Pickled Chipollini

Yesterday, I found my favorite vegetable in our neighborhood Javastraat shopping street! Mini Onions, I call them 'Chipollini' because an Onion is 'Chipola' in Italian and simply adding 'lini' means something small.

I saw them the first time in Italy when I was working on an organic farm. Someone roasted them after marinating in Umesu (Japanese pickled plum vinegar) and olive oil for an appertizer. That simple dish changed my whole view of onions. I realised onions could be the main flavour of the dish not just as a hidden addtional ingredient, chopped and melted in soups or sauces! They are so sweet, fruity, flavourful and can melt in your mouth.

I felt like I found a treasure in a hidden courner of a super market when I saw them. They were packed in a mixed  bag of shiny purple and yellow ones, and they were only 98 cents a bag.

I know I have a big hands and hard to tell if they are actually mini or not from this photo, but trust me they were! I've never spent such a long time just pealing onions. They were tiny.

I decided to simply pickle them because I had just had really tasty pickled chipollini at the restaurant De Kas the other day and Rowan had been craving them ever since. Yes, it's just pretty much copying the restaurant, but since I didn't know the receipe and had to guess it, I claim this as my own. 

Pickled Chipollini 

Ingredients

• two hands full of chipollini (mini onions, you can just use cut spring onions too)
• 2   tbs good olive oil
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 300 ml vinegar (I like japanese rice vinegar, tastes a little milder than wine vinegar)
• 150 ml water
• 1 bay leaf / laurier (fresh one is better if you can find it)
• 10 all spice peppercorns (or 1 tbs of mustard seeds)

From the left top:  Sterilizing a jar - boiling pickling juice - blanching chipollini

Method

1. Sterilize a jar
2. Peel chipollini and blanch them for 3 min
3. Combine vinegar, water, salt and all spice and boil
4. put a bay leaf in the sterilized jar, pour in olive oil, drop all the blanched chipollini in, then pour liquid until they are submerged.
5. Close the lid while hot and let it cool, store in a fridge.
6.  It's ready to eat from the next day.

This should last up to 2 weeks in a fridge if you use clean utensils to scoop them out. In our case, I'm more than sure that Rowan's going to finish them up in the next 3 days...He's a pickle monster who can eat a whole jar of pickled cornichons in a day!