Inspired by a truly awesome Captain Awkward post

[commodorified]

About living with an Optimiser without losing your mind.

Said thread having left me with an irresistible urge to tell people how I think onions are best cut. As this is high on the list of Worst Things I Could Do over there - quite right, too - I have come back here to do it.

So, these are My Opinions:

0) Dried onions and frozen onions - which in Canada can be bought in large bags at M&M Meats, among other places - are terribly under-appreciated.

1) Always use your very sharpest non-serrated blade. The onion juice that makes you cry is released by crushing the flesh of the onion, so the more you minimise this the less irritant is released.

2) Putting the onion in the fridge for an hour -or the freezer for ten minutes, but don't forget about it - before you cut it does, actually, help.

3) Keeping your mouth tightly shut from the moment you cut into the onion until you walk away from the cutting board helps a lot, but if you once open your mouth it stops working. I do not know why this is so.

4) Cut the ends off first, so that you have flat spots to stand the onion on rather than it being able to roll around. This may save your fingers if you do get teary-eyed.

5) When you put them into the pan to cook, starting them off on low and increasing the heat in stages will minimise the amount of onion juice that gets into the air to irritate your eyes.

6) If you do end up with streaming eyes, rinse out your mouth and nostrils, not your eyes. Putting a cool washcloth over your eyes is soothing and gets your lashes clean, but your eyes are already cleaning themselves.

7) Food processors are not, in my opinion, suitable for chopping onions due to an excess of crushing activity and subsequent fumes.

Please share your opinions about onions freely - with impeccable courtesy and bountiful goodwill - in the comments. Anonymous commenting is on (on DW) but screened, please do sign your anonymous comment in some fashion; initials, nicknames, etc. are just fine, I just want to be able to tell y'all apart.

n.b. Rice Cookers may also be discussed.

Comments

[graydon]

I'm suffering a certain bafflement that there's a meaningful sharpness differential to consider...

I generally go with Skud's methodology, minus the stock-storing (I'm cooking for one) and with keeping the onions in the fridge as a regular thing.

The wooden-bowl-and-under-water approach (there are places you can get ulu knives still) isn't something I've ever tried. I have run ten-something pounds of onions through a food processor; I cannot recommend the practice.

[commodorified]

I should probably mention that I keep a very cheap, very blunt knife especially for people who start in with knife-snobbery threads in my comments...


ETA: Which, if I am being excessively harsh I apologise, but just for starters, I was in my 30s before I owned more than one kitchen knife which I had selected and bought myself, new, of a high enough quality to keep a decent edge, because I was in my 30s before spending more than ten bucks on a kitchen knife was an option, never mind a priority. I have reason to believe that I am not alone in this. Many, many people make excellent meals with very basic or even completely shit kitchen equipment, and I was one of them for long enough that a statement like yours makes me hackle.

[graydon]

You specified non-serrated.

Cheap knives usually unmaintainable -- "stainless steel" that's more nickel than steel, electrically hardened edges too brittle to abrade, and so on -- and frequently serrated, and there's no reason to not use the serrated versions on onions. (And some reason to do so if that's the sharpest knife you've got.) The since-about-1990 cheap knife is a metallurgical marvel, and they certainly work, but they're also pretty much impossible to maintain.

So if you're talking about "very sharpest non-serrated" I'm immediately thinking that these are maintainable knives of at least moderate quality, and then I'm wondering why you'd maintain cooking knives to different degrees of sharpness. That seems like an odd thing to do.

[commodorified]

As I said, I find serrated, however sharp, produces far more tearing.

It's not a matter of deliberately maintaining different levels, but of many people owning one or two good knives and some mediocre ones.

[recessional]

Or all mediocre ones of different ages, so the newest ones are sharpest, which is what I used to have until I talked my mother into really believing that I wanted nice kitchen knives for Giftmas.

[staranise]

I resemble that description so hard. *sob*

[graydon]

It might be of general interest to consider either the Lee Valley "Peasant Chef's Knife" (19th century multi-purpose cook's knife design, 40 CAD, high carbon blade so yeah it will rust but it's a good high carbon blade, plus there's the aluminium foil trick) or vulching Grohmann's clearance page,

http://www.grohmannknives.com/pages/clearance.html

for the half-off-because-there-are-handle-chips possibilities?

Really nice knives are totally painfully expensive. Really functional knives aren't always.

(Grohmann's Canadian, and makes really splendid knives. So of course no one's heard of them...)

[alexbayleaf]

I'm cooking for one too. One person needs less stock than many, but generates less stock-making scraps, as well, so it all works out.

[graydon]

I have the habit of buying substantial cuts of beef and baking them over water, so I wind up with, if not stock, lots of stuff to cook rice in, generally more than I actually want to eat rice. (Throwing the root vegetables in there for baking purposes, or finely cubed potatoes and rice, works pretty well, too.)

Actual, proper stock, rather than the chopped-onion-under-the-cow, I can start with that, approach, is pretty rare for me.