WE’RE ALWAYS LOOKING for fun, new ways to enjoy outdoor cooking. Apart from the usual grilling suspects—burgers and dogs and slabs of this or that—we know that many vegetables make excellent candidates for grilling, where the heat and smoke of the grill bring out deeply nuanced flavors and textures. Think planks of zucchini or slices of eggplant (as in our Ultimate Grilled Vegetable Sandwich on page 19). To mix things up, we looked to something slightly unexpected yet altogether familiar: the humble scallion.
We’ve grilled scallions before but mostly to use as components of other things: a burger or taco topping or ana traditional Catalan feast (from the province of Tarragon on the Mediterranean coast) known as the calçotada (“calsotada”), which celebrates the harvest of slender, local onions called calçots (“calsots”). In (2005), Chef José Andrés concurs, “[The tradition of calçotadas] has a great future in America.”
