Adding Milk for New England Clam Chowder

Video Transcript

"Hi, 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. Let's check in here. We should be at a boil; yep, we are. What's happened here is that we'll have a really thick; for all effects and purposes; a clam juice, potato, onion, celery and bacon soup going on here. This doesn't sound very tasty, but it's a great basis for a soup. Now that this has hit a boil, what happens next is that we can slowly incorporate our milk. The reason I say slowly, is that I've left my milk out since I started, so it's at room temperature. What I'm going to do is grab that whisk I told you about earlier, and I'm going to start whisking the soup, and I'm going to slowly add the milk in; just a little bit at a time. This won't shock the soup; because if I were to add this milk in all at once, it would just shock it. That would dramatically lower the heat in the pan all at once. You can see now that I still have bubbling; even though I'm adding the milk. Just add a little bit at a time. Using the whisk helps a lot too; it helps blend it in that much faster. You may want to pause for a second, and let the heat come back up; let the boil come back up. Otherwise; you're just going to waste a ton of time with this. Like I said, just a little bit at a time; this way you're not shocking all the temperature out of your soup. As a matter of fact, I'm just going to turn this up a little bit more. Wait for a second; a little more. The amount of time you'll save from this is greater than the amount of time it would take for this to come back up to a boil on its own. I'm just going to go ahead and dump the rest in all at once. Now what we do is let it simmer, let it come to a full boil; uncovered, because what we're going to try to do now is reduce the amount of milk that's actually in the recipe. This is a step you only do if you're using milk. If you're not using milk, you would only reduce the amount of clam juice that's in there. Since we are using milk, we're just going to go ahead and reduce both. I'm going to scrape the sides down really well, and I'm going to come back to this in about twenty to twenty five minutes. In the meantime, I'm going to season it up a little bit. Once again; I like my black pepper, especially in my chowder. I think it adds a nice layer of complexity. I'll see you in about twenty; twenty five minutes. "