The Complete Pépin

- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

In all of the thousands of recipes that I've made over the years require one common ingredients, it never changes, the right technique.

30 years ago I wrote a book about cooking technique, and 10 years ago I made this TV series and the information is just as relevant as always.

I hope you find these lessons helpful in your kitchen.

Happy cooking.

In modern American cuisine, we use a lot of peppers, hot peppers like jalapeno, regular peppers, poblano.

There is hundreds of different types.

When you use the hot pepper like this, you know, the technique is to usually remove the flesh from the outside.

What I'm doing here, by twisting my knife and going all the way around, you know, doing, I can do it this way to remove the core that is the center of that jalapeno pepper.

The center of the core here, which has all of the ribs and all of the seeds, this is the hardest part.

Then you bang the rest out of it.

Now I will tell you another thing too, when I do jalapeno pepper, I take a piece and I taste it, because sometime I buy them at the market, they have no taste.

Next time they blow your mind.

So taste it in order to know how hot they are.

And usually the hotter they are, the thinner you're going to chop them, because, you know, if they are very hot, you want them into tiny, tiny dice that you want to put in a salad, in a marinade, in anything like this.

You can do that ahead of course, and you can even keep them with a little bit of oil.

It's a nice way of putting them this way.

Now, the pepper like this, the classic way is to brown it and we can do it, burn it rather.

Some people use now those gadgets like, the handheld type of, handheld type of flame, you know, that you can have and it's very good for that.

But conventionally you put a whole tray of this and you put it under the broiler and you turn them under the broiler so that they get dark all around before you take the skin out of it.

Another way that I have to do it is to do it with a vegetable peeler.

Already I have a couple of different vegetable peelers because I try them to find out the one which works the best.

Look at your pepper occasionally so that you can turn it around as they start getting brown like this.

Then you want to turn them around, they have to be charred all around.

Now I start with the vegetable peeler and I try, this one works pretty good, to go all around on top like this, that peels it.

Now, I go down and when I know that I'm going to peel it, I try to get a very firm one without too many pleats.

Now, I go all around and take this and go to remove as much of the skin as I can.

Now, you may have noticed that, for example, when I get in place where the pleat is like this, where there is no way that my vegetable peeler can get into this, so what do I do when I finish peeling it this way?

I cut right into the pleat here and right into the pleat where I had no access with the vegetable peeler, so now I can take it into four pieces, remove the seeds, remove the membrane, if you want, inside.

I'll get rid of this.

And what I have now is that the corner where I didn't have access before, now I can grab it and do it.

So I end up having the whole thing totally cleaned up.

I tell you, this is very interesting to do it like that.

A lot of people tell me, "Oh I don't like pepper."

You know, "I eat pepper and it comes back to me.

It's too strong."

When you peel them like that, it's very rare that they're going to come back to you.

So as you see, they are beautifully black now, it works, and charring it all around.

This now you can do either a julienne or whatever you want out of it.

And this as I say, will be very sweet, very tender and very nice to use this way.

So that's one of my favorite ways of doing it.

However, when you do them under the broiler like this, in addition to being peeled, they also have the advantage of having that roast taste of pepper.

Now, you cannot take the skin at that point.

What you have to do is to put it in a bag.

You know, either a brown bag or a plastic bag like this, so that there is a certain amount of steam The steam will develop.

Here I have one here.

The steam will develop and eventually loosen the skin on the outside.

So you have to leave it at least a good 10 minutes before you take the skin out of it.

Now this has been there for a while so I can take it out and sometimes, you know, what you do, you put it directly into water and press.

As you can see, the skin is kind of messy.

Of course, to do it in a little bowl like this, probably much easier to do it directly under the running faucet so that the whole thing will come out quite easily now, you know, I mean if there is a couple of little pieces left, it's okay also.

And you can cut the bottom part of it also.

And I will remove the center with the liquid, that I have the seeds and so forth.

