You’re cooking with one onion. You should be cooking with four

I thought my three-onion chicken salad was a triumph. Red onions for their bite, scallions for their grassy brightness, pickled onions for a puckery jolt of acid. It had crunch, it had sharpness, it had depth. But then, almost as an afterthought, I added fried shallots. And suddenly, the whole thing clicked.

This shouldn’t have been a surprise.

Onions — and their extended allium family, which includes garlic, leeks, shallots, chives and scallions—are nature’s greatest flavor amplifiers. They contain sulfur compounds that make them pungent when raw, mellow when cooked and addictively complex when layered. They are fundamental to cuisines around the world, as essential as salt or heat or acid. And crucially, they are not meant to work alone.

One onion is good. Two onions are better. But the real magic happens when you embrace the full allium spectrum.

Take French onion soup. A dish of such pure, indulgent comfort that it barely registers as sophisticated, yet a classic example of allium layering at its most intuitive. Matty Matheson’s version, a gold standard of its kind, calls for six different types of onions — red, yellow, Vidalia, shallots, cipollini, and red pearl — each bringing its own balance of sweetness and bite.

“These are different sweetnesses, different bitters,” Matheson explains in a Munchies video from VICE. “They actually all taste different.” The first batch of onions cooks down for hours, collapsing into deep caramelization. But then, just before the broth is added, he stirs in the cipollini and red pearl, letting them barely soften, retaining a whisper of rawness. “What that’s going to do is just give us another flavor profile because right now we only have that caramelized, deep flavor, which is amazing, but I really love that taste of kind of,” he pauses to raise his eyebrows, almost conspiratorial, “Raw onion.”

He’s right. Raw onion has a place. But as he demonstrates, layering alliums is not just about piling on the sharpest, most eye-watering elements and calling it complexity. It’s about contrast. About knowing when an allium should sing and when it should hum in the background, when it should melt into silk and when it should shatter between your teeth.

Samin Nosrat breaks down onion transformation in "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat": “The longer you cook onions, the deeper their flavor will be. But you don’t need to caramelize every onion you cook.” She explains how onions develop different flavors at different stages—from blond, where they’re softened and translucent (ideal for maintaining a light-colored dish, like her Sweet Corn Soup), to deeply caramelized, where they become jammy and rich. Even a single onion shifts dramatically depending on preparation. 

But then, you start adding different onions and things truly get kaleidoscopic.

Pickling is one of the simplest ways to bend an onion’s aggression to your will. A quick brine — vinegar, water, salt, sugar — transforms a raw slice into something crisp, electric and bracing, a perfect foil for richness. “Here’s a match made in modern food heaven,” Chris Shepherd writes in "Cook Like a Local," describing his Coca-Cola Pickled Red Onions. “Coca-Cola, one of the most exported American food products in existence and soy sauce, one of the most exported Asian food products in existence, find love in a pickle recipe.”

He continues: “Here is my super complicated thought process for this dish: pickle brines require salt, sugar, and vinegar.” Soy sauce equals salt, Coca-Cola swaps in for sugar. “But why is this combo better than using salt and sugar in their basic forms? Both soy sauce and Coca-Cola represent deeper, more complex (and, for soy sauce, umami-rich) versions of their building blocks. Since the main goal with pickles is to preserve while introducing seasoning, these swaps are extra satisfying.”

And then there’s fried onions, which are, simply, joy. They are the textural punctuation mark that so many dishes need, which is why French’s fried onions hold a place of honor in the American holiday kitchen. Thanksgiving, for all its excess, is not a particularly textural meal—pillowy mashed potatoes, velvety gravy, candied yams collapsing under their own syrup. No wonder the green bean casserole needs its crunchy halo.

But the power of fried onions extends far beyond the holidays. Luke Nguyen’s Tilapia Fish Salad, from his cookbook "From China to Vietnam," is a masterclass in allium layering, using both fresh and fried red Asian shallots, as well as fresh and fried garlic. The fried shallots add crispness, while the fresh ones bring bite. As Nguyen notes, fried red Asian shallots and fried onions are both readily available at Asian grocery stores in the United States, but making them at home has an extra benefit: Keeping the fry oil. This is liquid gold that can be used in sauces, dressings and stir-fries to add an extra layer of allium depth.

Which brings me back to my salad. My original three-onion mix had range — sharp, sweet, acidic — but it wasn’t complete. The fried shallots added something else entirely: crisp, savory contrast. Suddenly, it wasn’t just a good salad. It was a salad that had dimension, a salad that demanded another bite.

In cooking, as in life, sometimes the thing you need is another onion.

So here’s my final offering: a chicken salad that takes this lesson to heart. The chicken is marinated in buttermilk, garlic powder, onion powder, cayenne, dill and a splash of the vinegar from the pickled red onions, making it tender and deeply seasoned. The dressing — if you can even call it that — is a luxurious mix of Kewpie mayo, white vinegar, lemon zest, olive oil and more dill. The alliums show up in full force: raw red onion for bite, pickled red onion for tang, scallions for freshness. And because no dish should be without crunch, it’s all topped with a heap of fried shallots. For good measure, there’s a little chopped pimento, chopped pepperoncini, and chopped hot dill pickles stirred in, because balance isn’t just about onions.

You could, of course, make it with just one onion. But why would you?