Cut Peppers for Ropa Vieja Cuban Stew

Video Transcript

"Hi. My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'm going to show you how to make Ropa Vieja which is a traditional Cuban beef stew. Here we are with our red and yellow peppers. So let's go ahead and get our knife out. The first thing I want to show you. It's really important to take this off. I don't know how many times I've gone to eat somewhere and I've gotten a lemon or a lime or a pepper in a salad or a tomato and I've had a piece of paper in it. It's a big pet peeve. It's gross. Let's get rid of those things. There's none on this one. None on this one. So I'm going to show you a really quick and easy way to slice up a bell pepper. First things first. Just slice straight through the top. Keep it kind of close though to where the bottom of this is. And I'll show you why. Because what happens is you can pluck this piece right out and you can use this and trash this. And then also you get this piece right here, just kind of stick your fingers in there, work it around, give it a little tug and it's a good way to minimize the amount of mess you make while doing this. Also, just lop the other end off. And what that does, that creates a nice big, relatively flat piece to work with as opposed to a curved piece that breaks on the end and stuff. So, now with regards to peppers. This stuff right here you don't want to eat, it doesn't taste very good. So you can just take your knife like this and this is known as filleting a pepper. So you can just fillet that right out. Simple enough. And same thing on the top. Any of the white stuff you just don't want to really deal with because it's really bitter and does not taste very good. So we'll just trim it right now. There we go. And with these I always cut peppers skin side out and the reason why is if you cut them soft side up like this you can see I have just minimal effort to drag my knife through it. As opposed to if I flip it over. I mean obviously with a sharp enough knife anything is possible but it's a lot harder. So we want to go with a long stringy pepper here. And we want to go with the grain of the pepper which means we're going to go this way. So I just take the tip of my knife like that. Just drag it right across creating nice little strips. And like I said if your knife's sharp enough it'll go right through it. If you have a duller knife you'll have to do maybe something like this. But the funny thing is if you really just work and use the tip of your knife only the tip of your knife holds an edge much longer because you're dealing with a tiny, tiny bit and so you'll actually preserve the main edge on the blade of your knife and only use the tip up here for like the detail work."