Instantly Upgrade Your Meatloaf With This One Pantry Staple

Even though meatloaf is one of my favorite comfort meals, I'm also picky about how it's made. I want a meatloaf that’s moist and meaty, isn't spongy or over-worked, and has hints of onion throughout.

Many home cooks achieve the latter by adding a sweet onion, diced or pureed, into the mix. However, I recently discovered an easy swap that’s probably right in your pantry: dried minced onions.

Admittedly, this is a swap born out of pure laziness. A few months ago, I found myself with a thawed pound of ground beef and a hankering for meatloaf—but I had no interest in dicing up an onion. I had a container of dried minced onions in my spice drawer, and decided to toss in a handful on a whim.

Why Dried Minced Onions Make Meatloaf Better

The resulting meatloaf was one of the best I’d ever made, and the only thing I did differently from my usual combo of ground beef, bread crumbs, egg, and spices was substitute the dried minced onions. Slathered in a tangy, ketchup-based sauce, the moisture from the meat and other ingredients did an excellent job of hydrating the dehydrated bits without adding too much moisture. The result: a nicely flavored and textured meatloaf.

Because these onions are dried, their flavor is more concentrated, resulting in a slightly more pronounced oniony flavor throughout the meatloaf. It reminded me a bit of that old trick that recommends tossing in a packet of Lipton Onion Recipe Soup and Dip Mix to flavor a meatloaf, just without all the extra sodium. And because the onion flavor is stronger in dried onions, you only need a tablespoon or two to flavor the entire thing.

Using the dried onions was a major textural upgrade. One of my gripes with meatloaf is that it can be a pain to mince the onions finely enough that they seamlessly incorporate into the mixture. That’s not the case here; the dried minced onions almost disappear into the meatloaf, so you avoid those sometimes undercooked fresh onion bits.

Perhaps the best thing about this simple kitchen swap is that it’s affordable. A jar of dried minced onions retails at most supermarkets for $3 or less, depending on whether you splurge for a name-brand, and it will last a very long time in the pantry, standing by for the next time a meatloaf craving strikes.