Onions have been a bizarre centre of attention since last Friday when Tony Abbott surprised onlookers and indeed the world by biting into a raw onion (with the skin on) during a visit to a farm in Tasmania.
The reaction of most of the internet was to ask: what the hell was the prime minister doing eating an onion like it was an apple?
But then the story took an unexpected twist when Guardian science blogger Dean Burnett claimed that science backed Abbott on the onion front.
He said apples could indeed taste like onions (provided your other senses were switched off – for example if you were blindfolded and had your nose blocked).
This important story might have died there, but on Wednesday Onions Australia – the official body of Australian onion growers – delivered a basket of onions to the prime minister at Parliament House in Canberra, thanking him for what they considered to be millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity.
Later on Wednesday, Guardian Australia decided to construct a rigorous scientific test to find out if onions really did taste like apples, and if actually the prime minister had a point.
First off, we tried the Abbott way – biting straight into an onion with its skin on. At this stage I found them easy to tell apart: the onion skin gave it away.
But as for the taste, actually it’s curiously difficult to tell apart – both are sweet, crunchy and juicy. The onion packs heat in the aftertaste, though, which is a dead giveaway. The texture of the two was incredibly similar however.
My colleague Ben Doherty also took part in the test. After biting into an apple and an onion, he said: “Apples and onions, somewhat predictably now with the benefit of hindsight, taste very different. They also have vastly different textures: onions break up into their little layers, apples just crunch.”
In the second part of the test, we tried eating small, peeled pieces of onion and apple, popped straight into the mouth by an assistant.
That made it much more difficult to tell apart. If it wasn’t for the heat of the aftertaste, it could be difficult to tell the two apart. So I would say yes, onions could perhaps taste like apples, but only if you had an exceedingly poor sense of taste to begin with.
Doherty had something to add to this: “I will say this: raw apple mixed with raw onion mixed with raw apple and people shoving small pieces of food into my mouth with their fingers makes one ill. Lesson learned.”
So will we be replacing apples with onions in our fruit bowl anytime soon? Considering the nuclear-aftermath-sized radius of space our colleagues are giving us right now: no.
