Red Onions
Sweet and mild enough to be eaten raw, both the exterior skin and the flesh of red onions are a deep magenta color, which makes them particularly good additions to salads or anywhere else a splash of color will enhance the appearance of the dish. I love to use red onions in salads and on sandwiches and burgers.
Shallots
Shallots are small, brown-skinned onions with purplish flesh, and their bulbs are made up of multiple lobes, a little bit like the way garlic bulbs are divided into individual cloves.
Pungent and garlicky, shallots are weirdly unappreciated in the United States—at least based on how infrequently they appear in recipes, and the sort of careless disarray with which they tend to be displayed at the supermarket.
Which is a shame, because shallots are possibly the most sublime onion. They impart a very intense flavor, and because they're smaller, composed of thinner layers, they can be minced very finely and used in salad dressings and sauces. They're lovely to roast, however; peel and halve them, and toss them in the bottom of the pan when you're roasting a chicken.
Green Onions
Green onions are immature onions that have not yet formed a bulb, or only partially. The entire plant is usually used, including the tall green shoots, and they make a wonderful garnish for soups, omelets, tacos, as well as color and crunch. They go by other names, including scallions, spring onions, cebollitas (in Spanish), salad onions, and even—shallots!
That's right, in some countries in which English is ostensibly spoken, green onions are referred to as shallots. Typically, these are the same countries that like to troll us by using the word entrée to refer to the course that comes before the main course.
They get around the confusion by calling shallots "French shallots," a workaround which is nevertheless wholly unnecessary since shallots and scallions already have perfectly good names.
Leeks
Leeks are a truly marvelous vegetable, and also sadly underappreciated. Shaped like overgrown scallions, leeks are lovely in soups and sauces, and one of our favorite ways to prepare them is à la gratinée —baked and topped with seasoned breadcrumbs and Gruyère cheese. Baking the leeks mellows their flavor and softens them.
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