Cooking with Leeks

Hey, everybody

One of the vegetables that I enjoy cooking with is the leek

The leek is in the onion family. So if you don't like the strength of an onion, go with the leek because it's a lot milder

And I'm going to show you how to cut and clean a leek. OK

So let's start by taking the end off. And again, the leek is in the onion family, which means that it grows out of the ground

And everything that grows out of the ground, collard greens, for example, mustard greens, they're going to be sandy

There's going to be some dirt on them. And that's a good sign of freshness

Most whole foods are going to have that. But you want to get rid of the sand because nobody likes sand in their food

So I'm going to cut the leek down the middle and rinse it under some cold water

So I'm just going to spread those ribs out a little bit and try to wash some of the sand out

All right. So we won't really use all this super green stuff down here

because they're really, really bitter. So we'll go down here to the white end of the leek

and we're just going to cut it into half moons. These would be great in your next vegetable soup

chicken noodle soup. I might even put this in miso soup. So now we're going to add this into an ice bath

and the ice bath is going to encourage these to shrink up a little bit

sort of separate and get the rest of that sand out. So next time you're cooking with any vegetable that grows out of the earth

make sure you clean it really well because nobody likes sand in their food

This is how you clean, cut and prepare a leek for your next soup or grilling

And we've got more great tips like this all over the Paula Deen Network

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