How to Chop an Onion

This blog was originally created several years ago to do what a lot of blogs do, to document our lives. It started one New Years Day when I made a resolution to start a family blog. Like most resolutions it started out with good intent, but began to fizzle out and was neglected. We lived what we thought to be boring lives and our blog began to read like many of my journals, "Let's recap the last 9 months," or "I know I haven't been very good at writing." The blog then took a turn and evolved into me sharing recipes and my passion of cooking and eating. From there it spring boarded into Holli's passion of all things crafty. We now have a culmination of life, food, and crafts. Our little blog has evolved from only documenting our life, to sharing our passions with others. We love doing what we do, but we love sharing it more.

I know not all our readers are master seamstresses and executive chefs, but I'm sure there is a wide range of skill amongst you. Some may not be able to boil water or thread a needle and other's may be able to make a soufle or a wedding dress with their eyes closed. I think sometimes things can seems daunting because we just don't know the fundamentals. I look at Holli's sewing machine and think, "How does anyone know how use this?"  When things seem too overwhelming I think we tend to give up before we try.

So I have decided to bring things back to the basics. I will be including a lot of how-to instruction to many of cookings most basic tasks. I will do my best to explain when, why, and how we do certain things. I have a feeling we will all learn a lot in this process. I am no expert, but I have learned a lot from the internet and cookbooks. So I thought I would pass along some of that information to you. My first instructional how to blog will be on how to chop an onion. I'm also going to talk about the difference of chop, dice and mince.

Chopping an onion is one of the most basic skills when cooking. One thing we want to keep in mind when chopping things is uniformity. When pieces of food are the same size things will cook evenly. When some pieces of food are bigger or smaller then others they may be over or under cooked and the dish will not be uniform. With that said here is a nice little video I found on You Tube on how to chop an onion. It's from good housekeeping so it kind of has that old time video feel that you would see in a Home Ec. class.



Now that we know how to chop an onion, let's talk about the difference between chop, dice, and mince.

Source

Chopping
When chopping there is no set size for the pieces of food you are cutting. A good rule of thumb is that the pieces of food should be bite size.  Remember whatever size you decide to chop, keep them uniform. chopping is used for ingredients that you want to retain their character. Like in a chicken noodle soup you want your vegetables to flavor the overall dish but you still want them to be in big chunks and to look like vegetables.

Dicing
Dicing is a smaller cut than a chop and is normally around 1/4" to 1/8" pieces. Dicing is used when you still want to taste the ingredient, but want it to have a milder impact on the dish.

Mincing
Mincing is the finest off all the cuts.When you mince something you want it to almost disappear or blend into the dish while still adding to the over all flavor. This is usually true with things like herbs.

Deciding when to chop, dice or mince can effect the flavor, texture, and cooking time of the dish. cutting foods into smaller pieces increases the foods exposed surface area, allowing them to be cooked more evenly.

Of course you could always just buy the slap chop from this guy. But then you might as well throw uniformity out the door.

I'll sell you a slap chop for your soul!