It's noon on Sunday and you're back from the grocery store, ready to start prepping that triple-batch of ragu bolognese for the crowd of people you've agreed to feed later in about six hours.
And then you look down at your prep list: 6 onions, finely chopped. "What kind of masochist takes pleasure in chopping that many onions?" you ask out loud.
It's okay, I feel the same way. I'm the first to admit that my knife skills—while not bad—are pretty damn slow. I'm definitely not winning any onion chopping challenges, but I might have won the designation of "Most Careful" or "Lacking in Pace, But a Nice Guy" in my senior class if I'd gone to some sort of culinary vocational school.
Recently, Rhoda Boone, commander of all things Epi Test Kitchen, showed me an easier way. After years working in professional restaurant kitchens and being asked to slavishly chop onions ad nauseam, Rhoda wondered whether those onions really needed to be chopped by hand. "We'd always prep carrots and celery in the food processor," recalls Rhoda, "So why not onions?"
As Rhoda and the Test Kitchen team found out, there's no reason you shouldn't be using the food processor to chop onions.
In a test comparing hand-chopped onions to onions prepared in a food processor, Rhoda found very little difference between those prepared by hand and the ones she sent through the machine. Like magic, what would take an average home cook 10 minutes to chop—and countless tears—happened in less than 30 seconds with the press of a button. While they look a bit rougher than their hand-chopped brethren, they'll perform exactly the same way.
There are a few caveats here.
First off, you do have less control over the fineness of the chop when using the food processor—so if you happen to be employed in a three Michelin-starred French restaurant kitchen, this method might not be for you. (Oh, you're a home cook? Great, read on.)
If the recipe you're tackling calls for half an onion, it's probably not worth it to break out the food processor and deal with cleaning it afterward. Finally, if you're looking for grated onions, the don't bother using the shredding disk—Rhoda complained that the disk turned onions into a raggedy, watery mess. (The one time the shredder disk makes sense is if you're making latkes—you can pass the potatoes through at the same time and will end up draining the excess liquid anyway.)
The only thing left to do is figure out how to spend all the extra time you'll save.
