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Underused shallots

  • rosemary
  • 2 hours ago
  • 4 min read

"Use shallots raw in a salad and they will sing harmoniously with your other veg; use onions when making a stew. Shallots when you require finesse, onions when you need weight." Palisa Anderson/The Guardian


It's lucky dip time, and this time David picked out a book of excerpts of Beverley Sutherland Smith's columns in The Age which dates back to 1982. So I did my usual thing and picked Chicken Without the Tandoor. Now I was aware that I had written about tandoori chicken before but still thought I might be able to rake up something new. And so I began 'researching' and much to my amazement there was one of my articles - Cheating with tandoori chicken. Amazed because generally speaking you can never find my articles. Well why would you when it's a website with a readership below 20! Anyway I read it and realised I had done it all before, so I broke my rule and chose another page.


This time it was Shallots: a specific onion, which was a bit more promising - although as I later found it was unlikely that I would find any of her three recipes on the net - Shallot butter, Red wine sauce with shallots and Shallot mayonnaise. All sufficiently self-explanatory really not to bother.


However, her introductory paragraphs did show how times have changed - a bit. 'It is not easy to buy' she says, which is no longer true - you can get them in both of the major supermarkets, next to the garlic and ginger. Not the larger banana shallots though, or the smaller round ones. Still - it's progress. Her other major comment about them: "there are misconceptions about what a shallot is - cooks (and even some food writers) often substitute spring onions." is probably true however.


As well as actual raw shallots, you can now also buy packets of crispy shallots - used a lot by the South-East Asians and Chinese, but you can, of course, make your own - just slice them very thinly and deep fry in very hot oil. Anna Jones recommends rapeseed oil - which is what I think we call canola here. Not quite - I just looked it up - canola is a kind of rapeseed but not quite the same as that used in rapeseed oil. Would a non gourmet like me know the difference? And I'm guessing the South-East Asians would use peanut oil anyway.


One of my very favourite - and special - dishes that use shallots - no - one of my very special dishes full stop - is Delia Smith's Chicken with sherry vinegar and tarragon sauce which I discovered many years ago now. It's one of those wow dishes, but it's not a very regular dish because of the quantity of sherry and sherry vinegar it uses. It's for special dinners. There's tarragon in there as well - and lots of whole shallots. It's just wonderful.


So inspired by the deliciousness of that dish I sought to find others that might be just as good, from the net and also from my cookbooks.


I have several of Beverley Sutherland Smith's books but didn't discover anything there really - not even in her more recent and pretty comprehensive vegetable book - The Seasonal Kitchen.


So first I turned to The Guardian and then I just wandered. This is what I found.

A couple of salads first - Herby, crispy rice, shallot and lemongrass salad - Georgina Hayden/The Guardian and then one which is not online alas from Greg Malouf - Turkish bread and roasted vegetable salad, from his book New Feast. It's a kind of fattoush with subtle Malouf touches. You roast shallots, garlic and capsicums, peel and slice the shallots and capsicum. Add fried zucchini, fry bread in the fat, and add a Turkish red pepper paste. Take out the bread, add the garlic and capers then sherry vinegar and lemon juice, bubble, pour over vegetables, mix, add the bread with basil and lettuce and it's done. It looks delicious.



Then there are two tarts - one example of the Tarte Tatin approach - there are many - Shallot and wholegrain mustard tarte tatin - Joe Woodhouse/The Guardian and Agrodolce shallot tarts with thyme and balsamic vinegar - Sylvia Colloca/delicious. Lots of those too, with thyme being a favourite herb to use.



Then there is Nigel and also Nik Sharma who concentrate on bringing out the flavour of the shallots - Sausages, shallots and grapes - Nigel Slater; Roast shallots, couscous and lemon - Nigel and Saffron lemon confit with alliums and tomatoes - Nik Sharma



As I searched for variations I found a lot of caramelisation going on as well as ingredients that popped up frequently - thyme, sherry, lemon and mushrooms.


And so to the inevitable pasta - Saffron pasta with chipotle shallots and pickled chillies - Ottolenghi and Shallot and spicy mushroom pasta - Nik Sharma/Pure Wow. In his book Veg-table he admits that this was the first pasta recipe that he had published, but added:


“There are some cooking aro­mas I dream about, and the scent of caramelized shallots is one of them. Once caramelized, they declare their savory sweetness proudly, a perfect accompaniment to the mushrooms. There’s a tip that I’ve borrowed from Indian biryanis: Use plenty—and I do mean plenty."




Finally there is Jamie, who sort of does Beverley Sutherland Smith's red wine sauce with his sumptuous looking Beef brisket with red wine and shallots. Which is perhaps the best way to end.


I guess I have not added much to your knowledge of shallots with this post, but I do hope that at least one of the above dishes might tempt you to make use of them. I used to think of them as an expensive luxury but with capsicum at something like $9.00 a kilo, I no longer do. They cost a lot per kilo but they don't weigh much. I always have two or three available because they are indeed just a little bit more refined than the everyday onion.


YEARS GONE BY

May 4

2020 - Deleted

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