Pro Cooking Tips! Tip #1- Red Onions!

Today EL the Cook, introduces a new section of the site called "Pro Cooking Tips!"

Its designed to give you those useful, time saving tips while your busy in your kitchen making your next fantastic meal!

Lets begin with the humble Red Onion:

Characters: Bulbous,Red or pink in color.

Storage: 3-4 months at room temperature

Uses: Base in many foods like curries, soups, salads.

Red Onions are notorious, for their sharp taste and infamous irritation of eyes while being cut!

Heres our Pro-Cooking tip to tame their flaming characters!

1) Freeze for 10 minutes : Just before you cut, place the required quantity of Red onions in the freezer. Might sound funny, but what this does is reduces the enzyme activity in the onion and thus reduces irritation in the eyes.

2) Run under cold water: After peeling the skin off the onion, submerge under cold water. This also reduces the enzymatic and acidic action of the onion vapors

3) Keep the root end intact: Leaving the root end intact also reduces irritation as the base or the eye of the onion has most of those sharp scents!

4) Keep cutting them:  The best way to avoid that unwanted irritation is to keep cutting the onion! As you cut more and more, irritation becomes less! 

DID YOU KNOW?

In 2008, The New Zealand Food & Crop Institute synthesized a strain of  "No Tears Onions" Using gene-silencing technology, they successfully made onions which don't make you cry!

So don't you cry tonight! Especially because of your onions!