How to Sweat Onions & Garlic

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. It's been eight minutes, so we're going to take our lid, and we're going to carefully open it away from the camera, and our faces. Inside here, you will see our bacon. Some of it's crispy, some of it's not. It's all right if it is; it will just add a nice flavor and texture to our soup. We're going to stir this around; mixing all the crispy up with the non-crispy. You'll see now we've got a lot of grease on the bottom. That's all the bacon fat coming out. Well, not quite all of it yet, but it's a lot of it. What we're going to do is break up some of these pieces with the spatula for a second, and then we're going to add our garlic; give that a nice stir, then our onion, and we're going to give this a nice stir, as well; Get everything all nicely mixed in. We're also going to add that butter that we've got. I have four tablespoons of butter right here, so let me unwrap this real quick, and drop it right in; there we go. Now what we're going to do is sweat the onions. Let me go ahead and break this butter up a little bit. It shouldn't take too much. The butter was already almost room temperature as it was, so it shouldn't take a whole lot of prodding to get it to break up; and sure enough, it doesn't. We're just going to stir all this together; make sure we get everything off our sides, push it all back down in the pan; same temperature setting; about a seven or so. We want to grab our lid, put our lid back on it and we're going to let this sweat for about ten minutes. What this will do is soften up our onions and our garlic. It will also extract a lot of the flavor out, and really help mix and blend those flavors together. It will give you a nice sweeter garlic, a nice softer texture to the onions, and a nice sweetness to the onions, too; just by doing this. Ten minutes from now, I'll come back; and at that point, we will add in our celery, and we're also going to add in our flour to thicken the whole thing up. I will see you in ten minutes. "