Making the Roux for New England Clam Chowder

Video Transcript

"Hi, My name is Brandon Sarkis, on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to show you how to make a really tasty New England Clam Chowder. It's been about ten minutes, so let's remove our lid once again; being careful not to burn ourselves or anybody else around us; open it away from yourself. You can see now we've got these nice soft, mushy yellow onions; we've got this nice sweet smelling garlic, and we've also rendered even more fat out of our bacon. Now what we do is toss our celery in there, and give it a stir; and at this point, we're going to crank our heat up to somewhere around eight or nine; somewhere in the high range. Once we feel as though everything is nicely coated, then we're going to grab that flour we've got right here, and we're going to dump that right in. In case you haven't figured it out; what we're doing now is making a rue with the combination of oil and flour,and with the vegetables in the pan. This will also help eliminate lumps later, and it will also keep us from getting a lot of floury taste. That would be bad. Give it a nice stir; make sure it's all worked in nicely. You may need a little more; it just depends on how much liquid you got out. Now we're going to take our potatoes, with the liquid we used to cover them, and just dump them right in. You'll see that there's some kind of milky looking substance in the bottom of the bowl. You want to get all that out, because that's the starch from the potatoes; which is going to be a key ingredient here pretty soon. Let's stir that together, scrape the sides down, and dump our clam juice right in; just the clam juice; not the actual clams. If you put the actual clams in now, the clams will just toughen up as they cook, and that would be bad. Now what we do is bring this to a boil, and it will start to actually thicken up. I'm going to go ahead and hit it with a little bit of seasoning; just for grins. This is; by no means, the final seasoning, but I like to season as I go, instead of just dumping it all in at the end. Now, to get it to heat up a little faster, I'm going to throw a lid on it. We'll come back to it in a couple of minutes; after it starts boiling, and heats up; thickens up; rather. "