Full Belly Fundamentals: How to Dice an Onion

Dicing an onion is one of the most fundamental building blocks of being a confident and quick cook. You might feel clumsy and intimidated when attempting this skill at the beginning of your cooking journey, but if you follow the steps below, it will soon become a quick easy skill that you can do in less than a minute.

Ingredients/Equipment

Onion
Knife
Cutting board
Paper towel

Let’s dice!

Step 1

Start by identifying the root end of the onion, the bottom of this picture, and cut it in half lengthwise, through the root or just to the side of it so you have two twin halves.

Step 2

Take one half, cut off the root and peel off the papery skin. Do not cut off the other side, keeping it intact makes sure that it doesn’t fall apart while you are doing the rest of the steps.

Step 3

Make several horizontal cuts, for a medium sized onion like this one, I normally make 3.

Step 4

Make vertical slices, getting as close to the top of the onion as possible, spacing them as far apart as you want the pieces to be.

Step 5

Finish dicing the onion by making your final set of slices perpendicular to the slices that you just made while holding the onion together with your fingers. Discard the top.

As you can see, this makes relatively uniformly sized pieces of diced onion very quickly and painlessly