Fabulous Food Art: How to Make Baked Onion Flowers

Let’s be honest, onion rings are delicious – those sweet, salty, crispy fried rings are the perfect accompaniment to pretty much anything, in my opinion. These bulbs contain a great number of vitamins and minerals, but we sort of counteract that when we dunk them in floury batter and saturate them in oil. I wanted to find another interesting way to get my onion fix that both embraced the health benefits and still looked exciting to serve, and I found exactly what I was looking for! Enter: the onion flower. It’s really easy to make, tastes great, and it’s a real showstopper on the table!

Video instructions:

All you need is:

• 4 red onions
• 3 tablespoons oil
• 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
• Salt and pepper

Peel all your onions and slice off the root parts so that you can set them flat and reduce any risk of knife injuries – especially if your vision is going to get blurry from tearing up. Slice the onion in half, but not all the way through, stop when you’re about ½ an inch from the bottom. Then cut in half the other way so that it’s quartered, and then cut each of those in half again so that you now have eight segments but everything is still held together at the bottom.

Once you’ve done this to all your onions, put them in bowl, pour over the oil and vinegar and stir them up a bit to make sure that they all get properly coated. Place them in your baking dish (sliced side up, and spread them out so that they have room to bloom), pour over the rest of the liquid, sprinkle salt and pepper, and cover with tin foil. Then pop those babies in the oven at 425°F (about 220°C) and let them bake for 25 to 30 minutes.  Take off the foil to reveal the gorgeous opened flowers, and then give them another 10 minutes in the oven, uncovered.

It’s actually not all that hard to make your food look interesting – you can make cute marshmallow flowers, too, and even dress up your kids’ plates to get them to eat their veggies; sometimes it’s all about the delivery.

That’s all there is to it! Serve and wow your guests with some tasty food art!