The base of pretty much everything

I had a friend over for dinner the other week. He worked as a cook for a decade; his father is a regionally famous chef. He knows food, and cooks all the time for himself in a way that is similar to what I do. And I was like “we’re both bad at chopping onions, right?”

“Oh absolutely, I suck at onions.”

This person has chopped tens of thousands of onions. I have chopped thousands of onions. None of them have ever been good. I’m not even certain that I’m doing it right, for whatever definition of “right” you so desire. I will only get less bad at chopping onions until I die, and then on my deathbed I will be handed a chef’s knife, an onion, and a cutting board, and I will chop the perfect onion in the perfect way, and die.

Clearly, this is not going to be a how-to for chopping onions. This is about finding them. Sourcing onions is both easier & harder than you think. They are at every grocery store, and they are always good enough. Put in two ticks more effort and source them at the farmers market anyway, because they are vastly better, and they improve everything you make. Onions start coming in in June, and they persist through most of the summer. You know you’ve found a good onion when you don’t have to work with skin, when it is _ all_ good and fresh. Onions at their best are sweet & perfumed, not bitter or spicy.