Hey everyone, David C Andersen from the KnifeCenter coming at you from my home kitchen, because
today I'm going to show you all how to properly cut an onion, a few different methods, in
fact.
Let's do this.
(KnifeCenter Logo) Now if you're like me, you're probably spending a little bit more
time at home than you usually do these days.
And I don't mind that because I actually really like to cook.
But if maybe it's not something you used to do all the time and you want to kind of brush
up on your skills.
We're going to go over a few different ways and a few different types of onion cutting
that you can do to execute your recipes.
As you can see, I've got a handful of yellow onions here, just plain ordinary, everyday
yellow onions, and I'm going to go over how to slice dice mince, as well as wedge cut
these onions for you.
First, you're going to want to make sure you're working on a proper cutting board.
Don't use glass I'd suggest either using a synthetic hard plastic board or bamboo or
wood for this type of use.
We're also going to need to use a knife and of course being the KnifeCenter, we know a
lot about those.
So what I'm going to use today is actually Shun's Sora kitchen knife.
It's a santoku style knife, but you can also use a regular chef style knife if you prefer.
Both of them are going to work equally well for this task.
The first thing we're going to want to do is take the paper off of this on it.
And in order to do that, I'm actually going to cut this onion in half.
We'll take a look at our onion you can see we have two sides or two ends, if you will,
we've got a stem end here, as well as the root side or the root end.
Before I actually do any cutting.
Now's a perfect time to make sure your edge is in tip top shape.
Now you don't necessarily have to sharpen your knife every time but there's a few different
things you can do to hone your blade.
Probably something most of you are familiar with.
This is called a steel or a honing steel.
Now this doesn't actually sharpen your knife but it does realign the edge.
You'll see chefs going down this on either side and all that is is realigning the edge,
simply hold it at the edge angle of your blade or of your knife edge itself and you're going
to run it down A few times on each side.
Now most German style chef knives are going to come with a 20 degree angle per side.
Whereas Japanese style knives such as this Shun Sora are going to more likely come with
a 15.
Or specifically in this case, I believe it's a 16 degree edge.
So just keep that in mind when you're holding your edge angle to that steel itself.
Now that I've got my edge where I want it to be, I'm going to set my onion down and
just slice through the stem and of the vegetable.
Taking it clean off any papers loose can go ahead and take that off right now.
Throw that in the garbage.
Now I'm going to stand it up on its end and slice down through the root cutting it in
half.
I usually find it easier to cut it in half before trying to remove the paper because
it kind of helps out a little bit.
Makes it a little bit easier than trying to do it when it's still a whole bowl but you
can certainly do that if you'd rather.
Now that's just one way to start cutting and peeling your onion.
I'm going to show you another one.
But first you can see over here in the corner.
I've actually got A bowl full of water.
That's because I'm going to take these two completed onion halves or these two half onions
I should say, place them in that water, it's going to do a couple things.
One, if there's any kind of dust or dirt on some of those outer outer layers, it's going
to wash it off but also, it's going to help prevent some of the vapors that come off the
onion from escaping, getting into your eyes and making you cry because of course, onions
do make you cry, but the water is going to help.
I'm going to show you an alternate way to start cutting her onion and for this I'm going
to use a paring knife also from the Shun Sora collection and I really really like these
knives.
They're nice and affordable.
They use Shun's composite blade technology.
So the actual edge itself actually features VG-10 which is a really good steel for the
kitchen takes a nice fine edge works very well and they look really cool too.
And they're affordably priced.
Can't go wrong with that.
So I'm going to take my next onion and I'm going to start the same way I'm going to slice
the stem and off (knife chops) now on the last onion that I did, I left the root end
intact.
But on this I'm actually going to remove the root before I remove the bulk of the paper.
I'll just take off what's loose here first.
Now the way that we're going to take this root end out we're actually going to move
the onion around the knife rather than trying to move the knife around the onion.
And the first thing you need to do is kind of reverse grip the paring knife, just like
a pairing motion, which is where the name comes from, in fact, so we're going to hold
it like so being very careful not to not to get your hand on the edge itself, and then
simply pierce on one side of the root itself.
