Tout Sweet?

Once there were Vidalia onions, and to taste them, you needed to go to Georgia in the early spring. Today, with so-called sweet onions popping up in every nook and cranny of the country and riding a publicity wave of tsunami proportions, the trick is avoiding them.

You can now find Vidalias at many local grocery stores (the approved growing area now includes much of central Georgia), but you can also buy sweet onions from Florida, Texas, Hawaii, Washington and California’s Imperial Valley.

In fact, sweet onions are imported from Chile during the winter. Between them and American onions coming from controlled-atmosphere storage (the technique used for apples), sweet onions are available through much of the year. Spring is still the prime time, however.

Though there may be subtle differences in flavor, all sweet onions are basically the same, with the exception of those from Washington. Whether you’re buying a Vidalia, St. Augustine Sweet, Texas 1015, Maui or Sweet Imperial, you’re getting the Granex variety of onion. Washington’s Walla Wallas are a different onion, thought to have been brought by Corsican immigrants in the 19th Century.

This is not to say that all of those onions will be equally good. In addition to being lower in sulfurous compounds (which are what makes you cry when you slice an onion), sweet onions are also very high in water, which encourages spoilage.

For that reason, all things being equal, you might be better off with the Sweet Imperials, since they come from close by and will spend less time in shipping and storage. This year’s harvest--which began in late April--is a big one, predicted to hit 67,291 tons. That’s up from 1,354 tons in 1985, when promotion of Imperial Sweets began.

Sweet onions, of course, aren’t sweeter than other onions--it’s just that they’re less pungent than the rest. And so, they’re perfect for eating raw in salads and on top of hamburgers. In other words, they’re a summer kind of onion.