Green Onion Powder, Take 2

A while back, we wrote about our green onion powder, which turned out to be a great way to preserve green onions when we had too many to use up fresh.  Earlier this summer, we found ourselves in a similar situation with some overwintered onions that suddenly bolted.  And, as with everything else around here, the process is constantly evolving.  So, here's another couple ways to make green onion powder.

Onion stalk overload!  Ahh!

Cleaned and chopped, they look much less intimidating.  We mentioned that our makeshift solar wax melter only reached about 155 °F, which wasn't very good for melting wax, but is just right for drying food.  We're still working on making dehydrator trays to fit our Langstroth boxes, but the regular dehydrator trays stacked inside give a visual approximation.  Not shown in this picture, but also dried in this batch were some chopped garlic scapes and dandelion roots.

A few weeks later, they're nice and dry.  They probably didn't need so much time, but we got busy with other stuff and had to let them go that long.  The onions probably would have been good for grinding straight from the dehydrator, but we had the unfortunate scheduling demand of taking them out first thing in the morning, when it was cool and damp.  So, in the oven they went at 150 °F for an hour to re-crisp them up.

For the grinding, we turned to the grain mill, which we've now used on eggshells, sugar, sea salt, and green onion powder (also garlic scape powder and dandelion root powder), but not yet grain.  As with the other substrates, it makes a nice, fine green onion powder.  It works really well on the garlic scapes and the dandelion roots, but the chunks of onion we had were a little too large and flimsy (even when crunchy) to really feed into the grinder well.

So, after a while, we turned to the blender (a food processor or spice grinder would also work here).  It doesn't get everything chopped up perfectly, but for many applications (like soups or casseroles, for example), the larger chunks would be fine.

We sieved out the big chunks anyway to get some fraction of fines that make a good powder, and the rest we saved for cooking when the size doesn't matter.

Just for comparison, on the lower left is the grain mill powder, on the upper left is the fines from the blender, and on the right is the coarse fraction from the blender.  All perfectly useful in their own right, and all filled with that excellent green onion flavor.

How do you make green onion powder? (Or regular onion powder.  Or other powdered garden things.)