Easy Turkish Sumac Onions Recipe (Turkish Onion Salad) (2024)

FAQs

What are the benefits of sumac onion? ›

Sumac can be used in many dishes, including traditional Middle Eastern dishes and as an addition to other cuisines. Some health benefits of sumac include anti-inflammatory effects, metabolic and cardiovascular health support, antimicrobial properties, and potential muscle pain reduction.

Red Onions: The salad onion. While you can cook with it, it's less overpowering than white or yellow onions, making it ideal for uses that require raw onion. The colour fades as you cook them. Great for Greek salad, on burgers, etc.

A simple soak leaches some of that enzyme from the onion, leaving behind a mellower flavor and a much more palatable salad topper. (Cook's Illustrated has also had success with a bath of water and baking soda, but simple H20 will do the trick nicely.)

People take sweet sumac for kidney and bladder problems including irritable bladder, loss of bladder control, and bed-wetting, but there is no good scientific evidence to support these uses.

Due to a lack of data, there's no clearly established dose for using sumac medicinally. That said, clinical research has demonstrated that doses of up to 3 grams per day are safe.

Raw onions can add a nice bite to salads, from a green onion sliced and added to a simple green salad to easy creations based almost entirely on the sweetness of Vidalia onions.

You can get rid of the strong taste by soaking sliced onions in ice water for 20 to 30 minutes or by sprinkling them with an acid such as vinegar. Onions soaked in ice water will get very crisp while those sprinkled with vinegar will soften a bit, but they will lose the strong taste and become sweeter.

McDonald's preps its onions by using dehydrated onion pieces that are rehydrated in-store, which means they have already been cut and slowly cooked in a dehydrator.

What does vinegar do to onions? ›

Then you just have to wait long enough for the vinegar to do its job, rinsing away the harsh sulfurous compounds, softening the onion, and giving it a pleasantly tart pop of flavor. If you use red wine vinegar, my personal favorite, the onions also turn an amazing hot-pink color.

How to Reduce the Sharpness of an Onion. Patel recommends soaking a sliced onion for 30-60 minutes in ice water, which will alleviate some of the enzymes from escaping. Drain and pat dry before cooking with the crisp, palatable onion.

Onions - soaking in cold water to soften the flavor

When preparing raw onions, soak in cold water before hand to remove some of the pungency and soften the flavor. However since soaking too long will dilute the flavor, soaking in cold water for 5 to 10 minutes is recommended. Squeeze out excess water before using.

It's been positively linked to metabolic health, cardiovascular health, and blood sugar regulation. One study showed that daily intake of sumac for three months will lower the risk of cardiovascular disease among people with type 2 diabetes.

Red onions

All types of onions are good for you, but this dark reddish-purple variety, sometimes called purple onion, has especially high levels of quercetin and other helpful plant compounds known as flavonoids. Flavonoids give many fruits, vegetables, and flowers their colors.

In this study administration of sumac extract led to increased testosterone, FSH, LH levels compared to the control group. Table (4) this is in accordance with the study of Ahangarpour et al., (2014) they stated that sumac administration increased gonadotrophic hormones (FSH, LH) and testosterone concentrations.

This deep red spice is the main flavor maker in some traditional Middle Eastern dishes like fattoush salad and musakhan, but it is a versatile spice that can add depth and tang to many things including chicken, fish, and all sorts of salads!