Have you tried an onion boil, the latest TikTok food trend?

Every few months there’s a new viral vegetable trend, and the latest is one that will make your eyes water – perhaps literally. It’s called an onion boil, although there isn’t any actual boiling going on. Many of the videos involve using the air fryer, which is itself an oxymoron because there isn’t any real frying. Back to the “boil”: take a whole onion, add seasoning of your choice and a fat such as butter, and pop it in your air fryer for about half an hour. Then, eat the entire onion as a snack or side dish.

While at first blush you may think it strange to eat a whole onion at once, it isn’t really that unusual. After all, a side of onion rings can’t be far from being an entire onion, and let’s not forget about the Outback’s Bloomin’ Onion, which is another beast altogether. There are a handful of recipes in the EYB Library that have “whole onion(s)” in the title and plenty of others that are onion-centric, such as A salchi-taco hotdog with onions, onions, onions and onions, and American mustard from Max’s World of Sandwiches.

There are dozens of cookbooks that focus on the onion, and no doubt there are whole roasted onion recipes in many of those tomes. Onions Etcetera by Kate Winslow and Guy Ambrosino has Salt-baked sweet onions which throws another twist on this concept. Several versions of Joy of Cooking include recipes for roasted or fire-baked whole onions, showing that there’s nothing new about this viral trend, other than perhaps using an air fryer and the medium by which this dish is being ‘discovered’ by people.