I used to be standing on the kitchen counter making ready dinner. Tears rolled down my cheeks. I sniffled and tried to wipe my eyes with my sleeves. I wasn’t crying over spilled milk, nor was I crying due to a damaged coronary heart. I used to be crying as a result of I used to be chopping an particularly pungent onion—one with an aroma so highly effective you may odor it throughout my house. So many recipes begin with onions that if you happen to cook dinner in any respect, you’ve got undoubtedly skilled the disagreeable, tear-inducing results of an onion. However why does this occur, and is there any method to reduce the vegetable’s irritating results on our tear ducts?

When onions expertise cell harm—resembling after they’re reduce—their cells launch alliinase, an enzyme that produces sulfur compounds. In his guide On Meals and Cooking, meals science author Harold McGee notes that that is the vegetable’s protection mechanism. In response to McGee, vegetation “compensate for his or her immobility with a exceptional capability for chemical synthesis” and “produce hundreds of strong-tasting, typically toxic warning alerts” to discourage predators from attacking them. These sulfur compounds launched by the onion are supposed to “annoy and repel” their attackers by irritating their mouths, nasal passages, and eyes.

These compounds are particularly potent at room temperature. In his cookbook Veg-Desk, Critical Eats contributor Nik Sharma writes, “The enzyme alliinase produces its most potent chemical compounds at hotter temperatures; chilly temperatures will cut back the exercise of this enzyme.” So to reduce the tear-inducing results of an onion, Sharma merely refrigerates his onions for an hour or two earlier than utilizing them.

I learn in regards to the technique in Veg-Desk shortly after the guide was launched in 2023, and was curious to try it out myself—so I refrigerated an onion for an hour earlier than slicing it. Miraculously, I didn’t shed a single tear. Though I used to be skeptical, I’m now a transformed believer who won’t ever reduce an onion with out first refrigerating it. I ought to observe that that is solely anecdotal; I’ve not scientifically or methodically examined it towards different methods, however in my private expertise, it has confirmed to work extraordinarily properly. Onions might have as soon as aggravated and repelled me, however because of this easy trick for lowering kitchen tears, they now not do.

June 2025