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Cool analysis if you happen to have cylindrical onions and infinitely long knives laying around.
Extending the study to an onion’s actual shape, the conclusion would be conical cuts…
Banach-Tarski may be relevant here… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach–Tarski_paradox
They also completely missed the point of the two additional cuts method and made the lowest cut about where the highest cut should be.
This is about making all the chunks the same size.
It’d be more useful to tell me the lowest possible number of cuts.
the lowest possible number of cuts for what?
Dicing an onion
Cut off the bottom. Cut in half. Peel. Cut diagonal slices without separating from the root end. Both halves should still be intact, and the only exposed cut is where you cut off the end. Now every slice from the end will make a set of chopped pieces.
This is close to what I do. I cut the root end and the opposing end off, using the connecting bits to peel the onion. Then I stand it on the cut end and make vertical cuts down to about ½cm above the end of the onion, leaving everything connected. Rotate 90° and repeat until you’ve got a Bloomin’ Onion cut. Then turn the onion 90° on its side, and make vertical cuts again until you get to the part you didn’t dice. You can save this part for later quite easily, if you didn’t need a whole onion; otherwise place it on the cutting board, cut-face down, and dice in a grid pattern.
It doesn’t give you perfectly uniform sizes, and it’s not the fastest, but it’s a good midpoint between uniform and speedy.
For actual cooking, chop off the root part (it holds all the layers together), then perform two cuts to chop the onion in four equal pieces. Then press each quarter with your finger and it will separate into individual layers thin enough to fry in a pan.
You can even do it with two half-onions, but you’ll squish some layers when separating them, or you’ll spend too much time carefully separating them with a knife or a spoon.
my knife isnt sharp enough for this
why do all that when you could just do this? it’s much faster.
And here I am using a food processor to chop my onions into little uniform bits.
Bad testing regime. Missed whole categories, food processor, mandolin, alternating depth, etc. Include time taken and clean up needed. I cut radial, alternating 50% depth and 100% depth cuts.
I’m not fully understanding the last bit, why alternating depths?
I think I get their point. The layers closest to the center of the onion have the smallest radius, so by only going all the way with every other cut, the smaller pieces toward the center of the onion get cut half as many times.
Using my mandolin where you slightly rotate the onion after each cut works wonderfully.
I just stick it in the whirry blade thing.
