Onion Chopping

Technique from The Seasoned Chef.

To help decrease the likelihood of crying when chopping onions, store your onions in the refrigerator until you are ready to cook with them.

When you are ready to cook with your onion, grab a chef’s knife and a cutting board. Then get your onion and peel off and discard the flaky skin.

To easily dice an onion, start by chopping off the tunic or “North Pole” (the tip of the onion that is on the opposite side of the roots). Then cut the onion in half to match the image below (cutting down the longitude, not along the equator). You should have an East Hemisphere and West Hemisphere.

Now set one hemisphere aside and hold the roots or “South Pole” of the other hemisphere. Start making some longitudinal cuts but not cutting the strips of onion free of the roots. These strips should still be connected to the roots. When you have a few longitudinal strips cut, start cutting the onion latitudinally, across all the strips. With each chop, you should have a lot of diced pieces of onion that can pile up on the cutting board. Keep cutting latitudinally until you get near the roots. Then just chop off the roots and dice the rest of the onion and add it to your pile of diced onion. Discard the tunic and roots. Then use the same technique on the other hemisphere or save the other hemisphere in a plastic bag in the refrigerator.