This Andrew Zimmern Tip Will Change The Way You Slice Onions Forever
Alliums, like onions and garlic, are the foundation for nearly any recipe, from a simple pasta sauce to chicken tikka masala. Though onions are pungent and strong when raw, they mellow in flavor when cooked, even lending sweetness, and serve as a main flavor base. Onions are incredibly versatile, they can be sauteed, caramelized, fried, pickled, and more.
Cutting onions can be a pain, but because onions are so prominent in many cuisines and dishes, it's an important skill to be able to slice and dice them with ease. Luckily, it's a cinch to cut or dice an onion with the proper technique.
Celebrity chef Andrew Zimmern — best known for his hit show Bizzare Foods on the Travel Channel, as well as judging for the new reboot of "Iron Chef America," called "Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend" — shared his tips for dicing onions on Instagram. No need to cry over cutting onions, it's super simple!
Zimmern slices and dices in a flash
The most important step is to not cut off the root, but cut through the root, "I'm going to make sure that I leave the stem end attached," Andrew Zimmern said on Instagram, pointing to the root holding the onion half together. He then lies the onion half cut-side-down on his cutting board. Starting at the bottom, he makes 1/4-inch transverse cuts in the onion parallel to the cutting board, towards but not through the root.
"All I want to do is [cut] into the onion and pull [the knife] out, and when I pull it out I'm cutting almost all the way to the root end of that onion," Zimmern said, as he demonstrated. "Just slice through and draw [the knife] back." He then rotates the onion 90º, root facing the top of the cutting board, and makes longitudinal cuts downward 1/4 inch apart, with the tip of the knife starting near the root, again making sure to not cut through the root. Lastly, he rotates the onion again and makes perpendicular longitudinal cuts 1/4 inch apart, starting at the tail end, which causes the onion to fall onto the cutting board into little 1/4 inch cubes. Zimmern calls this, "a more casual quarter-inch dice."
This method for cutting onions is quite standard. You can see Gordon Ramsay demonstrate it, and Kenji Lopez-Alt describes the same process, along with other ways to slice onions. Master this trick and you'll never go back.