Chopping Bacon 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. Here's our bacon; here's our knife. So you see our bacon is a little hard. That's good because it's partially frozen, which makes it much easier to deal with. So we're just going to take our knife and we're going to cut it in very, very thin pieces here. See if you were using thawed bacon, this would be pretty near impossible. And since bacon doesn't lose or gain anything by freezing it, freezing it just makes sense. I'm just making--these are about a quarter inch, I guess, or so slices. And when you get towards the fatty end, it does get a lot harder, frozen or not. All right, so that's that. I am going to give it one turn here and we're going to go ahead and just break these into smaller pieces just to get them to cook a little faster, even though, obviously, when it gets warm, it will fall apart. This will actually expedite that warming up and falling up--falling apart process. And as always, a good sharp knife is an awesome idea for this part. All right? There's our bacon. We're going to set this aside because we're going to have to sweat it here in a second. Okay, so we're getting our pan hot. So what we can do right now is we can go and throw our bacon in cold; it won't affect anything. And what we're going to do is we're just going to throw a lid on it. We're going to let this render for about--I don't know--say, we'll call it seven minutes. You don't want to turn it down to about a seven; otherwise, you'll start burning your bacon up. You want to keep the lid on the whole time because if you don't, what will happen is all of that heat is going to escape, the moisture is going to escape, which makes the rendering process not working really as well. So keep a lid on it, come back in about eight minutes. Let me set my timer--5, 6, 7, 8--and at that point, we're going to add our vegetable oil and cook that, too, for a few minutes. So I'll see you in about eight minutes."