Now if you've only had pickled onions of late from the supermarket you'll know
how disappointing they can be and when I say that I think the technical term is
they are mushy, even the ones that purport to be sort of traditional
pickled onions. Now Michele and I have been talking about this, we've always
made pickled onions as we've grown up in our families and we made them with our
kids. So today we're going to make pickled onions that taste just like they
used to, absolutely delicious and there is no boiling involved because that is
what breaks down the onions and makes them so yucky. So come on
without further ado let's get on and make homemade pickled onions. Now it's a
personal choice what size pickled onions you like, I like them to be a fair old
size, some people like them tiny, it depends what you can buy in the shops. I
would look for a pickled onion that's probably a bit smaller than a ping pong
ball .Now you can actually use shallots as well but this size is a traditional
pickling onion, now all you need to do is just top and tail the onions, take a
little bit off of the crown and the base of the onion and they are a little bit
fiddly, you can just get the knife under there and what you want to do and see
this one's just going to come off in one piece, the outer shell is coming off in
one piece but we need to get all of this brown skin off. Now I think the beauty
when we were kids of doing this was everybody sat around the table and
peeled the little onions off, it didn't take long if there's three or four of
you doing it, it really doesn't take too long. Now I've seen many people say about
blanching them in hot water I don't like to do that again I don't want to heat
this onion in any way at all to make it soft and there she is that is the
perfect pickling onion. Now you can cheat a little bit if you've got a slightly
larger onion, we can just nip the top and tail off of this one and what you can do
is take one layer of the onion off, so effectively you're lose a layer of the
onion but you'll make a slightly smaller onion. I've got here by the way about a
kilo of onions and that's around about a couple of pounds. Those of you that have
boiled or brined your pickled onions in the past or even salted them I urge you
to give this a try, I just think they're going to be much more delicious and
or crisp, you're going to want some sort of mason jar or kilner jar to seal the
pickled onions in and you do want to sterilize these. So either put some
boiling hot water in there, pop them in the oven and sterilize them that way
whichever way, they do need to be sterilized. Now you can pickle onions
without spices just straight in the vinegar, here in Australia we have
pickling spices and this is made up of black peppers, allspice, there's some
mustard seed and dill in here, you could also add a little bit of dried chilli if
you want to. You are going to want I really insist that you go for malt
vinegar, it's going to enhance the flavour of the pickled onions and it just colors
them really nice sort of golden brown. Now here's a jar I've already sterilized,
popping my pickled onions in there and it is a little bit of sort of
tesselation to try and get the onions in to all the little gaps and nooks and
crannies. Now my pickling jar is about a quart and a half, about a litre and a
half, so I'm putting a couple of tablespoons in of my spices, my pickling
spices and they just drop down through. If you want to add chillies in at this
point I add a few dried chilies in and next we're just going to top this up with
our malt vinegar. Now you want your pickling vinegar to be right up near the
top here, we can now pop the lid on, oops a little bit of vinegar is going to burst
out, that's alright and seal this down nice and tight. Now something I like to
do during the first couple of weeks is to take my pickled onion jar and just
turn it upside down on a saucer just in case it leaks a little bit and that
allows the pickled onions in the top of the jar to get full immersion in the
vinegar. There you have it, a whole big jar of beautiful pickled onions. Now
you've got to be patient with these, they're not going to be ready overnight,
these are going to take at least four to six weeks, so I'm going to suggest you get
and make these along with me and we will open these up maybe towards Christmas
time and give them a try. I'm really looking forward to it, we've got a few
other things we're going to do to go with these pickled onions, so look out
for those coming up on Steve's kitchen. As always I'd love to hear your comments
and share any pictures on social media that you do and if you do make the
pickled onions we'll be talking about them in about six weeks time, be good and
I'll see you next time.