Prepare Tomatoes for Tomato Soup Recipe

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village and I am making tomato soup. Alright the first thing you want to do is prepare your work space. I'm setting down a damp towel here. It will keep my cutting board from sliding around too much. Now the first thing we are going to do is we are going to take care of these tomatoes. Something that is really important is to be sure you take the sticker off the tomatoes. So these are vine ripened tomatoes and they are still going to have a little vine stem on them. Take and pull off just like that, very simple process. The stems won't cut out. They will be really, really bitter that is why you don't want them in your actual roasted tomatoes because they won't taste very good. These are being difficult. Usually they are pretty easy to pop off. These must be pretty fresh tomatoes since they are so hard to get off. All you do is basically take your thumb, dig in on one side and pop it right out. You can also use a spoon or knife. I just use my thumb. Alright next thing we are going to do is take these tomatoes and since we are going to roast them, we don't want to chop them in too small pieces because they don't roast out very well. They tend to get really really mushy and they don't stand very well, so all I am going to do is take my knife and a lot of people hold the knife like this or this even. It's not the best way to hold a chef's knife. The best way you want to hold it is you want to hold it like this. The reason being is that you have your thumb on this side and your hand on this side and you are really controlling the blade which something this sharp you want to be sure that you have plenty control over itself. We are going to take the tomato and turn it upside down here and as I am cutting them, I will store them saucy or juicy side up so that way I don't make a big mess on the cutting board. Just real simple easy cuts here right across the center of each one of them. Nothing too spectacular. Alright, there we have it. Easy enough. "