Your Kitchen Needs a Little Fan

Image: Ian Moore, santypan, amnarj2006, Getty

Do enough cooking, and you will eventually injure or irritate some part of your body. Between sharp blades, hot burners, dirty ovens, and ornery onions, there are many ways to aggravate one or more of your senses. The eyes are particularly vulnerable to abuse, as they are quite delicate. (Though they are less likely to be injured than your fingers, which are always in the line of fire.) Luckily, there is an easy way to avoid killing your eyes: Get a cheap little fan and keep it in your kitchen.

A fan’s primary job is to move air around, and you can use one to move “bad” air away from your eyes and out the window (or at least out of the kitchen). If your casserole spills over and your oven starts to smoke, you can point a fan toward the fire alarm to silence its cries, then point it towards an open window to get the smoke out of your house. (Keep the oven closed, however. Opening it up just lets oxygen in, and oxygen is what drives combustion.)

Even if your kitchen isn’t smoky, it’s nice to have a fan around to drive unpleasant fried aromas or lingering fishy smells out the window. (I love fried food, but the smell of fry oil persists.)

And while you can enlist safety goggles, water, and even your freezer to cut down on onion tears, the best way to combat syn-Propanethial-S-oxide (the violent compound responsible for your watery eyes) is to physically move it away from the cutting board and out of the room, and a fan can accomplish that. (It’s the only way Alton Brown will cut onions, I’ve heard.)

Even better, this trick works instantly: There’s no waiting for the syn-Propanethial-S-oxide to be immobilized by the chill of the freezer, and no dunking anything in big buckets of water. All you have to do is set a fan next to your cutting board so the air blows across the onions and is flowing perpendicular to your body. Once it’s positioned, flip a switch and get to chopping, letting the fan blow the bad air away and saving your tender eyes from unnecessary pain.