Pickled Onions

A few years ago I got into a pickled onion habit, a jar wouldn’t last more than a couple of weeks and it was getting expensive.

What better solution then than to make my own?  This little post is an aide–mémoire for me and a guide for anybody else that fancies a go.

So what do you need?

• A bag of baby onions, 2kg bag (Mr Veg)
• Brown spirit vinegar, 2l (Spar sells it in 2l bottles)
• Honey, 300g
• Pickling spice, 1.5 packets depending how strong you like it (Robinsons)
• Salt, 75g
• Large wide jars, 750g mayonnaise jars work well. Small jars work less well as packing efficiency is reduced, especially if your onions are rotund.

And what do you need to do?

Not wanting to plagiarise more than necessary follow the steps here, with the following notes based on my experience:

1. What it says.
2. What it says.
3. What it says, plus:
   1. Sterilise the jars by boiling them and the lids in a large pot for several minutes.
   2. Add about a tablespoon of pickling spice to each jar (although this website says it should be added to the vinegar while you are heating it).
   3. Experiment with chilli, garlic and other flavourful things.
   4. Fill the jars so the meniscus is convex before putting the lid on.
4. Enjoy.
5. With cheese and crackers.
6. Or corned beef and HP sauce sandwiches.
7. On their own whenever you feel like it.

Under Construction

Just been preparing another batch and digging around in my photo collection, found a couple of pictures of work in progress.

For reference, a 2kg bag of onions reducing to 1.4kg is due to me procrastinating for weeks so that a lot of them went mouldy.

That batch filled 3 x 750g mayonnaise jars while this batch (about 1.6kg yield from 2kg bag) filled 2 x 750g mayo jars and 5 x 400g jam jars.  The jam jars have a lousy packing ratio as they are only 2 onion diameters in diameter.