Chop Tomatoes for Tomato Basil Soup

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I am going to be making creamy tomato basil soup. Alright there is nothing special about chopping these up. We just want to chop them into a decent size. You don't want to go too small but I mean if you want to you can. You can take the time to do that. There is really no point but really what I am going to do is cut them down into a slightly more manageable size. If you really want to take the time to take one of these and just dice them down really small like this. All you are effectively doing is you are making a really pretty dice but you are just kind of wasting your time. Because like I said this thing is going to get pureed. It is not that you need anything small and pretty. As with anything else when you are cutting, just let your knife do the work. I am exerting very little effort. I am letting the weight of the knife just fall though the tomato. I am keeping my fingers out of the way of the blade the whole time just dragging my fingers through like this. You should never have a knife that is so dull that you have to work your way through the tomato like if you have to get right down over the top of the tomato like that then that means that you have a very dull knife or a very poorly made knife. You see I am just letting the blade of the knife just glide through my tomatoes. Every time you use your knife if you are done using it, give it a couple of drags across the sharpener. After I use this knife before I put it up and before I wash it too, I will rinse it off and dry it off and just drag it through the sharpener a time or two and it is as good as new. This might seem like a lot of tomatoes now but once it starts to cook down and once it starts to break down and once you puree it, it is not nearly as much as it looks like. We are almost ready to go for this one. The next thing we move on to is our chalets. I am going to save the basil for last because you are going to want to do your basil as late as possible and the same thing with your onions because you don't want to sit here and burn your eyes. We are going to put this into our big plastic container and then let's move on to our next step."