40+ Foods That Start With O

You are trying to list the name of the food you know in alphabetical letters, A for Apple, B for Banana, C for Chesnut, until you meet the letter O, what foods that start with O? Orange, nah, you want something more interesting.

Food is all the things that humans consume every day to keep alive. That is, food is divided into many groups due to its nutrition, functions, and benefits.

I have researched the list of foods that begin with the letter O and classify them into groups as the characteristics. Beside the name of foods, there is some useful information to help you learn about the new ingredients, meals, and treats.

How Many Types Of Food Do I Have?

Please keep in your mind that all these foods are edible. I classify them into five main groups for you to follow to make them more accessible. Five main groups of food include:

Fruits

Fruits are a source of essential nutrients that people don’t get enough of, such as folate, fiber, potassium, and vitamin C. Fruits can be used in different ways: fresh, canned, dried, peeled, deseeded, cut-up, or even frozen.

Vegetables

The vegetable is a staple food for a healthy life. It is rich in vitamins and minerals with low calories, which is recommended for your diet.

Protein Foods

Protein foods, like their name, include those foods with high protein and rich in iron, potassium, and other vitamins and minerals. Most animal sources of protein such as meat, fish, poultry, seafood, and eggs, beans, seeds, nuts.

Dairy Foods

Dairy foods are the group of foods that contain or are extracted from milk. This food group provides low-fat content and rich in calcium, vitamin D, vitamin B12, and potassium.

Cooked Foods

Cooked foods are made from the accompaniment of many different kinds of ingredients in a particular way. Those are not only savory dishes but also nutritious.

So, let’s start!

Fruits With An “O” In The Beginning

This result will make you feel surprising because there are more than 10 types of fruits with an “O” in the beginning.

Olallieberry

It seems like a blackberry, doesn’t it? Actually, olallieberry is a marketing name for the cross between the Balck Logan and the youngberry. Those two kinds of berries result from blackberry and other berries, which made the olallieberry look like blackberry.

The taste of olallieberry is a balance between the sweet and tart of blackberry jam, plum, and cassis. This fruit is rich in vitamin C, vitamin A, iron, potassium, calcium, and dietary fiber. The sweet and tart flavor of olallieberry is a perfect complement for hazelnut, coconut, rose, apricot, raisin, pork, rum, and so on. You should be careful with its juice because it will leave a stain on your cloth.

Orange Fruit

Along with bananas and apples, oranges are one of the most consumed fruits around the world with their round shape and acidity flavor.

There are different types of oranges. For instance, tangerine is a small, sweet, and seedless orange with its rind easier to peel than most orange varieties and is usually used for food or salad.

Then there’s the navel orange, which is one of the various orange types most suitable for juicing. Navel oranges can be found in almost any grocery store and are quite affordable. Another variety is the blood orange whose flesh color resembles blood and is famous for its juicy and tar flavor.

Orange is rich in fiber, potassium, vitamin C, folate with low calories and helps prevent cancer and cardiovascular disease. People use orange juice as a healthy drink to enhance their immune system, and it is

Orangelo Fruit

The name of orangelo is similar to orange, but they are two different kinds of fruit. Orangelo is a result between grapefruit and orange. It is why it has the appearance of grapefruit with glowing yellow skin and 9-13 pulpy yellow-orange edible segments in the inner.

This unique fruit beginning with O has a mild flavor between grapefruit and orange with some acidity. In Puerto Rico, people tend to use orangelo rather than grapefruit since its taste is sweeter and more colorful than the old grapefruit.

Oregon Grape

Another name for Oregon grape is Oregon grape holly, which fruit is a berry that looks similar to a grape. Oregon grape berries have a purple-blue skin and a tart taste, not sweet.

The yellow roots of Oregon grape are used as herbal medicine. It treats many illnesses such as cold, flu, herpes, stomach upset, yeast infection, and more.

Otaheite Gooseberry

Another case for what it is called is not what it is. Otaheite gooseberry is not a gooseberry except for its acidity. When this tree grows in tropical and subtropical areas, it has another name: cermai fruit.

