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Today we are going to be learning how to dice out an onion. Onions are the darlings of the
culinary world. You can have and do so many things with an onion. So first things first
we have our safety set- up, a damp towel, underneath the cutting board, it gives us
good stability on there. I've already sharpened a chef's knife as well as a utility knife,
sharp knifes are safe knifes. And we have a scrap bowl and a good cuts bowl. So we are
ready to rock. Ok, with an onion there are two parts and the top part is what I refer
to as the North Pole, it's the part that's going to grow up in the ground and the bottom
part is the South Pole and that's the part that roots the onion in the ground and it's
the strongest part so we want to leave that intact. With our fingers in the claw position,
protecting our nails, we are going to hold onto the onion, and we'll take the utility
knife and slice down the root end, this guys going to go in our scrap bowl, along with
that, and then, a little piece there, now we have a flat surface, and flat surfaces
are safe surfaces. So that's what we are going for. Now I'm going to use the big knife, the
Chefs knife, cause this root end is pretty strong. Again it's what's holding the plant
together. So point down, hand over the top and using the leverage in your shoulder, pull
through with the knife and slice your onion. This guy can go in there. Now we have our
two onion halves which is what we are going for. We are only going to dice out one today.
That guy can just hang out. I'm going to put this kind of stuff over here. Now you want
to peel out the outer skin and if you peel it and discover that your onion has a little
funk on it peel that layer out too. We don't want funky onions. Done. So now we are going
to take our and lay it down and what we are going to do is create a grid, so the first
incision that we are going to make is going to go horizontally into our onion. So your
going to take the utility knife and go down towards the bottom here and your going to
rock it in. And then stop, I can't go all the way because I've left this root on and
that's the key part the root holds it all together. And I'm going to pull the knife
out and go a little bit further up and rock that knife in. And stop, that's all, and so
I've got my two horizontal cuts. So now I'm going to turn it this way and I'm going to
fan, again protecting the fingers, finger tips down, and making the slices back. Now
I'm not going all the way to the root cause again it's holding me together, so we are
just going to go partially back. And keep going. Now this is going to be about a medium
dice, if you wanted to do a small dice you would make your fan cuts closer together,
a large dice you would spread them out. I'm going to turn this guy and just because I
do it this way I'm going to now go in this way. I like to change it up. Ok so now we
have our fan and we are going to turn the onion and holding it together and dice it
out, the whole thing. So as you can see because I created that matrix, that grid, they all
come out in small pieces. So your just going to keep going, keep dicing your onion. Now
when you get down to the end here where its a little bit unstable right I can't keep going
there, it's not safe for me, and that's another thing, we want to be thinking of safety first
always when using knifes. Let it fall down and then you can go this way, and chop chop
chop and turn it to this side and chop chop chop. So you get that entire onion chopped
and this is all that's left of the onion. So we are going to take this and into our
scrap bowl it goes and then our nice cuts are going to go into our product bowl. And
there you go the half of an onion is diced out and ready to be used in our recipes.