Onions can be more than just another ingredient in the culinary chorus—especially if you’ve got grass-fed, grilled meat on the agenda. This month’s innovative Featured Chef, Dirk Flanigan, suggests promoting them to side dish, with an onion purée. Simple to prepare, the delicious end result “combines earthy sweetness with a rich onion flavor.”
Recipe: ONION PURÉE
Serves 10 (approximately 3 oz portions)
Ingredients
- 2 lb. Spanish (or sweeter) onions
- 2 c. heavy cream
- ½ lb. unsalted butter
- Salt and cracked pepper, to taste
Method
Roast whole onions at 350˚F for 2 hours. Pierce with cooking needle to test for doneness; needle should be able to be inserted through onions with no resistance. Let cool.
Heat cream to simmer and soften butter. In a vita-prep blender, combine with onions, butter and cream, and sprinkle lightly with pepper. Blend until consistency resembles a thin mashed potato. Serve warm.
Easy to Customize
Offering the consistency of thin mashed potatoes, a basic onion purée will work well with goat, lamb or beef. Savory on its own, the beauty of the recipe is that its many variations can harmonize easily with even the most complex of red meat dishes.
One variation that worked particularly well for Chef Dirk was the honey-truffle onion purée he paired with his crowd-drawing "goatchetta," at the 2012 StarChefs Tattoos, Booze and BBQ event in New York City. This dish was a riff on porchetta, made with Australian Goat. An Australian Goat loin and belly were stuffed with de-nuded hindquarter meat and seasoned with flavors of BBQ. Pressed and braised forequarter meat (goat neck and shoulder) was also added to the loin, with Activa RM used as a binding agent. The loin was cooked sous vide with smoked chiles, shallots and paprika, then finished on the grill.
The honey-truffle onion purée variation proved a perfect foil for the smoky, savory, and BBQ-sweet character of the goatchetta. To prepare this variation, Chef Dirk added a pound of honey truffles to the softened butter-cream mix, before blending. Radish cress salad and BBQ vinaigrette rounded out the dish.
For Sipping
Serving tender-grilled meat and a smoky onion purée? Chef Dirk suggests pairing the dish with a ripe, round, food-friendly Italian red wine, like Montepulciano d’Abruzzo or Valpolicella (Buglioni is a favorite producer). Or, serve diners a dry, fruit-forward sparkling rosé. Bugey, from the Jura region of eastern France, is one of his go-to wines. Like the Italian reds, it will mesh well with the savory, earthy flavors of the meat and onion purée.