Will Putting Onions in the Freezer Help Keep You From Crying?
I appreciate a good cry, but I don’t like it when my eyes get stingy and tearful just because I want to eat onions. I usually wear a pair of cheap laboratory goggles to protect my precious eye sockets, but there are several ways to tame the bulb. Placing onions in the freezer can reduce the volatility of syn-propaneethial S-oxide (a compound that causes tears), but how long do they need to refrigerate for this to be effective? Five minutes? 15? For half an hour?
I’ve seen conflicting reports on the time it takes for a cold to work, so I bought a bag of small white onions, put them in the freezer, took them out at five-minute intervals, and sliced them up to see if there was sync. Propaneethial S-oxide was immobilized. To make sure the test was fair, I used the same knife all the time, ventilated the chopping area by turning on the cooker hood between the onions, and made sure my eyes returned to their normal, unbearable state before grabbing the next one. I also wiped the cutting board and knife with a damp cloth so that there was no onion juice left over from the previous onion.
The onions that were chopped after five, 10 and 15 minutes stung just as hard as the room temperature onions, but after 20 minutes I was able to get to the end of the chopping process before I started to feel anything (my eyes started to buy up a bit. while shifting into containers). After 25 years, however, I was able to chop and store all the onions without any bite.
Obviously, not all bulbs are created equal, and the amount of syn-propaneethial S-oxide will vary depending on the size, color, and random growing conditions of the onions beyond your control. The yellow onions (which I used for this) are usually the most unpleasant, tearful, but the sweet Walla Walla makes me sad, and the shallots always seem especially mean, but 20-25 minutes should be enough. to reduce the volatility of most of these aggressive bulbs. If you are chopping more than one, remove them from the freezer one at a time to prevent the syn-propantial S-oxide from heating up during chopping.