If you want to know how to cut onions and aren’t easily fooled by late night TV commercials, I’m about to save you a tremendous amount of time and money.
I have a neighbor that owns every kitchen gadget and appliance available. She must have the QVC shopping network on speed-dial. These devices are advertised to save your time and lower your kitchen stress, but they do just the opposite.
I imagine a race between my neighbor and I. We’ll both dice an onion, she with her chopper/dicer device, me with my chef’s knife that I bought 17 years ago for twenty dollars. Ready? Go!
She has to take out a knife anyway to cut the onion in half and peel the skin off. A chopper/dicer doesn’t peel the onion for her, and it’s too big to fit into the appliance. Then, she has to go to the kitchen cabinet to retrieve the gadget. Then plug it in and try to attach the chopper bowl. Well, we all know they never fit quite right, so with a bit of monkey-ing, it finally clicks into place.
Then comes the blade, and there’s only one way that it fits correctly onto the motor, so more monkey-ing until it snaps on. Place the onion in the chopper, screw the lid on tight and press the button a few times to zap the onion.
She empties the inconsistently cut pieces of onion into a bowl or cutting board, and now must disassemble the device, rinse all the pieces, place it in the dishwasher, later to return to the kitchen cabinet. There! Just about 10 simple steps.
That’s not how to cut onions. In my onion race fantasy, I’ve long since finished dicing my item into nice, consistent pieces. My chef’s knife has no moving parts, it wipes clean in seconds, never breaks, takes little maintenance, and is easier to control and an electric appliance.
Since the root end of the onion holds the layers together, I consider the root end my friend. I’ll try to leave that in tact. First, I cut the onion from blossom end to root end to give myself a flat surface to work from. This avoids rolling onions and bleeding fingers.
Leaving my root end friend in tact, I remove the blossom end and peel the onion. Now, with 4 horizontal strokes and 4 vertical strokes, I’ve created a checkerboard fashion in the onion. Cutting down and across the top of the onion half has the item simply fall apart in consistent pieces.
Since consistency of cut is consistency of cook, I will have a better final dish than my neighbor who basically pureed her onions.
The 5 Steps on How To Cut Onions:
1) Cut from north pole to south pole (root end to blossom end)
2) Peel away the skin
3) Make horizontal cuts across the layers
4) Make vertical cuts to make a checkerboard design
5) Cut down across the previous two cuts to create diced onion.
You don’t need additional kitchen appliances to cut kitchen ingredients; they waste your time and money. The device is meant for only one purpose. Once you discover the correct method for using a chef’s knife, you’ll be preparing beautiful meals from fresh, wholesome ingredients without having to give your credit card to the TV shopping network.
See the entire How To Cut Onions Video HERE
Chef Todd Mohr has a passion for helping people improve their cooking with simple cooking techniques that work! His cooking DVDs , transform home cooks into confident home chefs. “Burn Your Recipes” and your cooking will be transformed.