
My best friend Chloe hates chopping onions so much, she firmly believes that, if there's a God and He has a Dantean taste for customized punishments, she will be damned to an eternity of onion chopping in the afterlife. She also doesn't care for the taste of onions. So she never willingly chops them.
I do like the taste of onions. Not so much raw. But certainly caramelized or fried or sautéed as a base of flavor in lentils or chili or braised short ribs. So I chop onions regularly, though not happily. Onion chopping is one of two things in the world that can consistently make me cry. (The other is "Friday Night Lights.")
Once, after my eyes had stung and wept with unusual viciousness, I Googled the phrase "onion tears eye drops," in the hopes that some modern-day Edison had invented such a product. None had. But I quickly found that the gods of industry were shilling a host of other potential solutions, and that generations of wise, teary-eyed cooks had developed dozens of ad hoc methods for stemming the flow of tears.
So I decided to test an array of 15 of these methods and products. I diced a relatively mild yellow organic onion using each potential cure, waiting several minutes between each test to take notes and reset my tear ducts. Then I went back and re-tested each method using red and white onions to make sure the mildness of the first ones hadn't skewed the results. Click through below to see what I found:

Results: Slight pain and tearing up after a minute of chopping, but since this was my first bulb, nothing too crazy.

Results: It's definitely a little easier and faster to chop the onion with a sharp blade, but only slightly less painful. I still started to tear up after a couple minutes. Note: We tried this method first, and you can't unsharpen a knife. So the knife was sharp, rather than dull, for all subsequent knife-based methods.

Results: This cut crying a bit, but didn't wholly eliminate it. Plus the resulting diced onions were a little waterlogged, and you have to plan an hour ahead to prepare the onions.

Results: Totally worked: I was tear- and pain-free while chopping this onion. Then again, the onion slices were cold, which could be a problem if you're serving them raw or cooking them with other ingredients. Also, you have to plan ahead at least a half an hour.

Results: This worked well, with few tears, and required no advance preparation. But the technique was tricky; I had to wield the blade slowly and carefully to avoid slicing down through the root.

Results: I felt like a buffoon reaching down into the sink to try this one, but it admittedly passed the tear test. No crying whatsoever. Only it introduced a whole other set of problems: my fingers got numb from the cold water, it was hard to keep my cuts precise and the diced onions ended up wet, even waterlogged, at the end.

Results: This didn't seem to do anything but waste a bunch of distilled vinegar and lend a slightly acidic taste to the onions.

Results: Pounding all that salt into the onions made them weep a noticeable amount of water, significantly more than normal -- and, strangely, seemed to help ward off tears a tiny bit.But not much.

Results: This didn't help at all. It was also weirdly hard to concentrate on the gum chewing and the onion chopping at the same time.

Results: SHOCKINGLY, this didn't help at all. I did look like an idiot while doing it though!

Results: Remarkably, this seemed to work well, and was relatively easy to do. The flame of the candle got larger and brighter every time I chopped, perhaps indicating that it was burning the irritating oils away.

Results: Here's the deal with Onion Goggles: You have to commit. If you start your chopping session wearing goggles, they work great. But if you start without goggles, chop a few, then put them on, they're awful. In this latter case, they strangely made my eyes sting more, not less -- perhaps they decrease the amount of air circulation in my eye socket, intensifying the tear effect of any irritants already in the air.

Results: Pretty much the same deal as the Onion Goggles, only more so. That's to say, if you put them on before chopping, you'll be 100% protected from crying. But if you put them on mid-chop, you might as well be watching "Terms of Endearment."

Results: The three machine-based methods all share one fatal flaw: you have to peel and halve the onion before using them, which puts you at risk for a few tears right away. But this one has the additional drawback that it doesn't work properly. It just wouldn't chop the onions properly. At all. Who cares about crying if you can't get a proper chop?

Results: Though this has the same caveat as the other two "machines," it's by far the best among them. As long as you put a little elbow behind the press, you get a clean, delicate dice of onions, without any tears whatsoever. The only problem was that it was slightly hard to clean. Still, a winner.

Results: This chopper (which was basically a micro-food processor) was so small that I actually had to quarter, not just halve, the onion to fit it in, bringing me basically halfway to dicing. And the blades had trouble reckoning even with an object as big as a quarter onion; by the time they'd gotten through the entire thing, they'd shredded the first few slices they'd touched into a pulpy mush. That said, no tears after peeling and quartering the onion.


Also on HuffPost: