Prepare Cheese for Tomato & Parmesan Soup Recipe

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis, on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to show you how to make rustic Italian Bread, Tomato and Parmesan Soup. It's going to be excellent. Now we're going to go for our cup of Parmesan cheese. This is actually some cheese rind I had lying around. There's probably a tiny bit of useful Parmesan on here. It's not a whole lot, but there is some on here. This is pretty much all rind. We want to keep the rind, though; the rind is very important for this recipe. There's that piece. You'll see that obviously, this piece has got a whole lot of rind in it. What we can do is trim away at it, and you have to be really careful when doing this because the knife can let go at any second, and cause you great pain. I'm going to take the easy way out on this one. I'm actually going to cut this piece. Wow, this is some mighty oily cheese. I'm going to cut this piece around the rind. I'll just cut the rind clean off, right here. That's cheese rind; important to the recipe, but not important to the eating part. You can see, I've actually got a little rind on this, which I'll cut off in a second. We'll just go right on the top of this, following the curvature of the cheese. It looks like I pretty much got it all; there's a little bit on this corner, I want to cut off a little bit there, and that is all cheese rind. What we're going to do right now is take the remaining Parmesan, and you can chop it, or you can grate it. I don't really like grating Parmesan cheese, it just crumbles too much. What I do is take my knife, and as long as you cut it into small enough pieces you're fine with the way this soup cooks. I'm just going to cut my Parmesan into a nice little small dice almost, or just a little tiny chop. That's a couple ounces right there. What I'll do is cut it like this into a more manageable piece, and really, the one cup that I said is in this recipe is not a rule. If you like more Parmesan, put more in. Some people make this where it's really very subtle. Some people make it where it's really gooey, like a beer cheese soup. It's a matter of preference. Here you can see that I've got my cup (and then some) of Parmesan cheese, and also my cheese rinds. With that, I think we can probably go ahead and get started making our soup."