We all cry to cut onion. Or do you know these tricks? This treacherous food has a lot of physics to tell you.
When the onions are cut, they free a mixture of sulfur -rich compounds, one of which is the oxide of syn-propanethial-S. This chemical activates the eye nerves responsible for tear production, details a.
The goal is, therefore, to reduce the liberation of this substance. The authors of one published this month and available in ARXIV made use of an electronic microscope to measure the width of the blade tip, which ranged from 5 to 200 millimeters.
When we sliced the onion with a knife that lost the cut, the blade causes the onion skin to bend, storing elastic energy and increasing the pressure inside the onion.
When the skin erupts, it does it more explosively, causing some particles to reach speeds of up to 40 meters per second, and they can even be fragmented. The best is, therefore, to have the Knife as sharp as possible.
The most recommended is also a Slow cut – A faster speed produces four times more particles.
“Cut is a very strange process,” he says of the University of Manchester, the United Kingdom. “We cut things with knives every day, but To cut something, it is necessary to go down to the atomic scale“.
“If it will really change a lot in the kitchen? It is not obvious to me that it will be particularly useful,” he concludes.
