Thicken Tomato & Parmesan Soup

"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 about twenty minutes or so. We're going to remove the lid I have on there. You can see the bread has softened up significantly, so what's going to happen is, as you stir it, you should see your bread start to break down. This part really is kind of dependent on the bread you used. If you used a really soft bread, it'll take a little longer for your bread to break down; if you used a really hard bread, like it was--maybe there was something that was stale, which wouldn't be bad at all, it would actually break down a little faster usually. So, and of course you could try to cheat at this point and use a hand blender, but I'm not going to do that. You should--basically you should sit here and be able to stir all the bread into the soup to thicken it. So it's coming along nicely. You know, this may actually take a little longer because of the bread that I used. If that's the case, then I can just let it cook a little longer, won't hurt anything. But you do want to, at some point while you're doing this, usually at the end of that fifteen or twenty minutes or so, just start stirring the bread in and see where you go, and see how much longer you think it's going to take. If I had to guess, I probably should give this another fifteen to twenty minutes to--just to be honest, because this bread was fairly fresh. It doesn't really appear to be going in there as smoothly as it should be. You could also use bread crumbs, but that's no fun. So, I'm actually going to come back to this in just a little bit longer, and we'll show you the end result then. So, I'm going to let this go for just awhile longer, and I'll let you know when it's ready. Okay, so it's been a little while longer, and you can see that our bread is starting to break down quite a bit, so a couple things you can do to speed that process up. You can actually take a wire whip, and really just get in there and just kind of start smashing the bread around a little bit. Or you can kind of start doing this - this will help agitate the bread until it starts to break up a little bit. I personally don't mind the lumps, which is why I left the crust in. If you take the crust off, you're not going to get those lumps like that. And you can see, I've got a really fantastic looking, rustic color. Lots of like, browns and deep reds. You could, if you really wanted to, puree this soup. So we'll just stir it up like this, and that is going to be it for our soup. And now we shall move on to presentation."