Adding 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 take a few minutes to show you how to make a really tasty New England Clam Chowder. Here's a neat trick, say you're making your, if you want to make it with all milk and not use any sort of heavy cream or anything, or all cream and it's not the right consistency, because some like their clam chowder really thick, what you can do is, you can take your roux and you make it in the pan, then you can go over to your soup and just add, like a ladle or two, of the actual soup, right into the roux here. Then, what we'll do is we'll thicken this in the pan. This way we avoid the lumps because what will happen is, if you thicken this in the pan, it'll incorporate the roux, right into the soup and it's kind of the Trojan Horse technique. It's a good way to sneak the roux right into the soup, without the soup knowing it and getting lumpy. So, what we do here, is just keep stirring it until it's all nicely incorporated, which it now is. So, here is our soup and here's our roux that is half roux and half soup. And what this will do, this will also avoid our lumps. The only time you would want to do this, is if it was not coming out the way you wanted it too and what happened for me, is there's probably a little bit more water in the potatoes, than I had accounted for, and also I was using a reduced fat milk, which is going to have a higher liquid content. So, now I've got a nice thick soup, which is what I was looking for because what I have to do now, and you want to make sure you stir it really well because, if you don't, all the thickened part, will sit on the bottom and that is not desirable. So now that I've actually over thickened it, it is now perfect for me to add in the chopped clams, with the clam juice. Because with the clam juice, it'll counter balance it and it'll think it right back out, so I just added those right in. Give it a few stirs here, with the whisk and you want to make sure you shake out all the pieces here in the bottom. What I want to do now, is I'm going to crank it up, on high, because the roux won't really take affect until you hit a boil so the second this hits a boil, I'm turning the heat down to like a three. So, you want to keep an eye on it. Turned my heat down to three, let it simmer and now it's pretty much ready, so we're just going to season it up and in about ten minutes, I'll show you what it's supposed to look like, in a bowl and how it tastes. "