You can go a little bit in and out but you're slowly going to move the onion in a circle
until that root simply pops right out like so.
From there, just score the onion.
score the skin, I should say.
You should be able to peel it off fairly easily.
Almost in one clean go Go ahead and keep this as is because this is going to come into play
with one of the cuts we're about to do, we want to have this whole onion rather than
halved.
I'm just going to take this next onion, do the same thing I did with with the first one,
throw it in the bath, so we can get ready for the next steps.
All right, now let's get to the actual cutting.
And the first thing we're going to do is a simple slice, we're going to start with our
whole onion.
Now what's cool about what I'm going to show you today is each of these steps we take we're
going to build on it in order to get to the next style of cut.
But the first as I said, is a slice and we're going to use this whole onion because we want
to get whole rings in this case.
Now depending on the knife you're using the technique used to cut it can be a little bit
different.
With most santoku style knives like this, you're going to be typically doing a push
cut where you Simply place the desired width you want on the onion and push through cleanly
kind of pushing forward.
You can also do a pull cut, same thing, holding the knife steady or holding the onion steady
with your hand and pulling back.
Both are valid.
If you're using a typical German style or French style chef's knife, there's actually
another cut you can do.
But we're not going to do it on this because this is a large piece of material we're cutting
through.
So this is going to come into play later, which I'll show you.
One thing to note, what I'm doing is make sure you pay attention to the way you hold
your hands while you are cutting, you're going to want to use what sort of called the claw
grip.
Basically, you're going to tuck your knuckles in so that they're not out near the path of
the blade.
And then you can place your thumb at the back of whatever you're cutting that way.
They're all out of the way and there's no possibility that you're going to actually
slice through a finger.
We don't want to do that.
And you're actually going to use your knuckles as a guide for the thickness of what you're
cutting.
That way They're out of the way they work well, you're safe and you get the results
that you need.
Now I've cut through most of this and the onion starting to feel a little bit unsteady,
so I don't want to push it.
That's we're going to call that good.
We've got here, our onion rings, which you can break these up.
These go well on a salad, you can reduce them down and put them on top of something like
a nice steak if you've got some of these caramelised, it's really tasty and this is the simplest
way to slice it.
Of course, if you want to make actual onion rings, just cut these nice and thick that
way you can batter them later and do your deep frying, there are going to be times that
you want to do a slice where it's simply just half the onion rather than the whole onion.
Now this is the part where we're actually going to start building our cuts one upon
the other to get towards the finer cuts later.
We're essentially going to do the same thing to this half one and we just did to the whole
onion, but because it's flatter, it's going to be a little more stable when you get towards
the end, which is quite nice.
Remember, tuck your fingers in.
(knife chops) You can do a pull or push cut no problem Now this is where I promised to
show you another chef knife technique, a chef knife as opposed to a Santoku, is going to
have a lot more belly out here near the front.
And that's actually to facilitate a rocking cut.
Now, this particular santoku kinda rides the line a little bit in between the two styles.
So I can show you that method without having to switch knives here, without your tip ever
leaving the cutting board (knife slices) you can still achieve those fine slices exactly
the same way.
We can keep going closer to the root this time again, because it is more stable.
Next, we're going to do a dice.
And the first step is a new cut.
But then we're just going to add in the slicing cut we just did.
Now what you're going to want to do this can be as fine or as wide as you like.
We're going to come down with a series of vertical slices straight down the onion along
the grain, and then we're going to come in and do our slicing cut.
So we're just straight up and down (knife chops).
Using the tip of our blade to come down and make those lines in there so that it's segmented
a little bit, then you're going to come in with your push cut or rocking cut whichever
one you prefer to use, same thing like we did with the slicing, and we're going to cut
it up for our mince; Sorry for our dice.
(knife chops) I left this a little bit rougher, not quite as thin of a cut, because in general,
a dice is a little bit thicker, whereas a mince is a little bit finer.
And that's what we're going to do next.
Now I'm going to show you the kind of the official way that's taught in culinary schools
right now.
And it's going to start out again, we're building our cuts one on top of the other, it's going
to start out just out just like that dice, but we're going to go with finer vertical
cuts this time.
