282442 Sun Jan 15 03:13:28 -0800 2006 7 31 Home Cooking 0 1505257 A meat or marinara sauce is the normal staple on Sunday in our house. Anything from simple to sublime is the order of the day. I normally start the sauce on Saturday - I will admit that I sometimes cheat and just reheat sauce from the previous week that's been in the freezer. But my SOB produce guy is screwing up the plan. Not the first time. I could recount the story of the wormy leeks, but I digress. Today I casually grab three Spanish onions. Innocuously, I presume they're fresh. My recipe is quite simple - to every can of San Marzano tomatoes - 2 T. olive oil; 1 crushed clove of garlic; 1 finely minced small Spanish onion - and whatever floats my boat. Could be chunked up pot roast, ground beef, sausage - it's a mood thing. Sometimes no meat whatsoever. But the onion is KEY. So as the sauce is cooking tonight I decide to brown up some cuisinart ground chuck. I go to chop and then add the onion. This is an onion like no other. This is an onion a soap opera diva would adore to have by her side for her own personal crying game moment. It's kinda slimey, it's so aromatic my cat runs from the kitchen - and he's an onion fan. If the sauce is salty, it's from my copious tears. Cooking the onion down has only added to my misery. The house smells of onion soup gone amazingly wrong - and the onion was not BAD - it had no green in the center, no mold, it wasn't soft. And the worst is yet to come... I have two more of these Mother F*****s sitting on my counter staring at me with a malignant smirk on their slimey little faces - as if they're saying "Eat Me!" Is there a way a tame a nasty onion? Or do I hunt down the produce guy and bitch slap him with one of them? Sun Jan 15 03:13:28 -0800 2006 0 bryan 1 1505258 Return them and ask him to replace them. Any reputable merchant cares to remain reputable. Don't put up a fuss. In the meantime, I use storage onions (not fresh) for my marinara and it's fine... in fact I even (caution: shameful admission 100 m ahead) buy them at the conventional market. Sun Jan 15 03:27:20 -0800 2006 1505257 0 Das Ubergeek 1 1505264 funny post...though sorry for your dilemma! makes me glad my tomato sauce contains no onion. i agree with ubergeek. return them. dare the produce guy to take one home and cook with it. Sun Jan 15 06:09:49 -0800 2006 1505257 0 hobokeg 1 1505265 Since produce is not actually "manufactured", most times these kind of scenarios are caused by the weather in the region the onions were grown. It's more God's fault than the produce guys. However they usually build in a big enough profit that it's not a big deal to replace it. Sun Jan 15 06:12:07 -0800 2006 1505257 0 coll 1 1505293 Wow, so much aggression over onions. Just found this online: "Why do onions make you cry? When you cut into an onion, the cell walls are damaged releasing a sulfur compound called propanethial-S-oxide which floats into the air. This compound is converted to sulfuric acid when it comes in contact with water which is why it stings your eyes. Chilling inactivates the propanethial-S-oxide so it does not float into the air. Thus, no tears. To keep eyes dry when chopping onions, try chilling peeled onions in the refrigerator before chopping. To get the onion smell off your hands, rub with lemon juice or vinegar. To freshen onion breath, chew a little parsley or a coffee bean. " I'd love to see you try to bitch slap mother nature, though. I'd sell tickets!! Sun Jan 15 11:49:20 -0800 2006 1505257 0 krissywats 1 1505324 Why did you buy the onions if you knew they were going to be overwhelmingly strong? It's because you didn't know, no more than your produce guy can look at an onion and tell you if its going to be strong or mild. There are so many variables when it comes to growing and storing produce that you unfortunately can't be guaranteed the perfect vegetable or piece of fruit every time. Take it back and let him know, if he's a decent vendor and your a good customer, I'm sure he'll make good on it. Sun Jan 15 14:13:36 -0800 2006 1505257 0 David Z 1 1505340 A method question -- are you sauteeing/carmelizing the onions before using them in the sauce or just adding them raw and letting them cook? Because I've found a long slow saute tames the most noxious beasts, with more flavorful results than one can get from exeedingly bland and smell-less onions, as the Spanish kind can sometimes be. Sun Jan 15 16:21:12 -0800 2006 1505257 0 personne 1 1505695 As noted below, chilling onions helps a lot. I usually keep mine in the crisper now so they're always chilled and ready to go. When I worked at a restaurant, we would put whole, unpeeled onions in bins of ice and cold water to bring them down in temp before chopping them on the food slicer. C- Tue Jan 17 15:19:17 -0800 2006 1505257 0 Candice