Slice Shallots for Vichyssoise Soup

"My name is Brandon Sarkis, on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to show you how to make Vichyssoise, which is a cold potato soup. The first things we're going to cut up are shallots, so what we have to do first is peel them. I've got a little bowl we can peel them into so we don't make too big of a mess. Since there are two of these on the same bulb, we're just going to snap them apart, like that. Try to get as much of this outside skin out of the way as we can, before you actually start cutting them because this stuff will just fall off and get into our onions, and it doesn't cook. We're getting to our soup, it doesn't cook. This one also consists of two pieces that are growing together, so we'll peel as much of this loose skin off as we can. What we're going to do to get the rest of the skin off is just take our knife, and cut right across the end, like that. It exposes an open end, and we're just going to take our knife, get underneath that, slice it open, and there we go. So now we've got our peeled shallots. What we're going to do is slice them into little thin slices. Not too thin though, we don't want to make them paper thin or anything. The idea here is that we're going to sweat this with the potato and with the onion, so we don't want to make it so small that it will brown. The last thing we want in this recipe is for anything to turn brown. This should be a nice yellowish-white color when it's done. We're just going to go ahead and cut these into little slices. That way, they get plenty of exposed surface area; you've got plenty of shallot that's out and touching the pan. That's the problem with cutting stuff too small; you reduce your surface area, and it makes it really easy to brown or burn whatever it is that you're cooking. If you're trying to do that, it's great. If you're not, as in this case, that would be bad. As with anything, especially onions and shallots, you want to make sure that you don't go rubbing your eyes afterwards because it will burn a whole lot. I've just got a little dish here. We're going to put everything in the little dish, and move on to onions."