And what I do with this, and I do them of different color, I cut them into strips to do a salad, which I love.

My wife loves it too, so we keep it in the refrigerator.

So those are cut now into strips, mixed.

As we can see here, we have a mixture of different color peppers which have been peeled in the same way and that we place in a jar, like this.

You know, they are kind of soft now, a little soft.

and what you do, on top of it, you put a lot of garlic, I mean, I like a lot of garlic with this.

So this is chopped garlic that I kept and that I placed into a little container like this.

I chopped it and put it with a little bit of oil.

So I take that chopped garlic, I put a good tablespoon of it there.

I will put, if you want, a dash of salt and pepper on top of this.

Or you may want to season it at the end, the salt will tend to make it softer.

And then you close that up, put that in your refrigerator, and that you can keep that for several weeks in your refrigerator.

Those are terrific in sandwiches and all that, that's how we use them at my house.

(gentle upbeat music) Citrus fruit I use a great deal in the kitchen.

And I wanna show you a few ways of handling it in terms of decoration.

I have beautiful lemons here.

And maybe one of the classic, easiest way of doing lemon is to cut it in half this way.

And what we do very often is to cut the edge, you know, outside and make a knot out of it.

Actually you can do one knot like this.

Sometimes I do another strip there to do another knot here, which is perfectly fine.

Or a longer one.

All of that is also part of a little bit of imagination, if you do it this way.

Doing again the knot here, making it slide back into it to do a loop.

Very often then we sometimes put a little bit of decoration in that loop there.

Another fun way is actually to do a little pig out of a lemon.

Make two hole for the eyes.

You can put a couple of peppercorns, or something like that, that you have, in it.

And it's just a question, whoops, of cutting the ears, as I have done here, fairly large.

And you can do a bit fancy, do a tail usually, and maybe cut the bottom, put a couple of toothpicks to make it whole and you have a nice little piggy decoration.

Another classic way, there are many, many different ways, is to do teeth out of your lemon.

But I do that with a twist here.

That is, I cut the teeth but not straight down, more in a spiral, you know, more on a bias, if you want, and it gives you another effect, you know, especially when you have to present in the dining room, then it's nice to present those things.

Where is it attached?

Still attached a little bit here.

So as you can see here, you have a different effect of a spiral, and again, maybe a sprig of parsley here, and that's another way of presenting lemon.

And there are many, many other ways.

When you use your orange, like for example, that orange, very often with the vegetable peeler, we take long strip of the surface of the skin.

And you can see here, I only have the surface of the skin where you have all of the essential oils that taste.

I don't want to take much of the white, cottony part, because this is bitter, but it is in the surface of that skin that you actually have the essential oil, which is volatile.

you can see that, if you brush it, and if you press this on top here, whether it's lemon or orange or grapefruit, you will have a great deal of that essential oil that you do perfume with and so forth.

So this is very, very odoriferous and it's very good, because when you do a, if you do, for example, a custard, you would not want to put the juice of the orange or the lemon in it because your custard will turn into cheese, if you have milk or cream, so you use only the skin.

Now that skin here, in turn, you can cut it into a very fine julienne.

And that can be candied, you can do a lot of different things with it or Duck a l'Orange, you know, you would want to use that.

Now, very often we use that orange peel into some types of desserts, for example here, and if I do this, I won't peel the orange entirely.

Now notice that I'm using my knife, I'm holding the knife by the handle and moving up and down in a jigsaw fashion to clean it.

Now I don't go close and press on it, I would press the juice out here, I move up and down so I don't press it and release the juice.

Now when I have, when the orange is totally nude, which would be also the technique that you use for Duck a l'Orange, then you start taking the segments out.

Now you see I'm taking one segment here, the next segment, I go next to the membrane, twist the knife, come back next to the next membrane, and so forth.

This is the proper way of doing it.

I have a sharp knife here, a thin knife, which of course makes it easier.

Some of the segments are small, some are bigger.

You just follow Mother Nature.

