelizing” in some of the instances Scocca cites. Particularly with onions, those are two distinct things. Related, certainly, but not the same.

You can brown onions by cooking them over medium-high heat for 10 minutes or so. They will turn color, probably a light golden brown by that time, but they will still be slightly crisp and taste like onions. Not that that’s a bad thing, in fact, sometimes that’s exactly what you want.

In fact, as an initial step in cooking a dish, it probably is. Caramelization is something else. It’s turning onions into flavor bombs. If you’re not careful, they’ll take over a dish. Think of the flavor of a French onion soup. Truly caramelized onions need to be the star of a dish, not just a flavoring.

In order to bring out the full flavor of caramelized onions, you need to cook them slowly enough that the cells of the onion collapse, mingling their chemical constituents to create a much deeper flavor. At the same time, those cells release their moisture so it can be evaporated, allowing the onions to reach higher temperatures and even more complex flavors.

This is where the real fun begins –- caramelization and, at the same time, our old friend the Maillard reaction. These, too, are frequently confused, but are different things. Caramelization is the breakdown and browning of sugars; the Maillard reaction (which flavors things as different as the brown crust on bread and the brown skin on chicken), is similar, but involves not only sugars, but also enzymes and proteins.

If you want a full explanation of what happens, I can’t think of a better description than the ever-reliable J. Kenji Alt’s piece at Serious Eats.

Alt claims to be able to produce fully flavored caramelized onions in 45 minutes. I am somewhat skeptical, but I trust him enough to give him the benefit of the doubt. When I first started caramelizing onions, it took about two hours. Today I find that it takes about four. I don’t know whether it’s the onions that have changed or me, but in his “Bouchon” cookbook, God, er, Thomas Keller, cites the same timing.

I’m not sure whether it’s wishful thinking on the part of those recipe writers, or simply sloppy description, but I’m with Scocca in calling bull on it.

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