Simmer Tomatoes for Tomato Basil Soup

Video Transcript

"My name is Barandon Sarkis, on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to be making creamy tomato basil soup. It's been ten minutes, so let's pull that off. Be careful, there's going to be a lot of steam coming out of here, so just pull your hand back like this. You want to let any moisture you get drip back into the pan because it's all flavor, after all. Now we're going to give this a nice stir. I'm going to tilt this so you can really see inside here. You'll see there wasn't a whole lot of browning, which is good. A little bit of browning is fine, but a whole lot wouldn't be very helpful for us. We're going to scrape all the stuff off the sides, push it all back down in there, and in go our tomatoes. We've got our trusty high-heat silicone spatula; one of my favorite things in the kitchen. Scrape all of that out. Now we want to stir this all the way to the bottom. You want to make sure the tomatoes come in contact with the bottom of the pan and not just the continuation of the onions, and the garlic, and the shallots; because you want the tomatoes to start to break down. Once again, we'll scrape the sides down. At this point, we're going to add our tomato puree`, and one other thing; depending on your tomatoes, you may have to add a little bit of water to it. We're going to let this go just a little bit, but I might actually just go ahead and add some water now. If worse comes to worse and we make it too thin, you can just let it cook out. I'm just going to add a cup of water right in here, just to help the tomatoes break down a little bit. I'm going to stir up my tomato paste in there, along with that little bit of water. You can also use vegetable stock, if you want, or you can use chicken stock, if you're not afraid of that. I'm making a vegetarian, but not vegan version of the soup. That's that' a little more of the salt and pepper, and trust me, that thing doesn't put out nearly as much salt as you think it would, which is why I have to turn it so many times. Now we're going to put the lid on it yet again, and we're going to let it go for about another ten or fifteen minutes. I'm going to come back and check on it in ten or twelve minutes. What you're looking for here is you want the onions to start to break down. You can turn your heat up to about an eight if you want, because the onions won't burn. As a matter of fact, you can probably turn it up to about an eight or a nine. We want the tomatoes to actually start breaking down and collapsing, and having the juice come out of them. Let's set out timer again; I'm going to set it for twelve minutes. I'll come back and check on it in twelve minutes, and we'll see how it's doing, and we'll go from there."