By no means Cry Whereas Slicing Onions Once more—This Science-Backed Trick Truly Works

I used to be standing on the kitchen counter getting ready dinner. Tears rolled down my cheeks. I sniffled and tried to wipe my eyes with my sleeves. I wasn’t crying over spilled milk, nor was I crying due to a damaged coronary heart. I used to be crying as a result of I used to be chopping an particularly pungent onion—one with an aroma so highly effective you may odor it throughout my residence. So many recipes begin with onions that in case you prepare dinner in any respect, you’ve got undoubtedly skilled the disagreeable, tear-inducing results of an onion. However why does this occur, and is there any option to reduce the vegetable’s irritating results on our tear ducts?

When onions expertise cell injury—akin to once they’re minimize—their cells launch alliinase, an enzyme that produces sulfur compounds. In his e book On Meals and Cooking, meals science author Harold McGee notes that that is the vegetable’s protection mechanism. In keeping with McGee, crops “compensate for his or her immobility with a exceptional capacity for chemical synthesis” and “produce hundreds of strong-tasting, typically toxic warning indicators” to discourage predators from attacking them. These sulfur compounds launched by the onion are meant to “annoy and repel” their attackers by irritating their mouths, nasal passages, and eyes.

These compounds are particularly potent at room temperature. In his cookbook Veg-Desk, Severe Eats contributor Nik Sharma writes, “The enzyme alliinase produces its most potent chemical substances at hotter temperatures; chilly temperatures will cut back the exercise of this enzyme.” So to attenuate the tear-inducing results of an onion, Sharma merely refrigerates his onions for an hour or two earlier than utilizing them.

I learn in regards to the methodology in Veg-Desk shortly after the e book was launched in 2023, and was curious to check it out myself—so I refrigerated an onion for an hour earlier than slicing it. Miraculously, I didn’t shed a single tear. Though I used to be skeptical, I’m now a transformed believer who won’t ever minimize an onion with out first refrigerating it. I ought to be aware that that is solely anecdotal; I’ve not scientifically or methodically examined it towards different methods, however in my private expertise, it has confirmed to work extraordinarily nicely. Onions might have as soon as irritated and repelled me, however due to this straightforward trick for decreasing kitchen tears, they not do.

June 2025