Add Paste to Tomato & Parmesan Soup

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. All right, so it's been a few minutes. Let's carefully remove our lid, so as not to burn ourselves. Now we've got a little color here in the bottom, and that's fine by me. It's supposed to be a rustic soup; a little brown is good. So what we're going to do is we're going to add our sugar and our tomato paste. Back to the whole tomato paste thing. I know a lot of you are probably asking yourselves why am I using tomato paste for this. Tomato paste can impart a flavor that is thoroughly unique--actually it does, and you can't really make your own tomato paste very easily. I mean you can, but it won't be the same as the canned stuff, and people have been using tomato paste for years and years and years and years and years, so it's not offensive to use tomato paste. You would be surprised how many great restaurants you go to that use tomato paste every single day. My restaurants used to, so, back when I still worked in a restaurant--now, I just do this. So scrape down your sides, make sure everything is good. And we'll let let this go uncovered for a couple of minutes, because what we want to do is we want to kind of sear that tomato paste flavor onto the outside. So we're going to let this go, like I said, for a couple of minutes, and I'll come back and we're going to add in the broth and the parmesan cheese rind. It's been a couple of minutes, give this a good stir. I want to see some good browning on those onions in there, which I'm seeing. All right, so for our next step, we're going to add in our vegetable stock, as well as a quart of water, which I am just getting right out of the faucet here. There's that. And now--I just want to stir this up, and make sure it's nicely mixed together, which it is. And now, I took my parmesan cheese rind, tied a little string around it, and I'm going to put that just right in the soup, and I'm going to tie a little safety string here, so that way I'd always know where it is, and it's easier to pull out. You don't have to tie it up like this, but it's just force of habit for me. So I'm going to bring this--I'm going to crank this up onto high, I'm going to bring this to a boil and once this hits a boil we're going to add our tomatoes. So let's just give this a few minutes."