Green Onion Powder

Last summer, we had quite a few green onions come out of our garden (more than we were interested in making use of while they were fresh), so we dehydrate a bunch.  We cut them into small sections and set them on the trays, but realized that as 'sections,' we weren't using them up very quickly.  The pieces work fine for casseroles, soups, stews, etc., but not so well for seasoning dishes the way we usually do, by sprinkling the seasonings on.  (We're habitual sprinklers.)  Then we realized that one of our favorite seasonings is onion powder (or granulated onion, depending on what your source calls it).  Now, this is going to seem terribly obvious, but couldn't we just grind up the green onion and use it like onion powder?  Turns out we could (and did), and we love sprinkling it on eggs, toast, steaks...basically anything on which we would normally sprinkle regular white-colored onion powder.  Of course, a quick internet search shows we're not the first ones to think of grinding up our green onions, but since we hadn't heard of it before, we wanted to help spread the word.

One of the green onions in our garden was still kind of a runt at the end of the growing season, so we brought it inside to the aquaponic system, where it flourished.  Just this last week, we finally decided it was time to pick the little guy since he was starting to get a flower bud.  Since we were going to turn it into powder, we thought we'd write about it on here in case anyone wanted to try it with their own green onions!

Here's the fresh starting green onion.  It grew surprisingly well in the aquaponic system, although we're  surprised when anything works around here. :-)

Cut it into pieces large enough that they won't fall through the openings in the dehydrator tray, and dry them for a couple days. 

After the dehydrator, we've found that they're pretty dry, but not quite crispy enough to grind right away.  So we put them in a warm oven for a couple hours (like after we take a loaf of bread out and the oven is cooling down).

Put the über-dry pieces in the mortar.  In this case, the whole onion fit at the same time.

Grind it up with the pestle.  It took about 20 seconds to get to this point.  It's hard to see, but some of the onion is a very fine powder and some is still relatively large pieces.

So we normally filter it to collect the fines, and put the big pieces back in the mortar.

Then grind just the big pieces, now that they don't have the little pieces to pad them from the mortar walls.  Bwa ha ha haaa.  We'll get them yet!

Once everything goes through, put the powder in whatever container you're planning to store it in.  If there's a few pieces that still won't go, add them to the leftover Reuben Strata you're about to heat up for supper (or many other kinds of leftovers).  It's interesting that the fresh stuff is a different color than the stuff we made last fall.  We're not sure why--if the other stuff changed color over the last few months, or if the aquaponic onion is actually a different color.  Time will tell!

Have you made green onion powder before?  What's your favorite food to which to add green onion powder?  Tell us about it in the comments section below!