Everyone's Cutting Onions Wrong And It's The Reason You Cry Buckets Every Single Time

Chefs barely tear up, and it comes down to one direction.

You stand at the chopping board, eyes streaming, blinking through the fumes, wondering how professional chefs power through mountains of onions without so much as a sniffle. It's not that they're tougher than you. They just don't attack the onion where it fights back hardest.

When you slice an onion you rupture its cells, releasing enzymes that mix and form a sulphur compound that floats up and stings your eyes. The highest concentration of those tear-triggering enzymes is packed into the root end, the hairy little base at the bottom.

So leave the root intact for as long as possible. Cut the top off, peel from there, and only slice through the root at the very last moment. Keeping it whole holds the cluster together and keeps the worst of the irritants sealed away while you work.

Add a genuinely sharp knife, which crushes fewer cells than a dull one, and chill the onion for fifteen minutes first to slow the reaction down. Combine all three and you'll chop through a whole bag with dry eyes and a smug little grin.