Ingredients & Advice for Making Traditional Italian Tomato Cheese Crustinis

Series Summary

Italian cuisine has been known around the world for centuries to be some of the best on the planet. The flavors, textures and varieties of foods there are unlike anywhere else in the world. Italians are lovers of food as all the Godfather movies will attest to. A meal to Italians is not just food. It is friends, family and personal time that always takes front seat to any other issues. Naturally, because of this the food itself must be the best. There are usually multiple courses that are brought to the table in what is known as “family style.” That is that there is a community plate or bowl that everyone takes their portions from. This creates even more of a family feeling at the table. If you've never eaten with an Italian that needs to be on your to-do list.

There are so many great Italian dishes with varieties of flavors and textures that it's easy to get lost in the possibilities of what to prepare. Luckily our expert Judith Amdur has given us some fantastic choices that your friends and family will be talking about for weeks. Beef steak Florentine is one of the most succulent steaks on the planet and she will show you how to cook it like the pros along with all the other courses involved in the meal. The salad, baked veggies and even a desert are also part of this video clip series so the next time you have a dinner party you can make sure there's something for everyone!

Video Transcript

"Hello, I’m Judith Amdur with expertvillage.com. Today I will be making an Italian dinner for our first course, which would be our hors d’oeuvre, I’m making Tomato Cheese Crustinis. The first step we would get is a long, buy a long narrow loaf of bread, an Italian rustic bread if possible, and also it's really good to cut it on a wooden board as opposed to a plastic board, because it's better for your knife. I bought this knife especially for cutting bread, it has the serrated edge, if you’re going to any chefy store of any kind, go ahead and get a bread knife, because it will start cutting in immediately rather than bouncing on the crust of the loaf, which an ordinary knife would do that. So I’m going to go ahead and cut off the first end of the loaf, which we’re not going to be using, but then the rest of our cuts will be approximately a quarter of an inch thick and we like them small and that’s why we get the long thin loaf. "