If you grate them you’ll end up with onion soup. A fine brunoise like this will hold its shape and texture in any sort of pan sauce, or mignonette, or tossed in vinaigrette.
But outside of fine dining kitchens there’s no need for any of the fancypants knifework.
I’ve spent way too much of my life doing fancypants knifework in ** kitchens.
edit: Grating them also causes far more damage to more cell walls releasing more sulfur compounds that make the onion turn bitter more quickly. There were some places I worked where’d we brunoise shallots a la minute (usually in raw preparations).
While I’m getting all nostalgic, this is my favorite knife for this kind of work. Able to take a great edge and super easy to sharpen. Doesn’t have fancy bolsters so it’s cheap enough (compared to the high end Japanese chefs knives you’ll find in fancylad kitchens) that it’s not the end of the world if you drop it in a deep fryer or it falls on the floor point first or any other random bullshit that happens in restaurants.
Kiddo got this set for Non-Specific-Winter-Gifting-Holiday when she was 7, and they’re real kitchen tools. She’s ready to move on now, hence the cut-resistant gloves.
Cause smashin shit doesn’t do that. If I need a paste or unreasonably small garlic or onion it goes in there these days.
It can be a bit of an arm work out if you’re doing a lot, but generally faster than breaking out and cleaning an appliance. It’s not a sub for a fine dice or brunoise though, cause of soup and burning issues.
Also the ONLY way to make pesto properly, turn the garlic into a cream, add the leaves and a bit of rock salt, then pine nuts, then cheese and oil… it’s amazing how different the same ingredients taste if you just blend them together.
Also, the whole idea that the way cooking is done in restaurant kitchens should be the goal for people cooking at home is ludicrous and probably stops plenty of folks from having fun in the kitchen or trying new things.
The disdain for tools like garlic presses or choppers or even timers is just a way to convince yourself that the years of toil and pain are meaningful.
That push through thingie would have been such a life-saver for me (many years ago now) when my wrist was fucked up. I couldn’t hold a knife to chop for more than 30 seconds at a time. Switching to my other hand was a short lived experiment in futility.
I dice onions the exact same way. It’s simple, precise, and pretty easy once you get the technique down and you don’t even need a super sharp knife. Those others though? Yeah, I’ll just use a Slap Chop.
I will shit talk the garlic presses till the end of time.
They’re a beast to clean. Clumsy to use. And make garlic taste like farts.
The farts taste doesn’t matter much in long cooked dishes, and people with grip problems may find them easier to wrangle than a knife.
But otherwise they’re one of those “easy” solutions that’s actually more time consuming, messier and just all round over complicated vs the actual easy way to do it.
Like a lot of kitchen gadgets it preys on the same sort of easy things are hard pitch that tends to stop folks from learning to cook or have fun in the kitchen.
Nah it’s from the way a garlic press crushes then extrudes it.
Alliums have these sulfur compounds in them that are released when you cut or break into them. The more cells you break up when you do that the more of them are released.
These compounds are what make finely cut garlic taste “hot”, and what make you cry with onions.
Cutting tends to break fewer cell walls, and smashing/grinding with the side of a knife or mortar and pestle apparently splits thing between the cells breaking even fewer. But really aggressive methods like the garlic press and grating break a whole hell of a lot. Too much sulfur and it tends to break down in the air into a kinda farty weirdness, creates the same compound as an over cooked egg yolk.
But like I said. None of that matters for long cooked stuff. After 15-30 minutes of cooking all sulfur off gases or starts to break down.
If I want to chop onions without a gas mask, then I need a food processor.
I’ve tried basically everything else recommended and still usually end up in the bathroom pouring cold water over my red snotty burning face for 10 minutes.