And you can see, now I would press the juice.

And what I have left here, it's actually only the little membrane that you have in between, you see, that we discard.

Very often a simple dessert like that is served with a puree of fruit.

In that case here I wanna show you how to do a puree, what we call of raspberry or a coulis of raspberry.

Now we have fresh raspberries inside and I put that into a food mill.

And instead of putting sugar in it, I'm putting raspberry preserves.

Now it happened to be a raspberry preserve with the seed.

So what you want to do is to push it through this way.

Now the food mill will eliminate approximately 70% of the seeds, but there will still be quite a lot of seeds left there.

Now, if you want to remove the rest of the seeds, sometimes you do, sometimes you don't, then you have to strain it.

If you strain it, take a strainer which is not too fine, like this one, put it in there and strain this.

Now, the important part, what people often do is that they go with the strainer and go to the bottom, which works for effect of putting one seed in each hole and it plugs the whole thing, so you don't do that.

You just hit it on the side so that all of the liquid goes through.

And only at the end, when basically you have nothing left, then you press it a little bit.

But only at the end, as I said, not at the beginning.

Now I have a nice beautiful raspberry puree here that you can serve as a very simple and very nice dessert, doing a little bed of raspberry if you want, onto which you arrange your segments of orange.

I have them here.

You can serve that, you know, with a simple piece of pound cake or a piece of brioche or something like that.

You have a beautiful dessert.

Now, I can even, around this, put a little bit of the julienne of the skin that I have here, which is nice and eatable this way, maybe a little sprig of mint to finish it up.

And you have a very fresh, very fresh, very fragrant, very simple type of dessert, which is a type of dessert that I like myself.

(gentle upbeat music) One of the classic desserts of French cooking also happens to incorporate some essential techniques.

So I'm going to show you how to make a Christmas specialty called Buche de Noel or Christmas log.

You know, it's called this way because it is shaped like a log that you put in the fireplace.

But of course the biscuit that we have here, the jelly roll, all of that can be shaped in any form you want and the Buche de Noel, you can have it year-round.

Now what I have here is a jelly roll, which is a very light type of sponge cake, which I put on a cookie sheet.

And we are going to spread this out with a pastry cream flavored with chocolate.

So this is a pastry cream which is made with milk, milk, a bit of flour, chocolate, sugar, and egg yolk.

So this is your classic, it's a very light kind of pastry cream as I say, I mean, chocolate pastry cream.

In fact, you know, if you wanted, you could stuff the center with a regular pastry cream.

Or sometimes we do it, you know, my mother used to do that type of cake very often stuffed with jam, you know, a raspberry jam or something like this, and it's perfectly fine.

Or then you can go richer and do a buttercream, because the pastry cream is relatively not too rich.

Okay, so I spread it in an even layer here.

And I'm using the parchment paper that I put in the bottom of my cookie sheet to help in the rolling process, you know.

This is important, and you continue rolling it.

And actually, you know what you can do there, when it's rolled like this, you can grab it around, wrap it up and put it in your refrigerator, you know, you have it ready.

Sometimes we do that at the time of the Buche de Noel, I mean, the time of Christmas, you do a bunch of jelly rolls ahead, you wrap them and you have them ready.

And at that point, you know what, you can put them directly on your serving plate.

So, where is the second, the end of the paper is here.

Well, for me, I'm gonna put it here.

We have a nice jelly roll.

I think that the bottom of my oven is going a little fast because it should not be quite as brown than that in the bottom.

I also think that my tray is a bit short, so I will cut a piece of the Buche de Noel right there.

This is for the first kid which comes into the kitchen.

Okay, so let's say the end here, what we do, in any case, we always trim it, because we use the trimming to put on top.

So even as is now, I'm still going to trim it and you usually trim it on a bias like this to put this in top.

Basically what you want to do is to imitate the stump of a tree, you know?

So I'm cutting that piece there.

Trimming a little piece on this side too and maybe putting it this way.