Simply come in again with the tip of your blade and make fine vertical cuts this time
finer than before.
Now be careful right now since we're not cutting against the cutting board, where you're going
to want to come In the onion this way, again, leaving the root intact.
And try not to slice through the ends of any of this while you're doing so, I know this
looks a little bit sloppy.
But now we're ready to come through with our standard slicing cut that we learned at the
top of this video.
(knife continues chopping) As you can see, we already have a finer cube than our dice.
Because again, we're going for a mince, I'm going to go ahead and pick these up with my
knife.
Just do me a favor, don't go scraping with your edge along the cutting board drives me
crazy, but you can use it to kind of scoop up what you've got.
And if you do need to scrape the board, I'll usually flip it around.
So the spine is going to run against the cutting board rather than the edge.
All right, I'm gonna let you in on a little secret.
I'm actually not a very big fan of using that particular method to do my minced onion.
So I'm going to show you a little shortcut.
Because at the end of the day, unless you're going to culinary school, there's no no wrong
way to cook food.
It's not strictly necessary, don't cook over like diesel fuel or anything like that, but
you get the picture.
What I like to do instead when I'm mincing an onion is I'll sort of split the difference
between what we did in the dice and what we did here in the mince.
Now it'll start the same way.
Right in the middle, I'm going to do one vertical cut, but rather than staying up and down,
I'm going to proceed around each side.
Continuing to cut radially down towards the center of the onion, again, leaving intact
the bulb or the root I should say, Now when I'm cutting the side as it goes away from
me, I'm usually using the tip of the knife, but on the side closest to me, I usually start
with the heel.
That way I can kind of really precisely place my blade and drag the tip just so until it's
just shy of the root.
And the reason I like doing this is all of your cuts that you do here are against the
cutting board.
You're never lifting the blade up scooting it sideways through the onion, I find it a
little bit safer and a little bit easier as well.
Once we've got that radial cut all the way around.
Now we do our slice cut from the beginning or push cut or rocking cut, whichever you
prefer.
still nice and fine, a really good dice.
This does a really good job, but if you find you need an even finer mince at this point,
this is where it works with both styles of knives, the santoku and the chef knife, but
the chef may have a little bit of an advantage.
Due to the nature it's rocking nature, but again, this one's a nice hybrid.
so we can simply come in and do a rocking cut like so on the cutting board with our
front hand out near the tip.
Going through our onions until we got it as fine as we want.
(knife chopping) Before we wrap up, I got one more cut to show you and that's the petal
or wedge.
Now in this case, I'm going to take my next onion half, and I am going to remove the root
end of this onion.
Now what's nice about this particular cut is it looks kind of fancy, but it's still
very easy to do.
The first thing we're going to do now that we've got both ends off of this half onion,
split it right down the middle.
Now if you're doing something like kebabs, you can stop right there, because you can
peel off those layers and have something that's going to fit very nicely on a skewer with
the rest of your vegetables or meat.
But what we're going to do is actually going to take things a step further, we're going
to build on that radial cut that I did in my little shortcut there.
Only we don't have the, we're not going to do the slice after it.
instead, (knife cuts) We just come through that radial cut right towards the middle.
And then essentially, you've got these nice, thin wedges or pedals that you can break apart.
And I really like this for something like salads they look really nice because you don't
really see people using this technique quite as much works great in something like Like
a hash or a quiche, especially if you're using like a red onion for a little pop of color,
this is all about presentation, this particular cut, it's really going to help things look
just that much better.
Right.
Hopefully that helps you out and gives you a few different ideas, a few different ways
to cut up some onions.
But this is just the start once you start mastering some of these skills, there's all
kinds of different things you can do in the kitchen with the skills you pick up here.
If you want to get your hands on any of the knives I used here, these great Shun Sora
knives, we'll leave links in the description to take you over to KnifeCenter.com, as well
as all the rest of our collection of kitchen knives and kitchen gadgets that we sell.
In the meantime, guys, I hope you're staying safe, sane and sanitary out there.
I'm David C. Andersen from the KnifeCenter, signing off.
See you next time.
(KnifeCenter.com)