Make Basil Chiffonade for Tomato Basil Soup

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I am going to be making creamy basil tomato soup. I bet you thought I forgot about our little friend basil. I didn't. I just wanted to wait until right now when that was cooking and I wanted to wait as long as I could because basil turns less than desirable at room temperature. Actually I picked up ones that are bruised up but it does not matter because we are going to chop it up and puree it for soup but we don't want this part. This part of the basil is not good. What you can do is you can grab a whole cluster like this and pluck it right off. What I am doing is I am setting it in a nice little neat pile. Each pile has not been cut and basil sure does smell wonderful. There is not much basil does not go in. Basil in mashed potatoes is good. I have actually made basil ice cream before. I won't say it was good but it was not terrible. It wasn't the only ingredient though it was mint and basil ice cream. So let's take all of our leaves pluck them off. What I have done here is I have taken the larger leaves and placed them on the outside with the smaller leaves in the middle. We are going to take it and roll it up like a little burrito kind of and do a little chipping on it actually and you can even get adventurous and pile up multiple piles if you are feeling brave and just roll them up and don't worry, that black thing that looks like rotten basil is not, it just got smashed in the bottom at the grocery store. That is why I selected it for this mission because it is getting cooked and pureed. If I were going to use it for the top of a salad or a pizza or pasta or something I would never use that basil, it is too ugly for that. So there you have that we are going to keep this cold for the time being and then we are going to come back to our onions in about another seven minutes."