What is an onion boil? Latest food trend asks you to eat a whole onion

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Some have called TikTok’s “onion boil” the best thing to happen to the allium since the battered, blooming steakhouse favourite. Others have labelled it “recession-core,” a reference to the aesthetic trend “that prioritizes usefulness over embellishment.” Little more than a hollowed-out, butter-stuffed whole onion, this may be accurate, but according to @thishealthytable, “Recession-core has never been so delicious.”

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Let’s get one thing straight: onion boil isn’t boiled but baked. According to Allrecipes, its name is a nod to the communal seafood boils (a.k.a. Low Country boils) of the East Coast, where everything goes into a pot with a spice mix such as Old Bay before being drained and drenched in butter.

To try it yourself, peel the skin from an onion, trim both ends and hollow it out using a paring knife. (TikTokers also used melon ballers or spoons.) Some creators then seasoned the onion with spices and poured melted butter over the top. Others, such as @stephpappas, sliced it crosswise, stuffed the hollowed-out centre with a knob of butter and placed pats in the slits before adding seasoning, wrapping it in foil and baking it at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for roughly an hour.

As one astute TikTok user commented, “Wait till people hear about dolma.” Admittedly more involved than making onion boil, to make Iraqi stuffed onions (dolma), Turkish sogan dolmasi or Greek salantourmasi, for example, cooks layer an aromatic mixture of rice, herbs and spices in the softened allium before baking.

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From cottage cheese to cucumber, TikTok food trends can have outsized impacts. With 6.9 million followers, known for his “Sometimes you need to eat an entire cucumber” catchphrase, Ottawa TikTok star Logan Moffitt‘s viral shaken salad was such a hit that Iceland experienced a cucumber shortage.

While some trends are dubious, a whole-baked onion confit is hard to find fault with. Onions are a foundational ingredient in stocks, stews, soups and braises the world over. So much so that Julia Child once said, “It is hard to imagine a civilization without onions; in one form or another, their flavour blends into almost everything in the meal except the dessert.” Enjoying them whole, as in Adeena Sussman’s balsamic-glazed onions and leeks, or caramelized and gratinéed like Mary Berg’s onion soup, is all fair game.

As commonplace as onions are, “they’re anything but ordinary,” author Mark Kurlansky said at a talk about his 2023 book, The Core of an Onion. “One of the things that’s extraordinary is that it’s a vegetable with a defence mechanism. If you mess with an onion, it’s going to spit sulfuric acid in your eye.” According to Kurlansky, humans are the only mammals up to this particular challenge. Our tears are a small price to pay for the onion’s mellow sweetness — whether doused in butter and eaten whole à la TikTok or not.

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