Today’s Gourmet

- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

You know, even today I'm still influenced by the person who cooked me my first French meal.

Of course, that's my mother.

And today, I'm making some of her favorites, a creamy, heartwarming garlic soup with potato and leeks, a really homey roast of veal with lots of pearl onion and artichokes, and for dessert, a light and airy almond cake with a sauce of mangoes and dark rum.

This kind of cooking with naturally good ingredient never goes out of style, and my friend Alice Waters from Chez Panisse Restaurant will stop by to encourage us to get back to cook with organic produce, the way my mama always done it.

Coming up on "Today's Gourmet."

(foreign language) (upbeat music) Today I am cooking real home cooking, cooking that my mother does, my mother's favorite I call it.

And those type of dish, you know, or roast that we are doing today is the type of thing that I grew up with.

We are doing a garlic soup with a lot of leek and we are doing a veal roast with artichokes around and all of those are very simple but very elegant food.

The important part in this, you know, often is the ingredient.

I mean, at home we used to have ingredient in the garden behind, I mean from the potato and all that.

And it did make a big difference, and that's how I remember the cooking of my mother.

We're starting with that piece of veal here, and as you see, that piece of veal is pretty red, which indicate a type of veal, often called Western veal as opposed to what is called sometime Provimi, sometime milk fed veal, which referred to a calf which is fed only the mother's milk.

That calf here already start grazing and starting grazing, of course, will give iron to the calf and develop the red in it.

Otherwise, the taste really doesn't change much.

What we are doing however, for our type of cooking, I'm removing most of the fat from the top, you know, as you can see here.

And we are going to roast that first on top of the stove.

But you see, it's important to remove that type of fat.

There is also certain farm or your butcher can probably get to you a type of organically raised veal, you know, and you have to pay maybe a little more for it, but it's worth it.

What we are going to do, put a little bit of olive oil in there and a dash of butter.

I'm not using much butter, but in that particular case, maybe half a tablespoon here and on top of the veal, we putting thyme leaves, you know, all over, home style.

Cracked pepper on top, freshly ground pepper here all over, just to give it a nice flavor, a bit of salt.

And that's about all you want to start with, you know.

Then we'll start it browning in there and we really want to brown it all around, you know, to give it a crust.

Often, people tell you to brown it around because it'll retain the juice inside and up to a certain extent it does, but mostly the browning is to give, crystallize the juice on top and give not only the color but the taste to the meat.

That is the difference between a roasted piece of meat and a boiled piece of meat, you know.

Then while this is browning and it has to brown for like eight, 10 minutes around, we are going to start our garlic soup, and I have leek here, I have onion, I have garlic, and potato.

We put water or chicken stock in it.

The garlic soup we do often where I come from is binding with different things.

Sometime we binding with leftover bread, sometime with potato, and sometime with another type of starch like tapioca or semolina or something like this, you know.

But very often, my mother would do that just with the leek, garlic stock, and she will have all bread that she cut into the soup there and put the mixture right on top of it.

That's a very good way of doing it too.

I'm gonna put a little bit of peanut oil for that to saute.

And first, we are sauteing the leek in there.

Notice that the leek that I add here, I add most of the green from the leek, you know.

Just cut the damaged leaf from the outside but there is no reason to remove all of the green.

This is one of the best part of it.

So this, the onion, I'm going to cut that onion coarsely across and here.

It really doesn't matter the way you cut your onion.

Remember we're going to strain it.

Now the classic French soup, which is leek and potatoes, sometime it's cut in tiny dice and served this way and sometime it is cut coarsely as I'm doing here and put through the strainer.

And this is a potage parmentier, so called parmentier was a man from the 18th century who developed the potato industry in France, he was an engineer.

So we saute the leek for a minute or so and cut the potato.

You can do your potato ahead, peel them, providing you keep them in water so they don't discolor it.

I don't want to wash them after I cut them here because I need a little bit of starch in those potato to give me the creaminess in the soup.

The garlic, you can heat.

A head of garlic on the side that will separate your cloves, and to peel your clove, cut the end of it like this.

After you peel the end of it, then you crush, you can crush it a little bit and now the skin will release, you see?

That's the best way to peel garlic.

Then look at it.

If there is any damaged spot like here, remove it.

