No more crying in the kitchen, thanks to onion that won’t make you blub

LONDON, March 6 — As long ago as the 1st century BC, Pliny the Elder, the Roman author, described in his Naturalis Historia the way that chopping onions makes you cry. Now Japanese scientists have brought to an end two millennia of culinary weeping with the creation of an onion that does not make the eyes water. The Smile Ball, as the variety is called, is cultivated in the northern island of Hokkaido and its popularity is growing — 180 tonnes are expected to be sold this year.

Its cultivators claim that, after centuries as a supporting actor to other, less pungent ingredients, onions can now take on a starring role as delicacies in their own right. “Roughly chop them into pieces about five to seven millimetres thick, toss with a little salt, dried herbs and olive oil, and you’ll taste their sweetness and they’ll pair perfectly with white wine,” says Noriya Masamura, of the company House Foods Group, which has been at the forefront of non-pungent onion research for two decades. • ‘No chips please’: how one man convinced an entire school to choose salad Many cooks have their own trick for avoiding onion-induced weeping, from placing the vegetable in a bowl of water, freezing it or chopping it while holding a piece of bread in the mouth.

The Smile Ball owes its existence to a discovery about what it is in onions that makes the eyes water. It had long been understood that cutting onions releases enzymes that create a volatile gas. This reacts with the natural moisture of the eye to form a mild sulphuric acid.

Tears are the body’s way of flushing out this uncomfortable irritant. In a paper in Nature in 2002, a Japanese team led by Dr Shinsuke Imai identified the previously undiscovered enzyme that sets off this process: lachrymatory-factor synthase. They subsequently bred a “non-lachrymatory” vegetable that looks like an onion, tastes like an onion and has the same nutritional value, but that doesn’t produce an acid in human eyes.

• How can you cut onions without crying? Imai’s discovery won the Ig Nobel Prize in 2013, a parody of the Nobel which is awarded to unintentionally hilarious discoveries. The Smile Ball, which costs about 70p for a large bulb, is in a different category from Sunions, an American onion sold in Waitrose for £1.

60 for a packet of three. Sunions are the result of more than 30 years of conventional cross-breeding of mild onions. Although the product’s tear-causing properties are reduced, they are not eliminated.

Smile Balls, on the other hand, were created by bombarding onions with heavy-ion beams to produce mutants, eliminating nearly all of the weeping agents. The same technology has been used on other plants to create flowers that last longer, salt-resistant rice, hypoallergenic peanuts and wormwood that contains an ingredient deadly to malaria parasites. Despite Sunions not entirely removing tears, they have proven very popular with shoppers, with sales rising 30 per cent last year, according to Moulton Bulb, the company that grows them in Lincolnshire.

Onions in general are one of Britain’s most-eaten vegetables, with the typical adult consuming about 60-to-70 each year, the equivalent of nearly one and a half a week. However, this consumption rate still puts us below our European neighbours who typically get through about 80 onions a year each while the worldwide average is nearly 100 onions each. Despite onions’ popularity, munching them whole and raw has never caught on, not helped by the revelation that it was a habit of the serial killer Fred West.

But the creators of the Smile Ball believe that the tearless variety will impart to the onion the status of a delicious apple. Masamura told the Mainichi newspaper: “I highly recommend that people try eating thick slices of raw onions. ”