Chopping Carrots for Fish Stew

Video Transcript

"BRANDON SARKIS: Hi, my name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to show you how to make Manhattan-style fish chowder or Manhattan-style fish soup. Okay, the first thing we're going to do is we're going to cut up our carrot. So let's take our chef's knife. We'll take our carrot. Now you noticed I didn't peel my carrot. I never peel my carrots for soup, because for soup, you want the whole thing, and it's not going to affect it if the carrot's got a mark on it here, something like that. You're cooking the whole thing. So all I do is I just lop the end off, take the other end off as well, and I just usually cut it in half, and then you'll see that this end is obviously huge. So either I can cut it into coins like this or like little slices, but I prefer to get this a little smaller and cut it down into, what you would call, a half-moon shape, which is like this. Now, what I do is when I cut it in half and if you lay it side by side, they don't fit together very well. If you flip 'em around to opposite ends, though, you'll find they fit together very, very well. So we're just going to take our knife and just cut about a quarter of an inch, maybe a little less--and that. Now, what we're going to do on the other half of the carrot, same thing. You see, if you put these two pieces together, they don't really fit. But if you flip 'em around, they fit together a lot better, just because the taper on the carrot, when you split it, you put two taper ends together they go like this, but if you flip 'em around, it creates more of a rectangular shape. So same thing on this one, about a quarter--maybe a little thicker on this one 'cause this is a smaller piece of carrot. Maybe go on this smaller end, maybe go up to almost half an inch, and there we go. So there's all of our carrot. Now, we're just going to put our carrot into a bowl here, and we're going to actually mix our celery and our carrot and our shallot and garlic together 'cause they're all getting cooked together at the start. So that is our carrot. Let's wipe everything down here, wipe our knife off. Okay, let's move on to our celery."