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

[dreamwaffles]

If I need to chop a lot of onion quickly, I do it thus:

1) hone my kitchen knife*
2) peel off outer skin, chop onion in half lengthwise, and set the cut side down to brace
3) cut off stem end
4) cut alllllmost all the way to the root end horizontally parallel to the board, pinning my onion with my hand flat on the curved top
5) cut allllmost all the way to the root end vertically through the onion (perpendicular to step 4) very, very carefully
6) chop away normally and VOILÀ THEY ARE DICED REAL QUICK

*I have a LOT of opinions about kitchen knives. My very very favorite is my 8" Victorinox Chef's Knife, which is the top-rated stainless steel blade from America's Test Kitchen for the past 5 years or so. I also have some decent-quality 6" knives and paring knives.

tl;dr about knives though, source Professional Knife Guy at My Local Kitchen Store: Good-quality knives don't need to be sharpened that often to hold an edge, once every 2-3 years is enough. Invest in a good-quality *honing steel* (mine was like $30 but I live in Hawaii and everything is super expensive) and hone your knives regularly so your knives keep a keen edge. I hone mine every 3-4 uses. Professional chefs hone theirs a bit obsessively.

(honing steels are the cylindrical things with handles that people go *shhhk shhhhk* with the carving knife right before they carve a turkey. There's good youtube videos about it.)

[graydon]

I might advocate for stropping over honing, since it's easier to learn, plausibly practical with less-than-ideal wrists, and moves less steel off the knife, so one can sensibly strop before each use.

More of a wood-worker thing than a cook thing, so far as I can tell, the only other people I know who strop their knives are people I've bought strops for over the years.

[dreamwaffles]

oooh, neat! I have no idea how to strop a knife though.

My honing steel isn't much heavier than my big knives, but it does need some wrist flexibility at least to keep the right angle on the knife.

*chinhands* I'm happy for you to tell me more?.... :D

[graydon]

The idea behind a strop is that if you take a heavy leather strap, leather has some very fine silica particles in it naturally, and thus if you stroke the edge along the strop, always away from the edge so you don't cut the leather, you get a very fine sharpening effect. The traditional thing to do with straight razors and other really fine edges.

This works dandy for razors where you can hold the strop taught with one hand and strop the razor with the other.

It doesn't work so well for generic edge tools, and there you get either very stiff short chunks of leather for carving tools, leather belts for belt sanders, or sticking the leather on a wooden back, so it's got a stiff support. (Lee Valley sells these; "leather hand strop".)

If you've got the hand strop, you can put honing compound on it -- hello, utterly consistent nomenclature associated with hand tools, why, of course it is, it's not fractal at all! -- to (modernly, greatly) enhance the effect; this is usually chromium dioxide with particle size around a micron in some sort of binder. (Usually beef tallow in the binder so possibly an issue for vegetarians.)

The motion is like slicing with the knife, only rotated ninety degrees minus whatever edge angle the knife has, so you're drawing back, away from the edge, and from handle to tip on the knife at the same time, very similar the motion for using a knife steel. It's slower and requires less force than a steel because there's less material being affected on the knife. (Steels half swage the edge; ideal for the blades of knives in the 19th century, less ideal for modern high-carbon stainless with vanadium in it, which is a much stronger material.) Because the hand strop is a wood block with a side rather than a tangent, you could at need clamp it into something so you had both hands for the knife, and even regularly you can either brace it against something solid or hold it flat in your hand. (This is all much easier to demonstrate than describe...)

The essential differences for the edge are the very fine particle size associated with stropping -- you can get things sharper than commercial razor blades this way, the electron photomicrographs have been taken -- and the slight gooshyness of the leather. Because the leather's indenting under the pressure of the side of the blade, it curls up a bit across the edge, so the very edge is less fine than the sharpening angle would require, and thus stronger, while being just as keen and even (fineness -- angle of the wedge; keenness -- how wide is the very edge of the cutting edge?; evenness -- how consistent is the keenness? what are its error bars? for most kitchen tasks, we want a fine edge very keen and even. For chopping wood, we want a robust edge, not so keen that it turns, and so on. No, this isn't globally consistent terminology but one has to start somewhere. :) How much force you strop with controls how much the leather indents and thus how much curl you get over the edge and how strong the effect is on the form of the edge.

Because the loss of metal is slight -- you can see it turning the green honing compound black, but you're just not taking much off -- it's entirely practical to pick a knife out of the block, take three passes each side on the strop, and set to one's onions or whichever every time you've got something to cut in the kitchen. I've got some knives, high-carbon steel ones, not the harder stainless of the modern age, these eighteen years now and used like this and not showing noticeable wear to the edge of the blade. (Never been actually sharpened on a stone, either.) The harder stainless of the modern age (yay! Grohmann) I haven't had as long but it responds really well and shows even less wear.

(Everyone knows that when you put knives in the dishwasher, it's hot enough and caustic enough in there to damage a really keen edge, even if the edge somehow avoids being banged against something by the force of the whirling water, and that you're making a tradeoff between two conveniences when you do it? Yes, it makes me twitch to see cooking knives go in dishwashers.)

I hope that's useful and comprehensible, it's much more a do subject than a words subject. (Or at least I find it so.)

[james_g4clf]

The Victorinox small paring knives are great too - stainless, but can be kept sharp with a steel (and have dishwasher safe handles).

[dreamwaffles]

My mom has two of them, I've been hinting about them for Christmas or birthday gifts for a while. The paring knife I have is one of those ones with a bright-colored blade and it seems to be holding its edge just fine without much honing, which is nice because I want it to keep its pretty colors....

[james_g4clf]

Nice thing about these Victorinox blades (see post on knives in dishwashers above) is that Victorinox use a variety of stainless steel which [A] holds an edge; [B] refreshes with a steel (note, says the irritating pedant, that a honing steel does not actually hone knives, but simply realigns the metal along the edge - everyday English is at odds with the actual physical process); and [C] keeps its edge in a dishwasher if it's put somewhere where the cutting edges do not bang against other stuff during the wash. It's a long time to your birthday - so there's one in to post to you from my stash of "Victorinox paring knives for giving away" which I get my sister in Switzerland to replenish for me from time to time when they appear in a supermarket clearance sale.