Onion

Onions are a kitchen staple used as a flavour base in nearly every cuisine. Raw, they add sharp bite to salads and sandwiches; cooked low and slow, they turn sweet and silky, forming the backbone of soups, curries, stews, and sauces. Brown onions are the everyday workhorse in Australian cooking, while red onions are favoured raw for their milder heat and white onions appear in Mexican and Asian dishes.

Beyond the common brown, red, and white varieties, this category includes spring onions, shallots (sometimes called eschalots in Australia), and pickling onions. Each has a slightly different intensity and sweetness, but all share the characteristic layered structure and volatile compounds that make your eyes water when cutting.

Onions are grown across Australia, with major production in Tasmania, South Australia, and Queensland, ensuring year-round domestic supply.

Farmed
photograph to come — from twenty years of markets, farms and kitchens

How it's made

Onions are grown from seed or small bulb sets planted into well-drained soil. The bulbs develop underground over several months, swelling as the leaves above gather sunlight. Once the tops begin to fall over and dry, the onions are lifted from the ground, field-cured in the sun for a week or two to toughen the outer skin, then trimmed, sorted by size, and packed for sale.

Nutrition (per 100g)

Energy 40kcal
Protein 1.1g
Carbs 7.6g
Fat 0.1g
Fibre 1.7g Sugar 4.2g
Mass Distribution

1 large is about 150 g — roughly 60 kcal of this.

What it costs the planet (per kilo)

Carbon ≈0.5kg
Freshwater ≈14L
Land ≈0.4m²

≈ Estimated — worked out from a category-typical value further up its supply chain. Where this comes from →

Where it comes from

Made from
Onion, bulb

In the kitchen

Used as

aromatic cooking base

Goes well with
garlic tomato carrot ginger pepper
Classic dishes
  • French onion soup
  • Biryani
  • Bolognese
  • Caramelised onion tart

Keeping it

Keep it: in a cool dark pantry, away from potatoes.

Advice from Cubud’s own keeping notes — how to keep it, not a measured number.

Keeping one at home? Track yours in your cubud →

Where this data comes from

Nutrition data from

USDA

How it was calculated

SR Legacy

Full credits, licences, and methods: the sources page →

Where to next

made fromOnion, bulb goes well withgarlic goes well withtomato goes well withcarrot goes well withginger goes well withpepper shares a sourceCulinary Bases shares a sourceProcessed Onion
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