5-Ingredient Crispy, Sweet, and Tangy Pickled Red Onions

Meet your new favorite keto condiment! These 5-Ingredient Crispy, Sweet, and Tangy Pickled Red Onions make an ultimate accompaniment with any meat or hearty keto food. Stunningly bright pink in color, they lend sweet and tangy flavor and crispy texture, balancing the heartiness of the high-fat keto food. Naturally, this condiment is super healthy, so feel free to enjoy it as you please!

How to make these 5-Ingredient Crispy, Sweet, and Tangy Pickled Red Onions

You need only 5 common (common in the keto kitchen, that is) ingredients for preparing this super tasty condiment. Well, everybody can access clean water (at least they should!), apple cider vinegar is nowadays pretty common, and red onions — the main ingredient — are known everywhere. Salt is the fourth ingredient that is certainly a staple and in everyday use. I recommend natural salt like unrefined sea salt or Himalayan salt for the best taste and health benefits.

The fifth ingredient, natural non-caloric sweetener, is certainly not that well known in the regular high-carb kitchen, where sugar is used to sweeten everything from your breakfasts to dinners and condiments to sauces and seasonings. In a keto kitchen, a natural, non-caloric sweetener has its place. This recipe uses allulose or erythritol, but be sure to check the Tips for Variations section at the end of this post for other sweetener ideas.

Even though this keto condiment is easy to make, you should reserve some time for letting the marinade cool before adding it to the onions to guarantee the crispy result, and, on the other hand, to let the onions marinate overnight to guarantee the fabulous flavor.

So, that’s it, let’s take a closer look at how to make this incredibly flavorful — and super-healthy — condiment:

First, prepare the marinade: in a small saucepan, combine 1 cup (240 ml) raw apple cider vinegar (ACV)…

…1/3 cup (80 ml) preferably filtered water or spring water…

…1/3 cup (80 ml) allulose or powdered erythritol…

…and 1 teaspoon natural salt like unrefined sea salt or Himalayan salt.

Heat over high heat, all the time mixing…

…until the mixture is boiling.

Remove from the heat and let cool to room temperature.

Then refrigerate until ice-cold.

Once the marinade is cold, take 3 small or 2 medium red onions.

Peel them…

…and slice them thinly.

Place the sliced onions in a mason jar. This one is a tad too large; I bet a 16-oz (450 ml) mason jar would suffice.

Pour the cold marinade over the onion slices.

Close with a lid. Shake the jar gently to help all the onion get coated with the marinade.

Place the jar in the fridge. Let the onions marinate overnight, or at least for a few hours. The color will turn stunningly pink while marinating!

Use with keto tortillas, tacos, sandwiches, hamburgers, salads, omelets, breakfast casseroles, steaks, etc. So totally yum! And the color is just spectacular!

How I came up with this easy keto condiment recipe

I’ve had the idea for sweet, crispy, and tangy pickled red onions on my to-do list for a couple of years. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I bought some red onions to experiment with my recipe idea.

Well, I was about to develop and post this pickled red onion recipe last week, but since the blackcurrants in my yard were about to get overripe, I decided to do a Keto Blackcurrant Parfait recipe instead.

So, finally, this week, I decided to muse on my idea of keto-friendly sweet, tangy, and crispy red onions. I decided to make a marinade and add thinly sliced red onions to the marinade to let the onion soak all the sweetness and tanginess from the marinade.

For the marinade, I needed apple cider vinegar to lend the tang, sweetener to provide the sweet flavor, and salt to balance the sweetness and tanginess.

For sweetener, I decided to opt for allulose. As I told in my last week’s post, I cannot access allulose that easily here in Finland, so I order mine from the US. I certainly would use it more often if I could access it. I thought this recipe was so special that I would use allulose as I don’t need to use that much sweetener anyway.

I know many people adore really tangy flavors and use vinegar — especially apple-cider vinegar — liberally. Even though I do like tangy flavors in condiments, I was afraid my pickled red onions would turn out too pungent if I used ACV as the only liquid in the marinade. Therefore, I thought adding some water might make the flavor mellower and more palatable.

And last but not least, as I wanted to have my onions crispy, I decided to add them to a cold marinade. If you are at least a somewhat experienced chef, you know that cold makes veggies crispy. Often, when marinating vegetables, you add them to a hot marinade rather than to a cold one. That, however, removes the natural crispiness of the veggies and makes them unpalatably limp.

Therefore, I wanted to cook the marinade first, let it cool in the fridge until cold, and finally add the onions to keep them crispy and crunchy.

After estimating and counting the measures, I was ready to conduct my first experiment.