Okay.

So, now, we have to put the cream on the outside.

And conventionally I could also bend this a bit to make it look more like a log, you know?

What we are going to do now is to put the second cream and the second cream is richer.

This is what we call a ganache.

And a ganache is a mixture of cream and chocolate in equal quantity.

You mix it together, you warm it up, and here, if I beat it a little bit, it's going to get slightly lighter in color.

It gets harder, because what I'm doing here, I'm putting air into it.

So this is what we call a ganache souffle.

You know, when you beat it like this.

Okay, now, it holds.

I'm going to put my ganache, and in fact, you know, this, I could put that after right there.

So here is my ganache.

So you continue spreading this out.

You don't have to be very careful here, because, remember, you're trying to imitate a stump of a tree or something.

So you could be kind of rough and it doesn't really matter.

So here it is.

On this side.

Again, the ganache here, here, and there, and I place back the stump of my tree here, maybe this one is a little big.

I may cut it to make it slightly smaller than that.

Here.

Sometimes in the cut itself we do a different color cream, you know, but this is fine.

Now what you can do now, with the teeth of a fork, you can again work out, you can continue doing the effect of the bark, you know, that you have there.

As we can see, the bark may go up the stump here, down on the other side, all the design in the wood.

So Mother Nature is so great that you can basically do anything you want and you cannot go wrong there.

So it looks more and more like a piece of wood, you know, which is what you want it to look like.

Now, there's all kind of other decorations that we do here.

For example, I have a little bit of buttercream, you can put a little bit of, actually a little bit of butter with sugar if you want, and a dash of green color.

And you can do, like if you wanted to do an ivy, you know.

And you place that all around.

Now after you've done your ivy like this, if you want to do leaves of your ivy, you see what you do, you take the same cornet that I have here, what we call the cornet, and now I have a little hole at the end.

But if you take it, if you take the knife and cut it on a bias here to make like a point in your cornet, and if you use this now this way, it creates the leaves.

You see?

So what you do, you create leaves on this side, on this side.

Okay, so you can do some of this, more of it, less of it, and so forth.

Another thing that I like to do, in addition to that, is to put a chocolate bark around.

That's another option that you may or may not have to do.

But I wanna show you how to do it.

It's very easy to do.

I take two pieces of parchment paper, approximately the size that this is going to be and you pour a little bit of chocolate on top of it.

You know?

That's it.

Be sure of the, this is just plain melted chocolate.

You do the same thing on the other one.

If you want one bark on each side.

Whoop.

And then again you spread it out, you spread it out, you don't have to be too careful either, you know, you spread it out.

Remember it's going to be a piece of bark.

And what I try to do after, the top of it, you know, to give a different type of shape, like pieces of bark, that's it, that type of thing, you know?

As you see, it's not complicated really.

And you can take this, put it on a cookie sheet, one of those, two.

You can of course do that the day before, it doesn't really matter, but frankly, it really doesn't take that long.

It will take about 15, 20 minutes or so, barely, in the refrigerator and it's going to get hard.

This way, and after it gets hard you can peel it off to put it against your Buche de Noel.

As we can see, before, anyway, you may want to put a piece of bark or not.

In any case, if you do, in that case, here the other one is not quite ready, I would leave it.

And as you see, this one is kind of collapsing on the Buche de Noel, but, you know, that gives it another look, really the look of pieces of bark that you have there.

So it's perfectly fine.

I will put one here.

And maybe the last touch of this, putting a little bit of snow, if it's winter, on the piece of my wood here and there, you know, a bit of snow which fell so that I can arrange it this way.

And maybe even some of those mushrooms, you know, in the woods you have mushrooms.

So we have those meringue mushroom that we do here to finish up the Buche.

(gentle upbeat music) There are obviously many more techniques you can learn to make yourself a better cook.

But I hope I have encouraged you to pick up a few more skills in the kitchen.

Thank you for joining me.

And happy cooking.