Onion Flowers -- An Easy + Beautiful Recipe (2024)

Onion Flowers are an easy & beautiful side dish option — so pretty when you make them with red onions, and only five ingredients!

Welcome to the July 26th edition of Sunday Scratchups, your weekly recipe from scratch around grocery sales & affordable ingredients. This week’s mystery sale ingredient is: Red onions! In today’s Onion Flowers recipe, I used a couple of lovely red onions for a prettier presentation. This gives you a purple-y, flowering, bloomin’ onion sans all the breading and junk, but Vidalias would also be lovely (and darn tasty) — or, you could mix/match for variety.

I originally saw these onion flowers at Once Upon a Cutting Board (easier to follow recipe at The Project Table) and simply had to give them a try! Aren’t they just gorgeous? And amazingly easy to make, for a side dish with this much of a visual punch. Check it out, because you seriously only need five ingredients (including salt & pepper!) and a bit of oven roasting time to recreate these beautiful onion flowers in your own kitchen.

Onion Flowers

Ingredients

Two large (or four small) red onions
3 Tbsp olive oil
2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
Sea salt, to taste
Fresh ground black pepper, to taste

Directions

Chop just the stem ends off of your onions so that they stand flat. Peel onions, then cut them in eighths — but not all the way through into slices, just down to about 1/2 inch up from the now-flat bottom so that they remain in one piece.

Pour 1 Tbsp of olive oil into the bottom of a glass baking dish. Place onions stem side down in dish, pour the rest of the olive oil + balsamic vinegar over onions, then roll them around gently in the bottom of the dish until nicely coated. Sit onions stem side down in baking dish and season with salt & pepper. Cover dish tightly with foil and bake covered for 30 minutes at 425 degrees.

Remove foil and bake uncovered for another 10 minutes for small onions, 20 minutes for large, or until onions are softening and beginning to open up on their own.

Use a large spatula to gently remove the onions to a plate, then carefully separate the “petals” until they look like a pretty flower.

Serve whole and allow people to section off pieces for individual sides. We enjoyed ours here with Bacon-Wrapped Chicken, salad, and garlic bread, but Onion Flowers are a sweet and delicious side for grilled meat and more.

Not just a pretty face

Onion Flowers are not only lovely on the outside, they are darn tasty on the inside. You’ll likely have leftovers, so use those everywhere from hamburger toppings to veggie paninis to side dishes throughout the week.

I hope you enjoy making these as much as I enjoyed taking photos of them! Onion Flowers are a simple & beautiful vegetarian (and gluten free!) side dish option.

Onion Flowers, printable recipe

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