When you have to think about chopping 29 or 30 cups of onions, it can be a little bit
overwhelming. So I'm not a chef. I know how to properly hold this chef's knife, but I am not a
chef. I don't stand all day in a kitchen chopping onions so I'm not really a professional at it,
but I've come up with a way to dice onions and mince onions to be much faster than how I was
doing it just manually with a knife and it's, there's a lot more consistency with the onions
that I've ended up with. I start by peeling all of my onions that I'm going to need. I'm going
to mince onions first right now and I have this old mandolin. It was a wedding gift, so it's 13
years old. At one time, the lid for the handle for it broke and I went to a garage sale and I found
another one and so you don't need anything fancy. If you can find a mandolin like this, that's
great. There's nicer ones out there. There's probably safer ones out there. This is what I use
and if you're really great with a knife, go ahead and use a knife. If you don't want to buy a
mandolin, use the knife. It's fine. I'm just going to show you how I do it. You can take your onion,
pop it into your handle. Always use your handle. We've all seen the shows
on tv where they get carried away and nobody wants you to bleed in your food.
You can start by just slicing it and what I've used here right on my mandolin is a julienne
tool. It's going to slice it this way and 20 times this way and the nature of the onion
is because it's in rings, probably 7/8 of your onion is already being diced because it's
in that direction. Sometimes it falls apart on you those last couple of slices.
Depends how bad you want to fight with it. You can dice this up separately or you can,
you can discard it. Because of that little last portion of the onion that's straight
along those edges, I always take my knife and just give it a little bit of a chop there
just to make it a little bit more consistent for those edge pieces.
And one onion perfectly minced and really two cups of onion or two onions
makes about two cups and I'm finished chopping my minced onions here and they look really great.
The other onion you're going to need to use a lot of a lot a lot of is some diced onion
or chopped onion. Again, the fastest way that I have figured out how to chop these to get the most
amount done in the shortest amount of time is using my mandolin. I've changed my blade from
the julienne blade to the french fry blade but because the nature of an onion is in
circles you're going to get these beautiful nice little diced parts because of the rings in there.
Whereas if you were doing a potato, you would get long skinny strings,
so I am going to dice an onion. It's so fast and so easy using the julienne tool
we're just going to carry on finishing up this onion and now if you have a mandolin at home
and you never want to take it out because it's a lot to clean, now you have a really good excuse to
take it out for a big job. Sometimes it's tough to take it out for those little jobs but boy,
it has been, it's been a life saver for me and all of these pieces come apart and it does go in
the dishwasher, so you're not cutting yourself in your sink if you're doing that, so again,
just chopping up those little edge pieces, those long pieces to make them more consistent
because you want your food to look good too. It's not just about being fast and easy and
and tasting good. It is really nice when your food looks good. Scrape it here
and we're almost at, we're just right around 20 cups. These are
graduated bowls so I can see how many I have there and I got about six more cups to go!