Making the perfect pickled onions

Fiona and Hugh Osborne preserve a lot of their own food and are especially proud of their pickled onions.

When we started growing our own food, we wanted to achieve several things, wonderful flavours, long preserving time and crops that didn't require us to constantly spend money on seeds. If someone is looking for a perfect example of a self-sufficient crop that is wildly underappreciated, it has to be the humble shallot. When we grow shallots, we plant one and get 8 to 10 back. We save the biggest and the best, replant in another bed and the circle repeats. The bulbs that we use keep far longer than any onion variety that we have ever tried. If we harvest in the Autumn and store them cool, dark and dry, they will last well into the following Summer. We find the flavour of shallots is much more mellow than onions and they work brilliantly in stir fries and many oriental dishes.

As many uses as there are for shallots, a really first-rate pickled onion has to rank amongst the best (pickled onions aren't really onions, they're normally shallots). Pickled onions evoke memories of Hugh's longgone grandfather at Christmas who loved a supper of strong cheddar, crackers and homemade pickled onions. For over a quarter of a century we have been growing shallots and making pickled onions and are now really proud of our recipe. We think it makes an incredible pickled onion, crisp, fragrant and full of subtle flavours. Now is the time to make them whether you harvest your own shallots or buy them in the shops. They will be perfect by Christmas.

PREPARING YOUR SHALLOTS.

When we preserve, we tend to preserve a LOT of them, it's simply more time efficient for us, so this recipe calls for 5 kilos of pickled onions. Whilst that may sound a huge amount, they last for several years and indeed improve for keeping! However, if 5 kilos seems a daunting amount it's easy enough to scale the recipe back to make just a kilo.