How to Chop and Sautee an Onion for Pasta Sauce

Bonjourno! My name is Marie Beirne, with MGB Special Events. Today, I am showing you how to make my mom s old fashioned pasta sauce with meatballs. This part of the process is where we going to chop an onion and saut it. First part is, we ve already diced up, part of the onion, I just want to show you how I do it. It s an easy way and it makes it a lot more safer also. After you have cut your onion in half, I like to keep the skin on, so it gives you a base of actually to have a hold on to it. And you simply take a very sharp knife, carefully, we are going in one direction, not too thick and this makes it just nice and easy and quick. Then we are going to turn it and make very thin slices. As you can see, it's dicing up this onion in a lot of different pieces and you don t even need to go back. As you get closer, you can hold on to the skin and it will keep your onion in place for you. And you toss that and then for the end pieces if you need to comeback, you can just dice it up. But that s nice and easy, okay. Now we are going to take our olive oil, just about a quarter cup, and we are going to pour it into the bottom of the pan. Just enough, not too much, you don t want it to be real oily sauce.

The olive oil that I like to use is Bertolli Extra Virgin, I always use extra virgin olive oil, I think it's the best olive oil, first press to mix it for a nice sauce. And you put it in there, and now we are going to go saut our onion on the stove. Okay, we are going to saut our onion now, just approximately five minutes, just until our onion is iridescent. Iridescent would be yellow and it would also have a shine to it. We don t want to brown our onions, we don t want to make it bitter, but we are just going to saut it, just enough, because of course, it's going to cook in the sauce, after we put in all of our other ingredients. So we want to get our spoon, and we are going to stir this up, just so that everything cooks evenly, every single onion gets top billing, and you could see, as we cook, right now it's a bright white and then you will see the difference when it is iridescent. Okay, so that s how you chop and saut an onion. Now that our onion is iridescent, we are going to go ahead and add all of our other ingredients. And this is where you going to see how easy this process actually is.