Due to the tart flavor of otaheite gooseberry, this fruit is usually blended with sugar. The juice and sweetened fruits are made into sauce. In some countries, the flesh fruits are juiced, candied, or even pickled. Especially in India and Indonesia, young otaheite gooseberry leaves are used as green.

Oval Kumquats

Oval kumquat is a classic Chinese mandarin and highly grown in Asia. The fruits have the color of deep orange outside the pulpy skin and light orange succulent inside. Oval kumquats can be eaten fresh or used to make marmalade, candies, cakes, and sauces.

The round-shaped one is called Marumi kumquat.

Oroblanco

Oroblanco was developed in California in the late 20th. It is a cross between white-fleshed grapefruit and pomelo. The name Oroblanco in Spanish has the meaning of white gold, and this name is used to describe the yellow flesh inside.

Oroblanco is an excellent source of vitamin C, an antioxidant, and natural fiber. The sweetened flesh fruits can be eaten raw or made into candies, marmalade, jams, and jellies.

Oroblanco taste also can complement other ingredients such as honey, avocado, ginger, herbs such as rosemary and basil, meat as poultry, dusk, and some other seafood.

Opuntia

It is a native plant in Mexico and a symbol for Mexican people. Opuntia, or the other name, is prickly pear, cactus pear. It can also belong to the group of fruits starting with “I” as Opuntia is also called Indian figs. Their fruits are edible by carefully peeling the small spines on the outer layer.

Opuntia is an effective functional food by the treatment features it has. The vegetative parts of opuntia are traditional folk medicines for chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, obesity, and aging.

Ortanique

The origin of ortanique is still unclear when this amazing citrus was first reported in Jamaica, 1920. Ortanique is considered as a natural tangor and its name is a synthesis coined from Or(-ange), tan(-gerine), (un-)ique. Ortanique appears with fabulous yellow-orange skin and a sweet taste with a strong balance of acidity.

An ortanique has about 10 to 12 segments with an average of 10 seeds. The flesh fruit is juicy with a rich, distinctive flavor.

Even though this natural fruit is warmly welcomed in the local market, it has not been planted widely until it received many favorable reactions in Canadian and Great Britain markets.

Oil Palm

It is an edible vegetable oil extracted from the fruit of oil palm trees. Oil palm is a native African; then palm trees were brought to the southeast of Asia. It turned Malaysia into the enormous country that produced oil palm in the world.

Oil palm is oxidant and heat resistant to get the fried products a crispy and crunchy texture. Though oil palm occurs in a small portion of the U.S diet, the main faculty of oil palm is in cosmetics, food products, detergent, and half of the package products Americans consume contain oil palm.

Olive

The olive tree is an evergreen tree and native to Mediterranean Europe, Asia, and Africa. Olive oil is extracted from the fruit with a high degree of nutrition used for multipurpose in human life.

The raw olive has an unpleasant taste. The unripe fruit is green and turns to black when ripe which needs to be curved and fermented to reduce its bitter taste and get ready to use.

Oil extracted from olive fruit is used widely in cooking, salad. The rich antioxidant and vitamin E in olive oil is also used in the cosmetic industry as nourishment and moisturizer for skin, strengthening weak and brittle nails.

Oriental Persimmon

Oriental Persimmon is also called Chinese persimmon, Japanese persimmon, or kaki persimmon. This fruit was cultivated in China more than 2000 years ago.

Fully ripe fruit is sweet and edible due to the loss of astringency in the ripening process when the unripe fruit has a bitter taste.

There are many culinary uses of oriental persimmon. The ripe flesh fruit can be eaten raw from inside out or hand-dried as in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam; Oriental persimmon is dipped with lime juice and sold in a jar under the name ‘water persimmon’ in Taiwan.

The ‘O’ Beginning Vegetables

Some of those vegetables are familiar to you, but some may not. All of them start with ‘O’.

Ogonori

Ogonori is an edible seaweed grown along the coasts of Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. The name of ogonori is Japanese and commonly known around the world by its scientific name Gracilaria.

Ogonori is used for miso soup and sushi rolls in Japanese and usually used in salads in the Caribbean and Hawaii. The seaweed is pickled and sold in a bowl of poke. The agar-agar powder extracted from ogonori is a vegetarian substitution for gelatin. Both the dried strips or powder form can be used to make jellies, puddings, and custards.