I was totally thrilled at how delicious the red onions turned out. The tanginess was just perfect for my mouth, thanks to the right ratio of ACV and water. The onions were mouth-wateringly crispy — just what I had been hoping for! The saltiness was also perfect, however, the onions could have been slightly sweeter. Therefore, I increased the sweetness to this final recipe.

The most astonished I was about the bright pink color of the onions and especially the marinade. It was pink to the extent of looking artificial, but luckily, these ingredients are the most natural and do only good for you!

Here’s the recipe for you to enjoy:

Continue to Content

5-Ingredient Crispy, Sweet, and Tangy Pickled Red Onions

Yield: 16 servings

Prep Time: 2 hours

Cook Time: 5 minutes

Additional Time: 6 hours

Total Time: 8 hours 5 minutes

Meet your new favorite keto condiment! These 5-Ingredient Crispy, Sweet, and Tangy Pickled Red Onions make an ultimate accompaniment with any meat or hearty keto food. Stunningly bright pink in color, they lend sweet and tangy flavor and crispy texture, balancing the heartiness of the high-fat keto food. Naturally, this condiment is super healthy, so feel free to enjoy it as you please!

Print

Ingredients

• 1 cup = 240 ml raw apple cider vinegar
• 1/3 cup = 80 ml water
• 1/3 cup = 80 ml allulose or powdered erythritol
• 1 teaspoon unrefined sea salt or Himalayan salt
• 3 small or 2 medium red onions

Instructions

1. Prepare the marinade first: Combine vinegar, water, sweetener, and the salt in a small saucepan.
2. Heat over high heat, all the time mixing, until the mixture is boiling.
3. Remove from the heat, let cool to room temperature and then refrigerate until ice-cold.
4. Once the marinade is cold, peel the onions and slice them thinly.
5. Place the sliced onions in a mason jar.
6. Pour the cold marinade over the onion slices.
7. Close with a lid. Shake the jar gently to help all the onion get coated with the marinade.
8. Place the jar in the fridge. Let the onions marinate overnight, or at least for a few hours.
9. Use with keto tortillas, tacos, sandwiches, hamburgers, salads, omelets, breakfast casseroles, steaks, etc.
10. The pickled red onions can be stored about one week in the fridge.

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Tips for variations

Even this plain recipe is perfect as is, there are ways to get more variation to it. Here are some suggestions:

• Need more heat? Then add sliced raw chili peppers or red pepper flakes with the onion.
• Want to add other spices and seasonings? Add 1 teaspoon of whole black peppers or white peppers. Rose pepper adds to the beautiful pink color and lends fabulous taste.
• Want something really special? Add whole cloves or allspice to the marinade. They taste exciting!
• Fancy citrus flavors? Replace 1/4 cup (60 ml) of the vinegar with freshly squeezed lemon juice from organic lemons.
• Fancy even more versatile citrus flavors? Add peels (only the colorful part) of an organic lemon, orange, or lime to the marinade. Cook the peel with the other ingredients.
• Don’t want to use allulose or erythritol? In that case, use stevia or monk fruit to taste.
• Don’t use sweeteners at all? Then omit the sweetener! The taste is still fabulously tangy. Actually, you might want to reduce the vinegar and add more water to the marinade as the sweetener balances the tangy flavor, and if you don’t use sweetener, the tanginess is more prominent.
• Love herbs? In that case, add your favorite herbs to the cold marinade together with the red onions to keep the herbs fresh. My favorite herbs for this condiment are parsley, rosemary, and mint. Bay leaf is another fantastic herb that goes well with onions. However, if you use bay leaf, cook it with the marinade so that it releases enough flavor.
• Are you a garlic lover? Add a couple of sliced garlic cloves to the marinade before cooking.

General prattling

This week has been full of cooking and baking, and writing lots of different texts, mainly related to Ketokamu. I’ve also created and edited some videos. For example, I made the first-ever Instagram Reels for Ketokamu! It was a short animation I did with Canva.

We are running 48-hour sales at our Ketokamu online store. Promoting the sales needed some work as well. I created social media posts, stories, and newsletters for our followers. I also took some promotional photos for Ketokamu. We launched a 500-gram bag of our baking mix already a month ago, but we didn’t have proper product photos of it, just mock-ups. So, I took those photos. Here’s one.

Related posts:

Fresh Sugar-Free Cucumber Pickles (Vegan) Rhubarb Chutney (Vegan) Zippy Lemon Cauliflower Rice with Garlic and Toasted Pumpkin Seeds 5-Ingredient Keto Caramelized Red Onions (Skillet Red Onion Jam)