Neighborhood Onions

Onions haven’t been so sweet for Imperial Valley farmers in the last couple of years. Or rather, it’s onion prices that have disappointed them. There’s been an onion glut with consequent falling prices.

Partly because of the low prices, onion plantings in the Imperial Valley area have dropped almost 20% since last year. Most of Imperial Valley’s onions are sweet, of the Granex variety, which produces the sweet onion also found in Texas (the Texas 1015) and Georgia (Vidalia).

Unfortunately, those out-of-state sweet onions are harvested at about the same time as Imperial Valley sweets, usually from early to mid-April and to June. That competition pretty much keeps the Imperial onion a local favorite on the West Coast.

However, this might turn out to be a great year for our local onion growers. Vidalia and South Texas have been hammered by the weather this winter and are expected to have much smaller harvests than usual. The Imperial Valley, on the other hand, dodged El Nino almost entirely. Quality should be high.

In reality, sweet onions are somewhat misnamed--they are actually lower in sugar than plain old brown storage onions. What makes them taste so much sweeter is that they are also much lower in the sulfurous compounds that give regular onions their bite.

That makes sweet onions a real pleasure to eat raw. When it comes to cooking, though, you’re better off sticking with brown onions. The sulfurous compounds are highly volatile and go away quickly when heated.

Sweet onions are also handled a little differently from regular storage onions. Because they’re lower in those sulfurous compounds, they’re more prone to spoilage. Keep sweet onions in the refrigerator and use them within a week.

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At the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market on Wednesday, there were abundant strawberries, green garlic, fava beans, English peas and sugar snap peas. In addition, Clearwater Farms had delicious wild onions (they were calling them ramps) and beautiful fresh morels collected near Ukiah. Zuckerman’s from near Stockton had purple asparagus, some colossal asparagus nearly an inch thick and a fresh crop of baby potatoes. Bill Coleman from Carpinteria had his usual astonishing assortment of herbs and greens, including hoja santa, puntarella, red mustard, radicchio di Treviso and sprouting broccoli. Fairview Gardens had white asparagus and Russian kale. A great new find is Valdivia Farms from near Carlsbad, which had all kinds of baby squash, squash flowers and exotic squash, including the rare ronde de Nice zucchini. Their haricots verts are in short supply for the next couple of weeks, but are worth asking for.