Onion chutney

Yield: 5 x 400 ml
Prep Time: 45 minutes
Cook Time: 3h 00 min

By Marky 25.8.2015

I first tasted Chutney with my friend Fiorella. She happens to be an expert when it comes to these sauces. When we visited her beautiful attic apartment, she had many Italian dishes and specialties on her table, among them were numerous little jars with sauces - chutney. We had no choice but to try them all, one by one. Until then, I had no idea chutney exists. I learned that marmalades don't only go on a piece of bread.
My taste buds were most appreciative of the onion chutney, so that's the one I decided to learn how to prepare first. It was a great success and I was instantly taken with these home made sauces. I started looking for more recipes for more fruits and vegetables. I started thinking about stocking up for autumn/winter and obviously, I wanted to adapt them to SCD as well.
I approached our foremost farmer, we like to think of her as our Mrs. Tomato, and bought ourselves a healthy amount of tomatoes, for tomato chutney was next on my to do list.
Thus the Italian spicy hot sauce fuocco d'Amore came to be as well as raw chilli pepper pesto. I was glad to hear that my father, a keen sportsman and fisher and a fan of spicy food, likes to make his own pesto using my recipe.

And what is chutney in the first place? Chutney is a sauce prepared from fruit or vegetables and some other ingredients. You can use it with meat, cheese or bread. Taste varies from sweet to spicy or savoury. This time it's onion chutney which is somewhat savoury and in future I will provide recipe for tomato chutney.

You will need a large pot with thick bottom and a long spoon.

Ingredients

sunflower oil - 300 ml
onion - 4 kg
garlic - 20 cloves
honey - 1/2 a jar (700ml)
salt - 3 spoonfuls
pepper
thyme - 20 branches
rosemary - 8 branches
chilli pepper - 3 pods
wine - 200 ml (sweeter kind)
vinegar - 350 ml

Instructions

Prep time: up to 15 minutes
Cooking time: 3 hours, electric cooker
Result: 5 - 6 portions

1. First fine cut the onions into strips. There is going to be a lot of it so I suggest clipping your nose and maybe wear a pair of diving goggles. I also like to take the onions outside to my garden. Prevent wild fire with a drop of wine that I also like to sip here and there. It's a long process so any distraction is helpful 🙂

2. Use electric cooker to warm up oil in a pot (15 liter) and add in the onion. Mix well and occasionally cover the pot with a lid and stew for 50 minutes. If you discover that the onion is getting burnt intensify your stirring, but! keep in mind that the pot will get burnt a bit, it is inevitable.
Don't worry it will not stick and you will be able to scrub it off.
The total time necessary depends on the gear in your kitchen, so the time I am listing here is mostly to give you an idea, based on my kitchen equipment. I am always on standby, watching the pot, every other step is based on what is happening in the pot.

The main rule is "Keep stirring so the onion doesn't get burnt."

3. Right after I add the onion I start preparing the garlic. Wash it up, cut to slices or even smaller pieces and add it to the garlic.

4. After about 50 minutes, when the onion shrinks its volume by about half, lower the heat, add salt, pepper, fresh thyme and rosemary - cut with herb cutter (no branches, only leaves), add honey, which thins out the mix, and again stir occasionally and let it caramelize.
This will take roughly 1 hour.

5. Then pour in the wine and vinegar, add slices of chilli pepper, lower the heat by another degree and cook for another hour. Low heat, slow and steady, stir more frequently, I don't go anywhere far and keep watching over the pot.
At the end of the cooking process, I remove the superfluous oil from the pot, roughly 2 full ladles, personally I don't want it in my chutney.

Finished hot chutney is put into jars immediately, store it bottoms up and let it cool down. If you do that, you don't need to sterilize.