How to prepare an onion

✅ The essentials

The onion is the base of almost every sauce, soup and stew. It is cut three ways depending on what you want to do with it, and once you know how to hold it, it goes fast.

🛒 Choosing it

Firm, dry, with no strong smell and no green shoot coming out of the top. A soft onion, or one that has sprouted, is old.

🧼 Preparing it

Cut the top, leave the root, cut it in half from top to bottom and take the skin off. The root holds the layers together while you cut, you remove it at the end.

🔪 Cutting it for the dish

• Sliced, in thin strips, to sauté at the start of a sauce or a stew.
• Finely diced, for a vinaigrette, a stuffing or raw vegetables.
• In rounds or rings, for a tart, a burger or a salad.

⏱️ How long it takes

Two minutes per onion.

🧊 Storing it

Whole, somewhere dry and away from light, not in the fridge: it keeps several weeks. Cut, in a container in the fridge, two or three days.

🍽️ Make it tonight

The grandma-style bolognese sauce: a sliced onion is the very first step.