So I put a whole bunch of garlic, like 10, 12 cloves in there.

We have a lot of garlic in that menu, but it's fine with me.

I love garlic so.

We mix it in there.

Maybe I can turn my veal here, which start browning on the, nicely on this side.

And now the potato.

Very simple soup.

In that case here, we have two cup of chicken stock, a very clear stock, no fat in it as you can see, and two cup of water, but it could be completely water or completely chicken stock also.

It's fine.

Maybe a little dash of salt now.

You cover it, bring it to a boil, and you want to boil it about 25, 30 minute.

That'd be more than enough to cook your potato and your leek.

Well you see, it's not really something which take that long to do and you can do it ahead to that extent at least to cook it and strain it.

Sometime, you know, for special party, we finish it with cream and stuff like that.

I think in our case today, maybe I'll put a little bit of milk at the end, but no cream.

Now with the soup, we serve croton also.

The conventional way of doing croton of course is to put oil and butter in a skillet and saute it, but that again, give you a lot of calorie.

What I like to do is to put about a tablespoon of oil in top of the crouton themselves and roll the crouton into that oil just to moisten it a little bit with the oil, so that you have just a little bit, you know, and then when you feel that they are moisten enough, then you can put them directly into the oven this way, so you don't absorb too much oil.

I mean I may have a tablespoon of oil here.

If I were to put that amount of crouton in a skillet with oil, that amount of bread will absorb like a quarter, a quarter of a cup of oil, you know, a big difference.

So that lower your calorie a little bit and really when those crouton are full of oil, you bite into it, sometime you have crouton in a salad, you bite into it, and the oil comes out of it.

It is not particularly good.

But those go into the oven for about 400 degrees now.

And I'm taking some other one which have been browning here.

Here we are.

And I'm going to put them ahead.

You know, crouton are good, but don't do them too much ahead too because remember, they get rancid.

I mean those will get rancid less because they've been done with oil.

If they're done with butter, they will get rancid even faster, you know, but they are good when they are freshly done, and it's really not complicated to do, eh?

Now the veal is still browning.

A nice piece of veal, about two and a half pounds.

And for the garnish of the veal, we are going to use artichokes and onion.

We have those tiny, tiny pearl onion here.

Peel a lot of garlic and artichokes.

I have done artichokes already.

In that case there is part of the artichokes, which is too tough that you cannot use.

So what I'm going to do first is to remove a little bit around the stem.

I want to keep the stem also, you see?

But there is a layer of fiber around which is fairly tough.

So remove it.

Okay.

Then I remove the end of the artichokes with that stuff and around a little bit.

The top part, which are really the toughest part, you know.

For this, you know, especially in Provence in France, they'll use the tiny artichoke, so that now I can cut it into four piece and get the inside ear, which is your choke, you know.

That's it, this is what you want to do.

Now the artichokes is eatable, I mean the whole thing here.

I have some done already this way.

So what we are going to do is to put that into our veal and I'll plate the veal.

Outside, put my artichoke in there and tiny onion.

A lot of garlic.

(vegetables sizzle) You want to saute that, you want to make a bed.

A bed of vegetable here and place the veal right back on top of it with the juice.

You cover it and at that point, I cook, I could cook that in the oven or on top of the stove.

I'm going to leave it on top of the stove to cook it here for about 20 to 30 minutes.

And during that time, I'm going to work on my soup.

Now I have a double here, the soup is boiling, starting to boil here, but I have one which is completely cooked, the same thing than that, and I am going to strain it now.

I want to puree it in the food processor that I have here.

If I put the whole soup in the food processor because I have a lot of liquid in it, the soup tend to be a little bit like baby food, you know?

So it whip it too much when you have liquid where I remove most of the solid, most of the liquid rather, I take out and the rest of the solid, now I can put it in there and I want to clean it up good because I need to put it back in there.

This plus this.

And now that liquid can go back into my pan here.

All I have to do is to process this.

And very often, you know, I will do that ahead.

I will do that ahead and to that extent, you can even freeze your soup, you know?

Now here this is nicely pureed.

Now as you can see, that's a nice pale green color with the green of the leek, which is what you want.

You can taste it for seasoning.

Again, seeing the way that we cook the vegetable, we never lose anything.

The water of the vegetable and all that stay in it.

Hmm, I think it's good this way.

