Dice Onion for Tomato & Parmesan Soup Recipe

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis, on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to show you how to make rustic Italian Bread, Tomato and Parmesan Soup. It's going to be excellent. It's onion time, so what we're going to do is peel away the part of the onion that we don't want; just a little bit on the outside. I slice off the bulb end, leaving the root end intact. The reason is because that end is going to hold it all together when I go to chop it. We've cut it in half; this end is still on. So now we just peel this piece right here back to that point, and we're going to do it with the other one, too. You don't ever want to get any of this paper in with your onion because it doesn't cook, and if anyone ever gets it in their teeth, they will certainly know it. It doesn't cook down, it just kind of stays leathery and papery. You'll notice in this onion that the bulb started to go inside, so we'll cut that piece out in a second. We'll just leave that there as it is. Since we're not pureeing this, we're going to want to go with a fairly small dice, so I'm just going to make a series of vertical cuts just like this; probably a quarter of an inch or so. Then we're going to turn our onion sideways, and cut crossways with the exact same size cut, giving us a very nice small dice. Here's a little bit of onion advice; refrigerate your onions, because if you go to chop an onion that hasn't been refrigerated, it's a lot more likely to burn your eyes. I keep my onions very cold because it would appear that I have very sensitive eyes when it comes to onion cutting. I, like anybody else, don't like having my eyes burned. Same process this time; quarter inch cut, straight down. Now right here, we've got this to deal with, so I'm just going to take and make an incision like that, and pop that right out, because , like I said earlier, that part won't cook very well. The exact same procedure for this half as the other half; quarter inch cuts crosswise, quarter inch cuts at ninety degree angle of that. I'm just about done with the onion, which is good because it's starting to burn my eyes. When you get to the nub down here, you can just cut around it; just kind of do one of these. There we go, that is our onion."