How to Chop Celery

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis, on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to take a few minutes to show you how to make a really tasty New England Clam Chowder. Here we are with our celery, and you'll notice that I've got some ugly celery with some bruises on it. I picked this celery for a reason. This is going to get lost in the soup, so if you have some pieces that are a little uglier than others... I wouldn't put this on a crudite, but I have no problem putting it in a soup, because by the time I'm done with it, you won't even be able to tell it's bruised. We're just going to cut off the white bits at the end. I'm also going to pull off the leaves at the top. Typically, when you buy it at the grocery store, the end they cut off looks a little ugly, so I'm just going to eliminate that part, as well. Now it looks much nicer. Same thing goes with this one. What I'm going to do is take my celery (first things first) and I'm going to split it lengthwise into a much narrower rib. If you're using a narrower rib of celery, then you can probably skip this step. I'm not, so I won't. You'll see what I did is reverse the ends on these. Instead of being like this, I turned them down like this. The reason I did this is because this puts two bulky ends at each end, and it makes a nice rectangle; as opposed to putting them like this. Then these two bulky ends fight each other, and you get a piece that's more of a triangulated shape. It doesn't work as well. Lets go ahead, and align these two pieces up. I'm going to do a nice, thin slice on these; nice and thin, because I want it to be almost transparent in the soup at the end. I don't want anyone taking a nice big bite, and going wow, that tasted just like celery, and nothing but celery. Clams should be the first thing they taste. Celery is one of those things that unless you're eating it by itself, is not something that you want to taste solely by itself. It's a good texture enhancer; it's a good replacement for salt in a lot of dishes. I'm getting rid of a lot of those bruised pieces. You can see them in here; they don't look so hot. Unless you're eating raw celery by itself, or eating it in a salad or something, most people don't seem to think too highly of it as a main part of their soup. That's why you don't see a whole lot of call for celery soup; although, I do actually kind of like celery soup. So like I said, a nice thin slice. I don't want to mince these in the food processor, and turn them into mush, because that would be really counter productive, but something nice and thin; something like this. At the most, something like this. Something that will actually break down in a soup and add a compliment, and not overpower it. Now, let's move on to our potatoes. "