Okra

In English-speaking countries, okra has some other names such as lady-fingers, gumbo. Okra cultivates mainly in the Southern United States, Africa, the Middle- East, the Caribbean, Asia. This fruit has a unique texture with a green rind covered by a layer of a soft feather, sticky juice, and small seeds inside the pod.

Okra is a good source of minerals, vitamins, antioxidants, and fiber. It is used to prevent the change of obesity and diabetes. The mucilage of okra can help to remove the toxic skin of the body.

People can cook okra in many ways, such as stew, boil, sautee, fry.

Orach

The science name of Orach is Atriplex hortensis, some of its common names as Garden orach, Red orach, Mountain spinach, French spinach. Orach is an ancient cultivated plant, commonly grown in the Mediterranean and later grown as an alternative warm-weather for spinach.

Orach has a mild chard-like flavor, but it tastes saltier than other green plants. Fresh green leaves of orach are used for salad, such as feta, cranberry, and vinaigrette salad. These green leaves can be used as a herbal remedy to release anxiety and exhaustion.

Onion

Onion is a familiar vegetable in your kitchen when it is still in controversy: Is it a fruit or a vegetable?

Raw onion chopped down can be eaten as salad with red bell peppers and tomatoes. Onion used as marinade or sauces will go well with any number of things, from a simple hamburger to roaster beef.

The richness of prebiotic in onion will help to boost your immune, digestive system.

Oregano

Oregano leaves are a culinary herb with a warm, aromatic taste and are primarily used in savory flavor. This culinary herb can be added to tomato-based sauce or salad to make it smell or used as a supplement for diet and as an aromatic oil.

Oregano has grown around the Mediterranean for centuries as a medicine. However, nowadays, you can grow oregano in your garden as a repellent.

Protein Foods Have An ‘O’ In The First Letter

When you think about protein food, meat and eggs are on the two first places on your list, but my list is on your ‘O’ first list here.

Offal

In addition to meat, organs of butchered animals and birds like liver, heart, kidneys, lungs, brain, cheek can be eaten as food. Offal contains a high value of nutrition.

Some delicious dishes are made from offal, such as chicken liver toast with spicy pecans, calf’s liver with parsley, and duck liver pate.

Oxtongue

The tongue is high-value offal when only one tongue for each ox. In commercial usage, the ox tongue is also called the beef tongue.

Oxtongue appears in many national cuisines, in Mexican taco, French, and Belgium’s sauce. This kind of offal contains a very high-fat content, and it can be cooked in different ways such as boil, grill, pickled, toast, and braise.

Oxtail

The oxtail is the part cutting from the base of the spine. Most of the time, the oxtail is cut into sections, and it is thin in the top of the tail and gradually thick in the bottom. For that reason, you need to stew it in moist heat for a long time to soften the cartilage.

Although oxtail stew might not seem like an appetizing dish at first, its taste is actually enticing enough to become one of Jamaican staple dishes. Indeed, if prepared properly, oxtail packs a strong punch of flavors that will knock your socks off.

The taste of braised oxtail is more tender with a silky texture than a short rib.

Octopus

This boneless animal is interesting to humans both inside and outside the plate due to its intelligence and benefits. Outside the plate, octopus is recorded to have their intelligence to open the jar from both sides, slip the body through a very narrow slit, and can use coconut to make their shell.

Inside the plate, octopus is a source of protein and rich in vitamin B12, iron, omega-3, selenium for coastal communities.

In different cultures, such as Japan and Korea, octopus is eaten raw as a novelty food. The Japanese also enjoy octopus as a snack. Takoyaki, one of the most popular Japanese dishes, is one example. Other ways to cook octopus include grill, fry, braise, boil, and stew.

Oysters

Oysters live in marina habitats as bays and oceans. It is a high nutrient food with low calories. People found in oysters a high content of zinc, this nutrient helps you to keep your energy to feel good, put your immune system will boost your sex drive, and get rid of acne.

There are many ways to use oysters. It can be eaten raw with spicy sauce, lemon juice, and welsh eggs, or cooked with other ingredients. For home cooks, you’ll need sharp oyster knives to shuck the oysters. Without proper tools, you’ll find preparing the oyster next to impossible.

