Video: How to Cut Basil When Making Traditional Italian Tomato Cheese Crustinis

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Learn how to cut basil for tomato cheese crustinis in this free Italian cooking video lesson.

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Video Transcript

Now that we have our bread all cut in bite-sized pieces, the next step would be to take fresh basil and I always wash the basil really well first and spin it dry. If you don’t know what a salad spinner is, get them to a store and buy one, because they’re wonderful. Also I did brush all the crumbs off my board, which is really important in between jobs. So initially what I do, is I just stack up all the basil leaves like this and when I mean like this, I just make them into one big stack. It’s easier to start chopping that way and we’re going to chop these very fine. I’ve got a big ole knife here, be careful of your fingers, and so you can see that at first, I’ve got them all cut really well and then what I do is I’ve got a really great chef knife that I bought and it's very, very, very sharp, I sharpen it with an electrical knife sharpener that I bought, that’s supposed to be the best. I don’t know if it’s the best, you could use a steel too. Anyway, so what I do, is I just keep re-grouping the basil and then I just keep, chop, chop, chopping. The re-grouping gets it into a pile that’s really easy to work and we want it pretty small. So I think, maybe once or twice more through there. Oh, and the balancing thing I’m doing with the knife, you might be interested in too. Good knives are made to rock and so you can see that I’m holding it in my right hand and then holding the front of the knife on the top, like this, and then it just rocks and it's so easy to use, especially with the sharp knife. And that’s that step and this is how your basil should look, just really like medium fine.