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commodorifiedAbout 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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2015-03-07 04:15 pm (UTC)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.)