Techniques - Cutting Onions

     Onions are one of those ingredients in recipes that make people cower in fear.  First of all, they're a perfect sphere which makes a lot of people worried about the onion rocking in mid-cut and the knife slipping.  Second, onion juice has sulfur in it, which when it evaporates irritates your eyes and causes them to water.  That's why onions make you cry.  The trick to onions is to cut them right, cut them fast, and cut them clean.
     First, I'm going to skip all the techniques out there for avoiding the tears when you cut onions.  The truth of it is, those tears are your body's way of cleaning itself.  If you didn't have those tears, your eyes couldn't clean themselves.  You can try all of them and tell everyone what works for you in the comments section, but I've never found a great way that works for everyone.  Besides, the technique where you cut onions underwater just seems unsafe!
     There are a few things I can tell you that will lessen your discomfort.  First, if you chop onions with a non-serrated blade, it will lessen the amount of juices released which will also decrease the amount of sulfur gasses reaching your eyes.  Make sure your knife is sharp.  A dull blade will crush the onion and make more juice spray out.  More juice = more gas = more tears.  Finally, and this is very, very important, don't touch your face or eyes!!!  If you put the juice on your face, the sulfur gas will reach your tear ducts much faster and make more tears.  If you touch your eyes, you're going to tear up so badly you won't be able to cut safely.
     You'll notice that, the more you cut onions, the less you'll cry.  That's because you'll learn to work with the onion much faster than you've been.  The faster you work, the less time you spend with the sulfur gasses coming up to your tear ducts.  It's just a benefit of practice.  However, ever so often, you'll get an onion that's so strong that you'll have tears running down your face no matter what.
     So, let's get to peeling and cutting onions.  This is one of those things I learned from a professional chef, came home and told my dad, and he said, "I've been telling you that for years."  Oops.  Well, I'm going to pass on the wisdom from my dad and a professional chef to cut your onions fast and easy.
     First, you're going to take the loose skin off your onion and throw it away.  Then you're going to cut your onion in half.

Either way, it doesn't matter.

 Then you're going to lay half of the onion, flat side down, on your cutting board and cut it into quarters.  If you were making onion rings, these steps would be completely different, but since we're talking basic techniques, let's just talk about slicing and dicing this week.  When you cut your quarters, there should be some of the root or tip on each piece, but only on one side.

 

 Next, you're going to cut off the root or tip from one of these pieces.

Once the root or tip is removed, you'll be able to easily remove the paper-thin skin from the onion.

Now, here your method changes depending on what you're doing with the onion.  If you're slicing the onion, simply set your knife and make cuts along the widest part of the onion.

Picture, courtesy of gracefulcuisine.com

However, I like dicing my onions because they cook faster.  No one ever seems to notice if they're sliced or diced unless you're making fajitas.  Dicing's a little more involved, but once you practice at it, it's simple.

First you're going to make cuts along the lines of your onion, don't cut all the way to the back.  Leave a little bit of room so the onion stays together.  Once you're used to it, you'll cut all the way through.  If you want, leave the root end on for this part so you have a stop point.

Here's where I differ from every other chef in the world.  I don't think there's any need to make a cut that's parallel to the cutting board.  Literally every chef I've ever seen teach how to dice onions makes a cut that looks like this:

When they're dicing.  I don't understand it - at all.  For one, if you slip while you're making that cut, you are going to cut yourself horribly.  For another, as I have experimented greatly with this, There is absolutely no difference in the final size of the cubes that you produce.  Really, I've tried it so many times that I feel like I can say confidently that making a cut parallel to the cutting board will not produce a smaller dice.

     Instead, you're going to turn your onion 90º and repeat the slicing motion you just performed until the whole thing is in cubes.  Some stick together, but you can break them up really easily.

    Telling it to you in words and pictures is really difficult, so I took the time, while I was making Ratatouille, to take some video of me cutting an onion. Hopefully, watching it will help you understand what's going on.  It's 2 minutes long, but it includes the whole onion, so you can stop anytime you like.