How To Dice Tomatoes

Hi there! I'm Matt from the Underground Cookery School; and today, I'm going to do a video cookery lesson for you. So, I'm going to show how to dice a tomato, it's sometimes referred to as a concasse which is the French word. And what we need before starting is a pan of boiling water and a pan of cold water.

We also need a knife, but when you do this job, try to use one with a serrated edge and a point to it, commonly referred to as a tomato knife, for this reason. The reason you need a point is to take the eye out and gently score the bottom of the tomato, you don't want to bruise the flesh of the tomato. And that goes straight into the pan.

Now I'm just going to move that around a bit, and what will happen is, in the next 30 seconds or so, the tomato will split. Now obviously, if you're doing an enormous batch in a big pan, it's going to take longer. And really, all you're looking for, regardless of whether you're doing one or thirty one is for the tomato, or the skin of the tomato, to start splitting because at that point you know that the tomato is at the point where it can be skinned.

So I'm just going to carry on moving this one around. There's no rhyme or reason to it, some tomatoes shed their skins quicker than others. Normally the bigger they are, the quicker it hardens.

I'm going to show you by bringing this one out to the camera exactly what I mean by the tomato splitting. You want to get that in cold water as soon as you can for the same reason that you want a nice hard tomato for this job. And consequently you want to hold the cooking process.

So it's been in hot water, carries on cooking and you can see, the skin just comes off beautifully. And what we're going to do now is dice the tomato. And the reason you would do this is make a nice tomato salad; possibly you might use the dice tomato to make a tomato sauce or even a paella.

I'm going to the core of this tomato and just take out the seeds, like that. Again, by using a serrated edge knife you'll find that this job is much easier. There are many chefs that don't use the seeds because that seed is being bitter which is why we're getting them out at this point.

So there you have four quarters with the seeds completely removed, which would, in colored terms, represent the bitterness being taken away. Lay it flat like that, dig your nails into what you're doing and just slide it along like that. And then, obviously the other way as well, now I'm going to do that four times.

And there you have, a beautiful diced tomato; or if you live in France, they would refer to that as the tomato concasse. And that's how you dice a tomato. .