Video Transcript

Hi. I'm chef Jeff Trombetta from Norwalk Community College in Connecticut, and today I am going to show you how to make a tomato coulis. It's just a sauce from its own puree or its own consistency. That's what coulis is. It's a French word. And I'm going to present that with a Gorgonzola polenta and fresh blanched broccoli. We're going to chop the tomato. This is a rough chop. In other words, don't try to be accurate. Because we're going to puree it. We're just want to kind of expose the cooking surface just so it cooks down and mushes naturally. We're going to puree it too with the immersion blender. And that's it. So that's a good quantity of tomato. And that will make a couple of cups. So for the tomato coulis, what we're going to do is we're going to do a little olive oil mainly for flavor, not so much for sauteing, not as a cooking medium. Add the garlic all right. And for ratio cooking, that quantity of tomatoes we kind of gauge, OK. When you make a bowl of cereal in the morning, you measure your milk? I don't think so. So measure your cream in your coffee, measure the butter in the pan when you're going to saute chicken, no. So it's all ratio cooking. So you don't want to get a good saute on that, you don't want color in the sauce. It's just like I said, olive oil is for flavor. So now we have this and this is going to cook til it kind of mashes down. But we're going to help it, good old trusty white wine. Remember, we want to keep this bright and brilliant and red. I'm not going to add red wine or a dark fortified wine like a marsalla or a cherry or something. So that's going to cook down and be kind of juicy, we're going to put the immersion blender in it and puree it. But let it cook down, let it reduce the acidity out of the white wine. Polenta is very simple. We're going to use two cups of chicken stock. And I know it's two cups because a measured ladle. You have to bring it up to the boil, we're going to rein in the polenta. And rein in means it's a steady flow of polenta as wewe're whisking it. I could add a little fresh pepper because I know it's going to need it. So I add a little salt, not too much. Because the Gorgonzola's got a little salt content and the chicken stock actually has a little salt content. So I'm blending the tomato coulis to a nice fine puree. Nice and smooth, make sure your tomatoes are tender, make sure your garlic is tender, and if you have to adjust the consistency we can add a little stock. So it's better to not have too much liquid right from the beginning. So now we have a tomato coulis, and always taste your food. Tomatoes need salt. This is kosher salt, it dissolves quicker. So it's a lot harder to over season. We're going to get some fresh cracked black pepper, and of course some Feins herbs. This is rosemary, sage, parsley, a little chive. Because I didn't strain the sauce. So it's got some bumps and bruises in it. And this way the herbs kind of give an excuse for bumps and bruises. In other words, it's fully pureed but it's just not fully strained. And it's a little thick, I'm going to add a little stock. Now if you wanted to keep this vegetarian, don't add chicken stock. OK. That has a nice consistency. So we're going to let this sit and we're going to pull over our chicken stock and finish our polenta. We're going to rein in our polenta and we're going to cook it for two, three minutes, rein it in, here it is. There we go. See it's like rain? Now the ratio is I have a half a cup of polenta here to two cups of stock. So the ratio is four to one. A cup of polenta would be four cups or a quart of stock, water, milk, whatever you want. But this is quick cooking polenta, the way it's milled. And so it's a little finer grain. And it's a little bit more open to absorption. So you only have to cook if for about two or three minutes. So let's take some Gorgonzola, that's generous. Just melt it, turn off our heat because it's already cooked. It's OK if there's like little dabs of Gorgonzola showing. So our polenta is nice and creamy. And we have to quickly get it into our molds so it doesn't set up. Spread it around OK. And you could bake it with something on it. You want to get it tight though. Because this is a mini tart pan. And it's fluted. You want it up the edge so you have a nice fluted sauce side, so it's visible. OK. So we have our polenta, we reheated in the oven, we unmolded it. That comes out nicely. I just have some nice fresh blanched broccoli. OK. It's nice and steaming, a little tomato coulis. Don't put too much sauce down. You know why, because when I put the polenta down it's going to displace the sauce. And it's going to be like it's a swimming pool. That's got nice brilliant color. Let's get this polenta up, get that dead center, and let's build our broccoli around, make a nice flower. But the tomato coulis is the key here. Let's put a little bit of Gorgonzola on there, a little scallion on the outside. I sliced these scallions on a bias. So bias meaning and angle and that is your tomato coulis. Let's see what this Gorgonzola polenta accompanied with this very fresh delicious smelling tomato coulis. It's really nice. I'm chef Jeff Trombetta from Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. And remember, it's just good cooking.