How to Chop an Onion Without Crying - CHOW Tip

Russell Jackson, chef-owner of Lafitte in San Francisco, knows that chopping onions can be a real pain in the eye sometimes. In this CHOW Tip he shares a few ideas that might make your onion prep a bit more bearable.

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TRANSCRIPT
Onions make you cry. They make you cry miserably and these are some of the tips that I think are going to help you to not cry like a ten year old child. If you store your onions in the refrigerator, it'll chill it down enough that it won't allow that sulfuric acid to build up. Changing the chemistry through water is also really, really simple way. Ice water, dunk it in for thirty seconds or actually even boiling water, you can drop that in for thirty seconds. This will, of course, change the texture of the onion. The next thing is use a really sharp knife. Go ahead and start out by cutting the root off and that'll release the gas. And you should be working in a well-ventilated area. One of the funny, and really interesting, things is you take a piece of bread and you pop it in your mouth and you chop the onion with the bread in your mouth then you won't cry.