How to dice an onion

Chef Skills

Michelin star Chef Russel Brown takes us through How to dice an onion. A simple process that requires good knife skill and practice, this is used as a basic preparation for young Chefs and industry professionals as part of their basic training.

In this video, we are going to show you how to dice an onion. So standard brown onion and we are going to start just by trimming the root off, but leaving it intact still not cutting it right off take the top off the onion and then just peel the skin off, so I am just peeling down and a lot of this is easiest to do with your fingers, I'm just working my way around and you just want to look and check that you have peeled down far enough that there is not a papery skin there still that could do with removing.

At that stage just give the onions a wash you don't want to wash them after you have cut them because you will lose a lot of the flavour out, we are just going to give them a wash and we are going to cut the onion in half and we are leaving the root intact and I'm just going to slice the top off so that we are nice and square, I am going to just take this down maybe 1 more layer just to tidy it up, it is a little bit waxy that top layer and we are going to start by slicing down through the onion, so using the crab like that with your fingers and your slicing down from the root towards you like so, turn the onion around and then keeping your fingers right on top so that they are out the way, slice through and depending on the size dice you're after twice is about right then back to your crab, working down at a dice and when the onion gets to that sort of point there where it is about to tip just let it fall over and we can just do the sides like so and that's your diced onion.

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