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Comment by CarVac | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised Kenji still does the horizontal cut at all. With the angled vertical cuts I find the horizontal cut entirely unnecessary. (Also a few years back I gave myself a nice flap avulsion doing the horizontal cut in an onion...)

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The weirder thing for me is that he makes the horizontal cut after the vertical cuts --- in fact, most cooks I've seen dicing onions do that --- and it seems completely backwards. It's safe and easy to make the horizontal cut on an intact onion half, but much harder after it's been cut up vertically.

making the single horizontal cut first makes every vertical cut after more difficult to perform without harming the structure of the onion.

technique and a sharp knife enable the horizontal cut second to be vastly superior to doing it first.

I'm not sure I understand. My knives are razor sharp (I keep a Shapton 1000 and 4000 on my counter along with a strop, my daily driver is a carbon steel I have to wipe down every time I cut a vegetable). They sail through the onion, but the sliced-up onion still splays out to both sides when I make the horizontal cut, and if you watch cooks doing it, it happens there too. What harm am I doing to the structure of the onion by doing it in the "wrong order"? They're the same cuts. The difference seems to be that in my order, the onion stays more stationary.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's a reason everyone is doing it this way, because it's kind of clearly more annoying than the way I'm doing it?

(I'm just nerding out on this).

Here's the way I'm thinking about this:

the vertical cuts do not significantly the internal structure of the onion as each individual cut I make does not entirely sever the connection between the thin vertical slices I'm making. This means that I can do a lot of these, and not worry about harming the overall structural integrity. Then I make a single horizontal cut which does harm the overall structural integrity. This is not intrinsic to the horizontal cut itself, but the fact that I have both horizontal and vertical cuts.

If I start with the horizontal cut, again I do not signficantly harm the structural integrity of the onion. However, each subsequent vertical cut I make is now going to individually compromise the integrity of the onion.

With a sufficiently sharp knife, the single horizontal cut at the end does not really pose a significant danger overall.

This all being said I almost never do the horizontal cut out of pure laziness, and instead prefer to just do angled vertical cuts analogous to the video. They're never perfect but fine enough for me...

I still don't get why you need the horizontal cut at all. The diagram at the bottom of the blog post shows how unnecessary it is when you do the vertical cuts at a narrow range of angles like that (which I have been doing for a while now).

The point of Kenji's method (really, all radial-ish methods, but radial is strictly worse) is that you don't have to do the horizontal slice. If you slice vertically, you do --- you can see it for yourself, if you don't the dice from the edges of the onion are almost twice as big as the diece from the center.

I’m sure I’ve seen a clip of some tv chef saying it is unnecessary. Maybe Jacques Pépin but not sure.

Probably Chef Jean Pierre.

angling the horizontal cut down is a good way to handle this. The horizontal cut is mostly only necessary for the lower sides of the onion anyways.

While narrating, Kenji says that he doesn't do the angled cuts at all, but it was an interesting math problem.

Invest in cut-resistant gloves. The few dollars will pay for themselves in non-lost time, plus you can use them on a mandolin.

NB: maybe stick a hotdog in one of the fingers to test it first.

I have them now, but's simpler to just avoid that one dangerous and unnecessary cut that proceeds towards my body instead. They taught that in Scouting, never cut towards yourself.

You need to cut in the direction of your body in some cases (for example when carving wood).

Two things to prevent injuries: a) never put any force if the material resists b) do it slowly.

And either learn to sharpen your knives yourself, or take them to a sharpening service. Dull knives require more force, and slip/catch more, so are more dangerous.

The trick I use for doing freehand sharpening is to color the bevel with a sharpie, that will show you if your angle is correct. You don't need a lot of stones, I just have one Sharpal double sided diamond stone, and then I move to a leather strop with 1 micron diamond emulsion compound.

Another very useful thing is an inexpensive jeweler's loupe so you can actually diagnose issues like not having removed the burr.

I looked into sharpening services in my city a few years back and they're like dry cleaners - every one was a mix of satisfied reviews and detailed "this person completely ruined my $600 knife" reviews. It was very off putting.

It's unlikely any sharpener is going to ruin your knife; at worst, they won't put the best possible edge on it. Your knife is probably just an inert hunk of steel. :)

Grinding too much of the edge does ruin the knife. Usually not the entire blade is hard enough to hold a good edge.

It's a fair point, but how likely do you think it is that any knife sharpening service is actually going to do that?

Oft repeated, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this actually studied in practice. And personally I suspect it’s more a clever meme by knife sellers.

> for example when carving wood

I've watched a lot of shows about the tools used for building log cabins in the pioneer days. I don't even know the names of them, but the tool for taking the bark off the tree by pulling the knife to you as you sit on the log is crazy. Also, the one where you straddle the log and swing the blade towards you between your legs is right up there too. Yet, I can't think of any way of making them better without using power tools.

Drawshave or drawknife and adz.

The drawknife is the safer of the two by far. It’s fairly hard to cut yourself when your whole body is moving the same direction. Similar to using a paring knife in your palm facing your thumb.

The adz however you just have to have good aim or pay the consequences!

Haha, jinx : )

Draw knife. As long as you are leaning instead of pulling its relatively safe. Same as its safe to pare by contracting your hand muscles instead of pushing a knife toward yourself.

Draw knives are even safer than paring knives: the handles are placed such that they're closer to you than the blade, it's extremely difficult to get your chest far enough forward that it could contact the blade without a very large chest.

My standard housewarming gift is cut gloves and a pack of nitrile gloves to put over them. The nitrile gloves are so you don't have to wash the cut gloves so often.

Do people actually use them? Seems too much of a hassle unless you are in a professianl kitchen and cutting all day.

IME kitchen knife injuries are just not common or severe enough to warrant something like that.

Another thing to get out, another thing to clean, another thing to put away.

All because we want to chew less. (I suppose nice texture too)

Just always keep them on and never wash them. Bonus: immunity to papercuts forever.

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