Hi, my name is Bryan Davis. I’m at Chef Bryan’s kitchen. And today, we’ve been making grilled cheese. On top of that, we’re going to do a nice recipe for a tomato soup. Since I was a kid, one of my favorite lunches was tomato soup with grilled cheese. The tomato soup we’re going to do today is you it’s a very simple recipe using simple combination of canned and fresh ingredients. It’s easily adoptable to work with any of the grilled cheeses that we’ve made today. So with that, we’re going to go ahead and get started.
Basing on what we’re going to do is I’m going to talk through building it and while we build it, you know we’ll talk about the different process of the things that you can do. What were going to do is we’re going to go ahead and turn our pot on. We want this on about a medium heat. I’m going to take a little bit of butter. You could use olive oil if you want it. But I’m a big fun of butter so we’re going to use butter. So, I’m going to put a little bit of butter in there, get it started. Let it melt down. I’m going to chop up some onion. Basically, what we’re going to do is we’re just going to do a medium dice on this onion. We don’t want it too large but we don’t want it, we don’t need to be you know very small. We’re going to end up blending this soup at the end.
So, we’re just going to do a nice little medium dice of the onion. Okay, now we’re going to get some garlic. I got some garlic cloves here. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to show you how to mince the garlic. I can hear our butter going and so we’re almost ready for that. But basically, what were going to do is we’re just going to slice the garlic down and we’re going to take it in about a medium to small chop. Okay, we’re going ahead to add our onion. We’re just going to put it right in the pot. Okay. And we’re going to cook the onion until it turns translucent which means it starts to turn a little clear.
When your making sauces or soups, it’s always a good idea to you know season as you go. So, we’re going to add a little bit of salt, a little bit of fresh cracked pepper and we’re just going to let this saute a little bit. Okay, we don’t want it to brown, we don’t want the onions to brown in color. So, you know we don’t want to fry them we’re just trying to sauté them and bring out the flavors. So, we’ve got our garlic chopped here. So, now what we’re going to do is we’re going to mince it. I’m going to take a little bit of the salt and I’m just going to sprinkle it right on the garlic. And I’m going to use the flat of the knife to push the garlic between the blade and the cutting board. So, what we’re going to do is we’re going to take the knife and we’re just going to mash the garlic into the cutting board with the knife. Anytime you use raw garlic, this is a great way to do it because you don’t have big chunks of garlic where somebody you know bites into it, into a salad or something with a dressing in it. They don’t get a big raw chunk of garlic.
So, we’ve got our garlic done there. Our onions are almost to the point where we want them. So, we’re going to take our garlic and we’re going to add our garlic right to the pot. Now, as soon as you put the garlic in, in the small steak, or the fine mince that it is in, you’re going to start to smell. It’s going to start cooking immediately. As soon s you smell it—that smells good. As soon as you smell it, you want to start adding your liquids into it. The first liquid we’re going to add is our tomatoes, and I call it liquid because tomatoes are much water, they’re pretty much mostly water. So, as soon as we put them in and they hit the heat of the pan, the liquids are going to start to be rendered out of the tomatoes. So, we’re going to add out tomatoes, and again we’re going to season as we go. So, we’re going to add a little salt and we’re going to add a little pepper and we’re going to turn our heat up and we’re going to bring this to a boil. So, we’re going to add a little bit of white wine. You know, we don’t have to add much, probably two tablespoons, just a little bit tomatoes, they’re acidic, the wine is acidic. It just adds a nice little blend to it. So, we’re going to let that cook for a little while. So, we’ve got our soup here simmering down or reducing. If I’m going to turn the heat down a little bit, I'm going to go ahead and add about a quarter cup, maybe a half of cup of tomato sauce and about a quarter cup of chicken stock.
Okay, so we’ve got our soup pretty much put together. We’re going to put our final layer of seasoning in it. A little bit of salt, a little bit of pepper, and if I was using dried herbs, I’d go ahead and add my dried herbs at this point to let them simmer with the liquids in the soup, but I’m going to be finishing this with fresh, so I’m not going to be adding any dried herbs to this one. So, we’re going to go ahead and cover this now, let it simmer for about 30 minutes and then I’ll show you how to finish it.