Easy Turkish Sumac Onions Recipe (Turkish Onion Salad) (2024)

FAQs

What is Turkish sumac? ›

Comment. Published: May 24, 2022. This post may contain affiliate links. Tangy, smoky, earthy, and slightly sour, sumac is an essential spice in Middle Eastern cooking. With its deep red hue and fruity, citrusy flavor, sumac spice is the perfect way to add acidity and color to your meals!

Red Onions: The salad onion. While you can cook with it, it's less overpowering than white or yellow onions, making it ideal for uses that require raw onion. The colour fades as you cook them. Great for Greek salad, on burgers, etc.

When preparing raw onions, soak in cold water before hand to remove some of the pungency and soften the flavor. However since soaking too long will dilute the flavor, soaking in cold water for 5 to 10 minutes is recommended. Squeeze out excess water before using.

People dry and powder these berries for use as an herbal medicine or culinary spice. Sumac is rich in a variety of nutrients and antioxidant compounds. Early research suggests it may be beneficial for blood sugar control and relief of exercise-induced muscle pain.

Sumac is a tangy and slightly sour spice that is used in many Turkish dishes, including salads and kebabs. It has a reddish-purple color and a tart flavor that is reminiscent of lemon juice.

Sure, you can totally put raw onions in a salad without cooking them. Raw onions give a strong and tangy taste to salads, making them more interesting.

You can get rid of the strong taste by soaking sliced onions in ice water for 20 to 30 minutes or by sprinkling them with an acid such as vinegar. Onions soaked in ice water will get very crisp while those sprinkled with vinegar will soften a bit, but they will lose the strong taste and become sweeter.

Sweet onions get their own category. Vidalia onions are a particularly mild yellow onion grown around Vidalia, Georgia. Crunchy and sweet, they're excellent served raw in salads and salsas. Walla Walla sweet onions are another brand of sweet onions, grown in Walla Walla, Washington.

To soften the taste of raw onions, slice them thinly or cut them into larger chunks and soak them in very cold water for about 15 minutes. This will soften the taste, making them ideally suited for a salad.

A: To reduce the pungency, sharpness or aftertaste of a raw onion, cut them the way you plan to use them and place into a bowl of ice water to stand for 1 1/2 hours before draining. If time is at a premium, place onions in a strainer or sieve. Run water through onions for at least a minute.

Why put sliced onions in water? ›

All you need to do is give the sliced onions a good soak in a bowl of water before serving them. This one simple step tames the bite of the raw onions and mellows out their flavor.

That's because onions act as a natural deodorizer, meaning they can basically absorb smells, unpleasant and otherwise. This can be especially useful if you've got a bathroom without a window or air vent.

Sumac has a fruity flavor almost like lemon. The sourness can balance the acidity of a dish.

The flavor of sumac can be likened to the tang of fresh-squeezed lemon juice; it's tart and sharp, but also contains a hint of sweetness, along with lingering floral notes. “It's a subtle tang with some fruitiness that you wouldn't get from lemon juice,” says food blogger Amina Al-Saigh. “I also love its pink color.

Dried thyme and oregano make great ground sumac substitutes as they both have a similar earthy flavor profile. For a more intense flavor, you could also opt for marjoram or sesame seeds. For an even more intense flavor, you could add cumin powder or ground coriander to your mix.

Given its tart, acidic flavor, sumac is best substituted with lemon zest, lemon pepper seasoning, lemon juice, or vinegar. However, each of these substitutes has a more overpoweringly sour taste than sumac and should therefore be used sparingly as a replacement for the spice.