In China, Malay, Vietnam, and Khmer cuisine, oysters are extracted to make oyster sauce. Used to elevate vegetable and meat dishes, oyster sauce boasts a signature flavor that is hard to replicate. You might also opt for oyster-flavored sauce, but you’ll find its taste rather lacking.

Oats

Oats are one of the healthiest grains on the earth and contain gluten-free and many vitamins, minerals, fiber, and antioxidants good for your health. Oat is a whole-grain food, and you consume it like oatmeal, oat bake, oat milk.

Different forms of oats, such as rolled oats, steel-cut oats, and quick oats, contain different nutrition values and are used for other purposes.

Oatmeal

Oatmeal is oats after the process of dehusking, steaming, and flattening or grounding. This word is also used to call the common oat porridge made of ground or rolled oats.

You can make your own oatmeal at home by using rolled oats or quick oats cooked with water or milk in the microwave. Then add some of your favorite toppings such as banana, strawberries, blueberries, walnuts, and granola.

Is oatmeal only suitable as a healthy breakfast? As it turns out, there are also many, many desserts starring oatmeals. A healthy and delicious treat? It’s like having your cake and eating it too. So why don’t you try out some of these tasty treats right today?

Ogi

Ogi is a delicious dish that originated from Nigeria. This creal includes maize, sorghum, and millet immersed in water for three days to be fermented and cooked to make pap. The sour process of ogi helps to improve the digestible protein in ogi compared to other kinds of flour.

In order to enrich the nutrition in ogi, some supplement foods are added to it such as fresh cow’s milk, fruit, edible oil, and egg yolk.

Dairy Foods Start With ‘O’

There is no ‘O’ in milk, but here I got some ‘O’ dairy foods for you:

Olivet Cendre

Olivet Cendre is a French cheese made from unpasteurized cow milk in the town of Olivet. The milk used to make cheese was collected from graze cows along the Loire river in spring.

The cheese then aged for at least one month and smoked by the grape-vines in the vineyard. This makes the ivory-white cover with chalky dough and brings a delicate taste to the cheese. The best period to produce Olivet Cendre is May and June.

Oreo

Oreo is a famous sandwich cookie with a layer of sweetened cream between a layer of chocolate wafers. Oreo is recognized worldwide for its cookie taste; some unique flavors are made for marketing, such as lemon, mint, blueberries, red velvet, etc.

Oxford Blue

Oxford Blue is a creamy blue cheese made from unpasteurized cow milk and affinage for about 14 to 16 weeks. The cheese rind is sticky and wet, covered by silver foil when the inside texture is moist, creamy with a tangy, aromatic, and spicy note.

Orgu Peyniri

Orgu Peyniri is a Turkish dairy product made from high elastic cheese wound together in a braided. Its ingredients are similar to white cheese, with the production process similar to cheddar cheese.

Oat Milk

Oat milk is creamy flavor milk made by soaking oats in water and then blending and straining it. Oat milk keeps almost all the nutrients, fiber, and vitamins from oats that are good for your health.

Cooked Food Begin With ‘O’

The world of cuisine is uncountable, with so many names of savory dishes. Some of them, with an ‘O’ in the beginning, are in the list below:

Omelete 

Omelete is a dish made from beaten eggs, similar to scrambled eggs when fried on a heat fan with butter or cooking oil. This fried egg is savory with one moist, softened side and one brown dried side.

Some ingredients are usually added in omelet as cheese, tomato, jam, vegetable, mushroom. With less than 10 minutes of preparation, an omelet is an excellent choice for your busy day.

This 4-recipe will help you find your omelet recipe.

Oblea

Oblea is a Mexican snack. It includes two crispy layers of thin wafers and a sweet luscious filling in the middle. The filling usually is dulce de leche; sometimes, it includes jam, whipping cream, and a combination of other types of filling.

Obusuma

Obusuma, or its common name is ugali. This is a porridge made by maize flour, sometimes with cassava, sorghum, and millet.

Ugali is a family meal in Kenya, and it is used with vegetables, fish, meat, and scrambled eggs. This starchy food is cooked by gradually adding maize flour into boiling water, stirring it until the mixture is condensed.

Show you how an ugali is made.

