Freeze Chopped Onions

You can freeze onions, chopped, then keep them in your freezer and pull out just a handful on demand.  If you just buy one onion when you need it that’s an expensive way to buy onions, but if you buy a bag of them, then they’ll sprout and go off before you’ve used them – so freezing onions, chopped and ready to use, makes sense.

A 1Kg bag of onions can be bought for about £0.50 most of the time, somewhere – often supermarkets will have a deal on.  A bag this size would probably contain 6-7 onions in total.

To freeze onions, it’s easy, there’s no blanching or fiddling about at all.  You can do this with any onions – the photos show red onions, but white ones are identical to freeze.

Method: 

1. Chop the top and bottom off the onion.
2. Remove the outer/dry skin of the onion, you can remove the next layer too if it doesn’t look appealing to you.
3. Cut or slice or chop what’s left into the sizes/shapes you want.
4. Slide the onion pieces into a freezer bag, flatten it down, seal the bag with a clip.
5. Lay the bag flat in the freezer, the onion will probably take just one hour to freeze.

Using Frozen Onion:

Just take out the amount you need – and either defrost it in the fridge, or drop it straight into the dish you’re cooking.  Apart from the fact the onions are frozen, you can use them exactly the same as if they were fresh/raw.  Use them in quiches, stews, casseroles, chow mein, stir fries – they might lose a little of their “bite” once defrosted, so be careful how you use them in sandwiches, but they’ll probably be just fine for most people to not notice.

Tips: 

Freeze the onions flat so they take up barely any room in the freezer – and it makes it easier to take out just what you need later, as they won’t be frozen into one football sized lump.

If you use a flexible chopping mat to chop the onions up, you can grab the sides of that to create a funnel, enabling you to slide the onions straight into the bag.  If you lay the freezer bag back onto the chopping mat to flatten out the onion, you can then put the bag and the chopping mat in the freezer until the onions are frozen, then remove the mat.

Compare Bought Frozen Onion to Freezing Your Own:

There’s no difference in product, whether you’ve bought frozen onions or made your own – there is a cost difference.

Cheap/frozen onions will cost you about £1 for 500 grams, whereas to chop up your own onions will give you about 750 grams (after you’ve thrown away the skins/tops/roots) for about £0.50.  Shop bought is £2/Kg, home made is about 1/6th of that.  Prices do vary, so it’s tricky to nail any saving, but freezing onions yourself is cheaper.