r/Cooking•
PeanutNo7954

Sweaty onions

(This got removed from r/AskCulinary, they suggested bringing it over here.)

No, not sweating onions.

Earlier tonight, I finely chopped a little over 1/2 cup of yellow onion for a chicken pot pie. (Got to do something with the breast meat from the Costco rotisserie chicken after all the dark meat is gone!)

While chopping, it's getting warm in the kitchen, and a drop of sweat fell right into the pile of chopped onion on the cutting board.

I hesitated about half a second, and thought, "It's getting sauteed in butter, then baked in the pie, it's one drop out of a cup and a half or so of liquid, screw it."

I don't plan on mentioning it to my sister, who is the only other person likely to be eating the pie.

Anyone else do this? Am I totally out of line, horribly gross? Or is this as minor as I'm treating it? I feel like hair is about 1000x worse than sweat.

And yes, I'm well aware of how much "foreign matter" is allowed in foodstuffs per the FDA. I worked at a manufacturer that made the Risograph, Mixograph, and also a cute little machine we called "the bug crusher." It literally counted how many seeds out of a sample had a larva inside them, by crushing the seed, and counting the ones with bugs by the change in electrical conductivity. So I know the food we all eat and ingredients we all make our food with aren't pure to start with.

Posted Jun 23, 2025, 4:27 AM UTC

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