How to Chop Onions

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to take a few minutes to show you how to make a really tasty New England Clam Chowder. Normally, I do the onion last, but since I have to do garlic, I figure I'll do onion and garlic. The first thing we're going to do is chop off this end of our onion. This part is no good, because of the bulb end. We're going to keep this end on; it will hold it all together when I go to dice it. You want to make sure you get any threads off of it, throw this in the trash over here. You can see I've still got some skin on the outside; the papery bit. That stuff doesn't cook, so we're going to peel that right off. I'm going to peel it off my other one, too. Once again; we're going to achieve a small dice with this onion. Something comparable to the size of our potato or our celery. To do that, you're just going to make a series of quarter inch vertical cuts; just like this at the size that we want which is at a quarter inch. Then we're going to go crossways; at the exact same size, and we'll get a nice easy dice this way. When you get to your nub, you can just lop the ends off. That way, this is your only piece of waste out of that whole onion; besides the skin. As long as you keep that onion together, it shouldn't bother your eyes too much; and if you use a cold onion that will help a lot, too. This onion has been refrigerated, so it's only very slightly burning my eyes right now, which is tremendous. I, really hate the way onions burn your eyes. Just a couple of vertical slices, right back down. Oh yeah, now it's starting to get to me. We'll just take this piece on the end; chop, chop, chop. We've got a little piece here; chop, chop, chop, chop. There we go; there's our onion. Now let's get it out of my face; because it's really starting to bug me, and burn my eyes. "