I love growing onions, a homegrown onion is a lot fresher than store bought ones. Once cured, onions can last quite a while in a dark, cool pantry. I use onions quite a bit in cooking and as fresh, but I often find some will begin to sprout or rot before I can get to using them.
I hadn’t thought about freezing onions before, but as it turns it out, it’s super easy! If you find a good sale on them in the grocery, stock up.
While you won’t want to use frozen onions like fresh, they’re perfect for using in soups and sautéing for other dishes like casseroles and taco filling. Prepping them now means you don’t have to cut them up later, which is especially good when you want to fix dinner quickly.
Most vegetables need blanching before freezing, but onions don’t. Blanching stops the enzymes in the food that makes the food begin decomposing. Blanching also helps retain color and vitamin content of the food. While blanching isn’t hard, it can take some time, so I’m happy to skip this step. However, if you want to freeze whole onions, they will need to be blanched. I’m not sure how practical whole frozen onions are though.
Keep the tissues handy if you’ll be cutting up a lot of onions at once. Refrigerating them for a half hour beforehand will help.
Freezing Onions Yourself Is Economical
With the onions I bought on special, I calculated I saved 75% ($3 vs $12) by chopping the onions myself instead of buying frozen onions already in a bag.
Even a bag of onions at regular price could save you half the cost of buying frozen ones.
How to Dice Onion
How to Freeze Onions
- Simply peel and dice the onions and put into a freezer bag.
- I like to use quart size freezer bags with 2 cups of onion per bag. One average size onion makes 1 cup diced.
- Lay the bag flat and spread out the onions into a thin single layer and press all the air out.
- Lay the bag flat in the freezer. This way, pieces of frozen onions can be broken off as needed, instead of having to use the whole thing as a solid mass.
- When you’re ready to use, just run cool water over the onions in a colander to thaw.
- They will last up to a year in the freezer.
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