Oeufs En Meurette

Oeufs en Meurette is a typical cuisine in Burgundy served with poached eggs and burgundy sauce.

The taste of red wine plays the main role in this cuisine when it flows on both the poached eggs and in the burgundy sauce. Bacon, carrot, mushroom, and some other ingredients are cooked with one part of diluted red wine to make the sauce. The eggs are boiled directly in the other part of the wine but still keep the melted yorks.

Oeufs en Meurette is served with butter-fried bread on the bottom, a poached egg, and sauce sprinkled on the top.

A step-to-step guide to make Oeufs en Meurette is a real chef.

Ogbono Soup

Ogbono Soup is a staple dish of Nigeria made from ground Ogbono seed. This ground seed is used as a thickener and coloration for the soup texture.

Ground ogbono seed is added to palm oil to meltdown, and to generate their work for a thickener. Goat meat and smoked fish then added to braise for a few minutes. To finish the soup, some shredded pumpkin leaves are added in the final step to make it vegetative.

The ogbono soup is similar to curry in yellow color and liquefies soup with the taste of some Nigerian specialties.

This is how a Nigerian ogbono soup is made. Watch this video to know more:

Oil Down

Oil Down is a stew of breadfruit, fish, salted meat, chicken, dumpling, and vegetable in coconut milk. The name ‘Oil Down’ comes when the coconut milk is simmered down. It releases a flavor of oil on the dish’s surface. This dish is native to Grenada, an island belonging to the West Indie in the Caribbean Sea.

Men at parties traditionally cook this flavorful one-pot meal. Nowadays, oil down is served in most restaurants.

Okroshka

Okroshka is a cold soup from the region of Volga, Russia. This soup is a cooling dish for the summer with different kinds of vegetables, herbs, eggs, buttercream, lemon juice mixed with a sauce made from kvas and light sour cream or kefir.

In this cold soup, kvas is the main ingredient of the soup. This beverage is made by fermenting rye bread with raisin or fruit with a meager percentage of alcohol.

All the ingredients are chopped down, then mix with the soup blended with kvas and kefir, or sour cream with vinegar instead of kefir.

Opera Cake

Opera cake is a French dessert with a beautiful combination between coffee and chocolate. The bottom layer is almond sponge cakes soaked in coffee syrup, then filled with coffee buttercream and chocolate ganache layer. The top surface is a layer of chocolate glaze.

Osso Buco

Osso buco is an Italian dish made from veal shin, red or white wine, onion, carrot, celery, and other spices. Veal is browning with flour on a pan before simmering with a sauce made from different ingredients and wine. The dish is served with veal, seasoning, and sprinkle with a mixture of wine and melting butter.

Ohitashi

Ohitashi is a Japanese cold dish makes from any leafy greens (except baby spinach), soy sauce, dashi, and mirin.

Green leaves are boiled to tender, then transferred to a bowl of cold water to keep the vegetative crunchy. After drainage, the veggies are sprinkled with a combination of soy sauce, dashi, and mirin. Cover it and put it in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes before use.

If you want to buy mirin for this savory dish, you should carefully read the manufacturer’s description. Mirin or hon-mirin is Japanese cooking wine with natural sweetener and no added sugar when aji mirin is sweet cooking wine with sugar.

Okonomiyaki

Okonomiyaki is a combination of the word Okonomi (Things that you like) and Yaki (Cook), a typical dish in the region of Hiroshima or Kansai.

This is a savory version of Japanese pancake. It includes eggs, flour, shredded cabbage, and some other ingredients such as shrimp, octopus, bacon, spring onion, vegetables, cheese.

Omurice

Omurice is served with fried rice covered by an omelet with ketchup or soy sauce on the top. The fried egg used in omurice is similar to the French omelet, in which a fluffy yellow rind covers the soft render inside.

In omurice, the egg is placed on top of the fried rice. When it is served, the chef will make a sharp cut along the omelet egg to release the running melted egg inside.

A perfect omelet egg is the most challenging part of making omurice. Watch this video to know more:

The List Is Ongoing!

All the foods above start with the letter O, and this is not the end of the list. I hope it is helpful for you. If you have any other names of food that start with an O, please share them with me in the comment section.