Chopping Onions for Chili

Lieutenant Tom Papoutsis: Next, we are going to go to our onions. We have got three of these huge sweet onions, but what we are going to do, I am going to show you a quick basic simple way, we are going to cut the ends off here, these end up into here, we will get some of that out of there. Id like to take my onions, slice down in the middle, and then it makes it easier to get the peel off. Just kind of take off all the outer skin thats kind of dried, you can see there is a difference how yellow that is, and then once we get into the center here, it starts to get a little more white thats where we want to be. So, you are going to lose about one or two layers typically of the onion. So, we are going to peel this back.

Now, the way I learned to do onions was the way my grandmother used to do it, and this little woman used to take and she would slice these onions down, not all the way through, but you would slice it down like that, and then take and what I do is I come through, and I dont go all the way back, I am staying right here, and I kind of cut it like that, and this is going to dice very easily, because I am going to take my fingers and I am going to hold that altogether. I am going to come straight down through, and when its done, you are going to see these are real nice little pieces of diced onion. When we get down to that point, where we stop we have this, I just flip it over, and we are just going to chop it, just like that. We are going to do that with all of our onions and that will give us a nice chop. Dont be too concerned about making your onions, real tiny small, this is chili okay, its not Rocket Science. I call it Kitchen Chemistry, but this is chili, and we want some big pieces in there.

There is our onion, we are going to go ahead and do that one a little bit later.