Follow These Tips and You Will Never Cry While Cutting Onions Again

Do you cry like a Kardashian while cutting onions? Here's how to avoid that pathetic face...

1. Chill the Onion
A cold onion releases its tear-causing enzyme into the air at a much slower rate than a room temperature onion. But as you might remember from Lauren’s Fridge vs. Cupboard post, onions also take on a mealy texture in the fridge. For optimal texture and less tears, only chill your onion right before you are going to be chopping it—for one hour in the fridge or 15 minutes in the freezer.

2. Wear Goggles
You might look a little silly while wearing them, but they are a pretty effective solution for managing tears. If you don’t want to go out and spend on specialty kitchen specs, putting any type of airtight barrier between your eyes and the onion helps including contact lenses.

3. Breathe Through Your Mouth
This is the solution that I use most often. Since your olfactory nerves are located so close to your tear ducts, breathing the onion vapors in through your nose can also contribute to teary eyes. Breath through your mouth while chopping an onion to greatly reduce tears.

4. Get to the Root of the Problem
Since the irritating enzymes are confined to the onion’s “basal plate,” if you can avoid cutting into this area you will avoid tears entirely. Before you begin chopping your onion, cut a cone out of the root end of the onion that is about 1/3 the diameter of the onion and goes 1/3 deep. This area should encompass the entire basal plate. Once you have disposed of the cone, peel and chop the rest of your onion per usual.

5. Use a Food Processor
I use my food processor all the time for making things like pesto and Healthy No-Bake Cookie Dough Bites. But I often forget that my food processor can also be used to chop an onion quickly and easily—which means less time to start tearing up. This solution could be considered cheating since you’re not actually doing the chopping yourself… But hey, whatever works!