The Best Onion For Chili (Your Ultimate Guide) (2024)

FAQs

What type of onion is best for chili? ›

Sweet Onion

Sweet onions are great for caramelizing due to their higher sugar content. You can cook them into your chili, serve them raw over top, or even elevate your chili with a sophisticated caramelized onion topping! Some of my favorite sweet onions are Walla, Walla, Maui, and Vidalia Onions.

And while we prefer yellow for cooking, white for garnishing, and red for pickling, grilling, and everything in between, they're generally interchangeable: Switching between them won't ruin a dish, even if it slightly alters its flavor or appearance.

Yellow onions are the most popular cooking onions because they add excellent flavor to most stews, soups, and meat dishes. In fact, typically when a cooked recipe calls for onion, yellow onion is a safe way to go. Yellow onions have a yellow-brown papery skin on the outside and a white flesh.

Yellow onions are perfect for stews, soups, barbecues, roasts and sauces. Avoid eating them raw as they have a strong flavour.

You add uncooked veggies.

Like meat, vegetables and aromatics should be sauteed before being added to the chili mixture. This brings out the flavor, making for a more balanced finished dish. Onions should be sauteed until translucent; garlic should be sauteed until lightly browned and toasty-looking.

White onions are probably the strongest-tasting onion on this list. They're typically used in Asian and Mexican dishes, as well as potato and macaroni salads. You can also sauté them, making them ideal for French onion soup or any other food in which you want to add sweet or sour flavor.

For an onion that you can keep long after the growing season, the strong-flavored, yellow ones are your best bet. They're the most widely grown in this country and they keep extremely well. Commercial growers like these onions because they store them for long periods of time and ship them long distances.

Red and yellow onions are richer in antioxidants than other types. In fact, yellow onions may contain almost 11 times more antioxidants than white onions ( 25 ).

Instead of the pepper and salt, I used Emeril's seasoning and sweet yellow onions. The meatloaves were good, and the onions became even sweeter when baked.

What is the best onion to cook meat with? ›

You can use yellow onions in pretty much anything, but they work really well in dishes that require long cooking times or as the base in stews, stocks and soups, and they're great in meat dishes.

I later learned how I could avoid this problem and make a fully smooth meatloaf by pre-cooking any vegetables, especially the onion, before adding them to the ground meat. This way the meatloaf gets the flavor without the rawness -- a method from the smart people at Cook's Illustrated.

"The rule of thumb is to use white onions for raw preparations like pico de gallo, or as a topping for chili," he explains.

Italian onions, or cipollini onions, are flat and are red, white, or yellow in colour and often have a mild, sweet flavour. They are used raw for salads and sandwiches, and their outer rings make an attractive garnish.

White Onions

These onions are slightly sweeter, a bit milder in taste than yellow onions. They're a good choice for dicing and serving raw on sandwiches and salads or in fresh salsas.

Technically, from a culinary perspective, since onions and shallots behave the same way when cooked, you can substitute them one-for-one in recipes. It's important to remember, though, that shallots are milder in flavor. This matters most in raw applications, such as minced in salad dressing or sliced thin on a salad.

Owing to the fact that Spanish onions are grown in low-sulfur soil, they tend to be milder and sweeter than other varieties of yellow onion. This means they're ideally suited for any recipe where you want an onion flavor, but not too much of an onion flavor (like in an omelette or a stir-fry).

Sweet onions have a yellow exterior, but they're not to be confused with yellow onions. To distinguish between the two, look at the size and color of the skin—sweet onions are lighter and larger than yellow onions. Aptly named, sweet onions are exactly that.