Puree Tomato Basil Soup

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis, on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to be making creamy tomato basil soup. It's been ten minutes. Once again, beware of the stem. What we should have is a nice bubbling pot of tomato and onion chunks, which is exactly what I see in front of me. I'm going to grab my friend, the bar mixer, or hand blender, whatever you prefer to call it. I'm going to turn my heat down to about a six, and just give it a few little quick pulses, kind of move it around. What we're doing here is getting some of the big chunks. What you don't want to do is put this all the way against the bottom. If you put it against the bottom, you're not going to get anything except the soup itself, and not the chunks. You want to suspend it about halfway up, while you're doing this. Hold it in one spot for a second, and watch out, the steam coming out of this is really hot. This is the point when you can go one way or the other with it. You can choose to leave it a little lumpy, if you like. You can give little pulses here and there, and leave big chunks of tomato. I like mine to be a little smoother, so I'm just going to give it a little bit longer than usual. When you stir it around, you can tell how big any chunks are. Mine looks to be pretty small, about where i like it. You can see that my soup has reached a pretty nice thickness. A quick way to test the soup is to grab a spatula or a spoon, and check it out. You also want to stir through it and make sure you didn't miss any large chunks of onion or garlic or tomato, unless you were trying to. It's looking pretty good. I'm going to grab a real spoon, and see how well it sticks to the spoon. This will determine whether or not it's done. See how it coats the whole spoon like that? That means it's done, so we're pretty much done. We have a couple more steps we're going to do, just to finish it up nicely. We're going to season it and things like that, but from a production standpoint, we're finished. Off we go to our next step."