Many tricks promise to stop tears when chopping onions, but do they work?

HAVE you ever resorted to using a diving mask or swimming goggles to chop onions? That's probably a little extreme, but, throughout the ages, all kinds of tricks have been promising to keep cooks from shedding tears during their food preparation.

From a slice of bread or a match in the mouth to pre-cooking in the microwave, here's a look at some of these tricks and how effective they really are.

A few days ago, on British television, the celebrity presenter Phillip Schofield caused a sensation on his show "This Morning" by testing, on camera, a cooking trick lauded by TikTok. Basically, the presenter put a generous slice of bread into his mouth, without chewing it, before chopping an onion.

In fact, Philip Schofield had already tried the trick and promised viewers that it worked wonders, as he chopped away with no stinging eyes and no tears.

Why do onions make us cry?

His demonstration actually involves countering a completely natural phenomenon. When an onion is peeled, a gas is released. When this gas comes into contact with the tear fluid in our eyes, it turns into sulfuric acid. Initially, onions absorb sulfur from the soil, which is stored in the cells of the vegetable.

When sliced, the molecules are released, which in turn meet enzymes, and are eventually turned into a volatile, irritant gas.

The result is as immediate as it is unpleasant: we cry! And that can be annoying when you have several onions to chop, and you need to see what you're doing. So it's no surprise that people have been trying to counter this effect for years. On TikTok, the hashtag referring to advice on how not to cry when cutting onions has more than 188,000 views!

Preventing crying when cutting onions is a popular quest and one that's been underway for a very long time. In the United States, research has been conducted to develop a variety of onion that does not trigger this kind of reaction. In the states of Nevada and Washington, it took 30 years to obtain these non-genetically modified onions, called Sunions, that do not make cooks shed tears.

This new product offers an alternative to the countless age-old tricks that promise to prevent tears. In the past, it was thought that a match in the mouth could prevent crying. Similarly, it has long been advised to pass the knife blade under a trickle of cold water, if not lemon juice. Meanwhile, the American culinary goddess Martha Stewart recommended cutting an onion near a flame.

On TikTok, some suggest putting onions in the microwave for 20 seconds. A canteen chef recommends sharpening the knife to avoid spray. In fact, all kinds of often age-old tricks have come back into the spotlight, thanks to TikTokers! For example, @mamie.antoine recommends putting the onion in the freezer for 15 minutes.

All these recommendations have one aim: to prevent the gas that emanates from the onion cells when they are cut from reaching the eyes. Some are more effective than others, and in some cases, they can give rise to crazy and hilarious situations where TikTokers protect themselves with a snorkeling mask or a cooking pot lid wedged in front of their face, held in place by the hood of a sweatshirt ...

Everyone seems to have their own preferred approach when it comes to cooking the top-trending recipe of the moment on the Chinese social network: pasta with onions, which is sometimes referred to, somewhat dubiously, as French onion pasta. Some videos of this dish have been viewed more than a million times!