Chopping Tomatoes 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, while that bacon is rendering, I am going to take a second to go ahead and hack my tomatoes up a little bit. So we just want to pull the stems off of them, which is not altogether difficult. Now, you may notice that I've got some tomatoes that are kind of bruised up in spots. It's not a big deal at all because they're going in a soup, so there's always a place for bruised tomatoes. So we're just going to take our paring knife like this, unless you have a tomato corer, which I don't bother to keep around, because I have a paring knife, and you'll see this is why I don't need a tomato corer. So a really easy process, you take your knife in, stick it at about a 45 degree angle, kind of jiggle it, and spin your tomato, and it should just pop right out, just like that. Yeah, and as far as tomatoes go, like a lot of times, you can find in a lot of places will sell the less desirable-looking tomatoes at cheaper prices. If you're making soups or sauces with them, you don't need pretty tomatoes. I mean, you want to make sure that the flavor is there, but it's not imperative that they're beautiful on the outside because you're cooking them. If you're serving like a Caprese salad or something, yeah, you want pretty tomatoes. You see this little nasty bit here, I'll do the same thing with it, just going to saw it right out, and with that, it's a forgotten memory. All we're going to do with these, we're just going to quarter them. And as I put them in a bowl here, what I'm going to do, I'm just going to salt them. I'll just put these in here. And by salting them as you put them in the bowl--whoopsie, I bumped the camera--it allows that salt to really work its way into the tomato. There we go. Now, we're just going to set those aside at room temperature. They'll be just fine, nothing to worry about. And let's get ready to go back to our soup or to our bacon, rather, that's rendering."