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Y BEST FRIEND CHLOE
hates chopping onions so
much, she firmly believes
that if there’s a God and He
has a Dantean taste for customized punishments, she will be damned to an eternity of onion chopping in the afterlife.
She also doesn’t care for the taste of onions, so she never willingly chops them.
I do like the taste of onions, so I
chop them regularly (though not happily). Onion chopping is one of two
things in the world that can consistently make me cry. (The other is Friday Night Lights.)
Once, after my eyes had stung and
wept with unusual viciousness, I
googled the phrase “onion tears eye
drops,” in the hopes that some modernday Edison had invented such a product. None had. But I quickly found that
the gods of industry were shilling a host
of other potential solutions, and that
generations of wise, teary-eyed cooks
had developed dozens of ad-hoc methods for stemming the flow of tears.
So I decided to test 15 of these
methods and products. I diced a relatively mild yellow organic onion using
each potential cure, waiting several
minutes between each test to take
notes and reset my tear ducts. Then I
went back and re-tested each method
using red and white onions to make
sure the mildness of the first ones
hadn’t skewed the results. Ahead,
discover what it takes
to conquer an onion.
GETTY IMAGES/DORLING KINDERSLEY
M
FOOD
HUFFINGTON
03.17.13
MY NORMAL
METHOD
(AKA “The Control”)
METHOD: Hacking
away at the onion using
my dull Ikea chef’s
knife on a standard
cutting board.
RESULTS: Slight pain
and tearing up after a
minute of chopping, but
since this was my first
bulb, nothing too crazy.
SHARPEN YOUR KNIFE
METHOD: HuffPost Taste’s
editor sharpened the dull Ikea
chef’s knife using an ancient
family method involving the
bottom of a ceramic mug. Then I
hacked the same way as before.
RESULTS: It’s definitely a little
easier and faster to chop the onion
with a sharp blade, but only slightly
less painful. I still started to tear up
after a couple minutes.
NOTE: We
tried this
method first,
and you can’t
unsharpen a
knife. So the
knife was
sharp, rather
than dull, for
all subsequent
knife-based
methods.
SOAK THE ONION
METHOD: Halve and peel the onion, then soak it in water
for an hour before cutting.
RESULTS: This cut crying a bit, but didn’t wholly
eliminate it. Plus the resulting diced onions were a little
waterlogged, and you have to plan an hour ahead to
prepare the onions.
CUT THE ROOT LAST
METHOD: Carefully cut the onion so that you leave its
root intact for as long as possible, as demonstrated in this
video from the Culinary Institute of America.
RESULTS: This worked well, with few tears, and required
no advance preparation. But the technique was tricky; I
had to wield the blade slowly and carefully to avoid slicing
down through the root.