If you don’t have time to fuss with cleaning and chopping fresh vegetables, in some cases you can use onion powder.
It is especially convenient to use when preparing dishes for children. After all, most little eaters do not want to “make friends” with a natural vegetable, choosing it on their plate and pushing it to the side. And onion powder added to baby food will hardly be noticeable.
You can make this spice from fresh onions, which you first need to chop thinly, then dry and chop.Many housewives use devices such as a convection oven, oven or vegetable dryer to speed up the process. We will not rush and dry the onions naturally, that is, we will do without any devices. So, more nutrients will be retained in the vegetable than with artificial drying.
Ingredients:
- 2 medium-sized onions (their total weight was 180 g)
Yield: 5 heaping teaspoons (12 g) onion powder. Cooking time – 15-20 minutes + 7-8 days for drying the onions.
How to make onion powder at home:
Remove the husks from the bulbs, rinse with cool water and wipe dry. We cut both heads into very thin (ideally, no thicker than 1 mm would be good) half rings. The thickness of the slice determines the time it takes to dry the onion.
Cover a tray, board or baking sheet with baking paper and place the chopped vegetable on it, separating the half rings into separate strips. We try to lay it out in one layer. All the onion slices ended up taking up a small tray plus a large one (about three times the size of the first one). In this form, we leave the onions to dry, placing them somewhere on a table or an open cabinet shelf where the sun's rays do not penetrate. In general, drying time for onions can take up to 8 days.
After a day, the onion strips shrunk, significantly decreasing in size. We stir them with our hands and leave them to dry further.
After the second day of drying, we combine very thin onion straws on one tray and leave for at least another three days. Stir occasionally so that the onions dry evenly.
And already on the fifth or sixth day we get a small pile of well-dried onion straws.
Now we begin the final stage of preparing the onion powder. Place a bunch of onion straws (all at once or in parts) into a coffee grinder and grind to the desired state. The powder can be made into granules or reduced to fine particles resembling flour. Every 10-15 seconds we turn off the coffee grinder for the same period of time, that is, we work in small bursts. This is necessary so that the device does not heat up, otherwise the onion will begin to melt from the high temperature and turn into a wet lump. In addition to a coffee grinder, you can use a blender or mortar to grind dried onions.
Pour the resulting powder onto a small piece of parchment (use the one on which the onions were dried), level it to form a thin layer, and leave for another day. This will give you more confidence that it is completely dry.
If the powder gets into lumps, take a sieve and grind it using a dry spoon or wooden pestle. Then let it dry a little more.
Pour the ready-to-use onion powder into a dry container (a plastic container or glass jar is ideal). Throw in a cube of refined sugar (it will absorb moisture that may remain in the powder or accidentally get in later, say, with a spoon) and close it with an airtight lid. We store the container in a dark place, like any other spices.
Before adding onion powder to a dish that has little or no liquid (broth), first dilute it in a small amount of water. This will make it easier to achieve uniform distribution of the crushed product.
You can make garlic powder at home in the same way.
Enjoy using it!
