Black Onion: Nutritional and Health Benefits

Black onion is a product that has a multitude of beneficial properties for the body. In this article, we'll tell you what they are so that you can start including them in your cooking!

Written and verified by the nutritionist Saúl Sánchez Arias.

Last update: 27 May, 2022

To create a black onion, specialists transformed a common onion into a brown product with a toffee-like taste. This process uses drying chambers with specific temperatures and humidity. It also removes the spiciness of the original onion and its strong smell.

In fact, the product gains a caramel scent which makes it a lot more attractive to the person eating it. The common onion’s compounds change thanks to this process.

These compounds become more bioavailable, with a better absorption rate. There’s also an increase in the positive effects the onion has on our health. Black onions contain 21 amino acids, some of which have analgesic properties. Additionally, the black onion has a large number of antioxidants like flavonoids, which help improve our cardiovascular function.

Black onion: an innovative product

Specialists first created this food in 2016; it doesn’t grow naturally. It’s categorized as a gourmet product and, if you decide to try it, you should choose the more ecological varieties to avoid artificial additives.

You can use them in your cooking as an ingredient, taking advantage of their sweetness, color, and scent. But you can also eat them alone, given that their taste is nothing like the white onion!

Black onion: rich in minerals and vitamins

This product contains a lot of minerals like calcium, magnesium, copper, iron, phosphorus, and potassium. It also contains vitamins from groups A, B, C, and E. It’s important to remember that vitamin C has demonstrated  its ability to strengthen the immune system, which helps us fight off transmissible respiratory illnesses.

Likewise, there’s also sufficient evidence confirming that consuming calcium helps to reduce the risk of osteoporosis in adults. This illness is more common in women. It increases the possibility of suffering a bone fracture, which can affect the individual’s quality of life.

For those reasons, black onions are a product that has similar characteristics to black garlic when it comes to micronutrients. However, the uses of the black onion are a lot more versatile, which is definitely an added bonus.

The importance of consuming antioxidants

Antioxidants are the charged substances that prevent DNA from deteriorating and helps to fight against the creation of free radicals, according to a study published in Food and Chemical Toxicology. It’s important to ensure you eat them daily to combat aging and guarantee your body works properly.

The black onion acts as a huge source of antioxidants, better than many fruits and vegetables individually. As such, habitually including black onions in your diet, along with others that are rich in these compounds like cranberries, notably improves the quality of your diet.

Interesting foods to pair with spices

On a gastronomical level, it could become popular to pair the black onion with different kinds of spices  in order to improve the scents, tastes, and quality of the dishes. Furthermore, spices are usually rich in antioxidizing compounds, which strengthen the beneficial effects of the onion.

The possible combinations of this product still haven’t been excessively explored given that this is a recent creation. However, it won’t take long for specialists to find the combination of ingredients that enrich dishes from an organoleptic and nutritional point of view.

Not all that glitters is gold

Despite the encouraging characteristics of this product, it’s clear that they’re still not readily available in supermarkets. They’re also more expensive than the traditional product and the varieties offered aren’t always ecological.

Normally, you can find black onions in gourmet or super-specialized stores. From there, you can make many recipes with this ingredient, like pizza dough.

The black onion, an uncommon product

Specialists only recently created the black onion but luckily it fits a gastronomic niche thanks to its interesting organoleptic properties. It’s also a more interesting food than the original if you consider its nutritional quality.

It provides a huge amount of the necessary vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants that our bodies need to work properly. You also have the option to eat it cooked or raw, improving the versatility of this product.

Currently, this product hasn’t become a common item you could find in someone’s pantry, given its reduced ability. However, specialists hope that in the next few years it’ll become part of the gastronomic world of our country with enthusiasm!