Chopping Fish 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. All right, so it's fish cutting time. Now you see, I've gone and got a separate cutting board just for cutting the fish. It's always a great idea. So I'm just going to take all these fish fillets and just throw 'em here onto said cutting board. And all we're going to when we cut these is cut 'em into just smaller pieces, just cut through 'em, just like that. You know, you can do like a fish finger or you can do cubes, you could do strips--really, whatever you want. I actually went down to my local fish market and told my fish guy, I was like, "Hey, you got any ugly white fish pieces you can't really serve as fillets, you know, especially something for a soup?" And he said, "Yeah. As a matter of fact I do. I got some flounder back there," and I got it for about half the cost of what a flounder would usually go for because it's visually not as appealing as the other flounder that they had sitting on the shelf or on the cabinet, rather. So we're just sitting here and just, like I said--and the origin--the thing is, is that that's really keeping true to this dish because the origin of this dish is a fish stew. I mean, this is what you do with your fish. This is how you'd stretch out your fish to make it last the longest. This is how you feed eight people on four pieces of fish. I mean, I could feed with a nice crusty bread to go with this. You're talking about feeding, off this one pot, six people, eight people maybe, with two pounds of fish and two pounds is being generous. You know, you could probably cut this down to a pound of fish, just throw extra vegetables into it, although I'm making it pretty much, I guess, more elegant fashion and the fact that I'm throwing a lot more fish into it than you really need to just, you know--and that is our fish. So we're just waiting now for our soup in about 10 or 12 minutes where we add the fish in. So we'll just keep our fish somewhere cold and we're ready to go."