Nice taste of garlic.

You can add a lot of garlic to it, you know.

And what I want to do is to put a little bit of milk in it.

As I said, we put cream sometime if you want to make it richer or frankly you can leave it without even putting anything in it.

But it's conventional in home French cooking to finish soup with a little bit of milk, you know.

That's it.

You can bring it back to a boil if you want with the milk.

In any case, you won't put the milk before you're ready to serve it, you know?

And the soup is now ready to be served with some crouton, and I have some chervil here, which is a nice, a nice herb that I like with that type of soup, you know?

So this is really home for me, you know.

When I feel sad, I need a bowl of leek and potato soup, you know.

A few crouton on top of it.

That's it.

And those little what we call plush, you know, pieces like that of chervil right on top of it.

And this is really the same way my mother cook it.

(gentle music) There is no possible great food without terrific ingredient.

And for that, we have an expert today, my friend Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley.

And it's so nice to have you here.

I know how passionate you are about organic stuff, and I have cooked in your restaurant, I've eaten in your restaurant many times, and I was always very impressed by what you do with your, the people who supply the food for us.

Is it really worth the price?

That's what people ask you, you know, if you pay more.

- And of course, I think it is because there's, I mean it's a wonderful flavor, but that taken for granted more than that, is the fact that the people that are growing these vegetables are taking care of the land, and that's where our food comes from.

And we need to support the people who are raising and growing things.

- [Jacques] Absolutely.

- With that consideration.

- They take care of themselves also.

They take care of our inside.

- Right.

- Which is good.

But do you think that the taste compare?

I mean some people will tell you, I know that it's more perishable, and it's one of the problem, right?

- Well I think there's a lot of things that affect the taste.

I mean it's how it's grown, how carefully it's grown.

It's what variety has been planted.

It's when that vegetable is picked and how ripe it is, and then how quickly you eat it.

And so the closer you can get to the farmer, the more possibilities you have.

- I had apricot in your restaurant yesterday and thought, I thought that was in the wrong valley because they were really ripe from the tree and that was terrific.

And when people tell you that vegetable don't look good if they're organic, I mean, those look absolutely beautiful, but someone take care of them.

I know if you handle them too much that they are perishable, right?

- But they all have little, what I call charming irregularities and whether it's a little brown spot that can be cut off.

I mean, you can't expect that when you're, you're not searching for uniformity.

You're searching for a flavor and a taste.

And sometimes, they're a little bit big and sometimes they're a little bit small.

But it's very important, particularly if you're buying organic vegetables in a supermarket, that you ask for them to be in good condition.

They're very fragile, and it, they have, they don't have shelf life.

- Yeah, no, we have.

We have to ask supermarket to do that.

It's important for the land as you say.

It is important for us.

And I know busy you are.

Thank you, thank you so much for coming, and now I'm going to finish my veal.

- [Alice] My pleasure.

- See you.

So in our veal that we have done, we roasted the veal, we have the sauce, we have the artichoke.

The only thing that we want to put next is a bit of tomato to finish the sauce, you know, a little bit of a fresh tomato.

And again, you know, talking about organic food and I am, you know, so intense and interested in this too.

I mean I have my own garden, and I use only organic stuff in my garden.

When you have a fresh tomato coming out of the ground, you know, just out of your garden, it does make a terrific difference.

So here I have a little bit of soy sauce for color, a dash of water, and the tomato, and that's going to finish our sauce here.

Make it nice.

And now we are going to move to the dessert that we are doing today.

And the dessert is an almond cake recipe that my mother also does, made with sliced almond, sugar, a little bit of potato starch.

I put some of the sugar here and the potato starch, and we are going to ground this.

This used to be called a pain de genes, and the pain de genes was a cake which was much richer than what I'm doing today.

(food processor whirs) I keep grinding that until it's nicely fine.

And here I have three egg yolk, and in my egg yolk, I put the rest of my sugar.

I should keep one tablespoon to beat the egg white.

I have a dash of vanilla.

I mean, I remember doing that recipe where we put eight egg yolk, where we put half a pound of sugar or half a pound of butter.

And as you see here, it is not a question of not eating this anymore.

It's a question of cutting down.

Moderation is very important, and we can still do a terrific cake, add a dash of milk, a dash of oil in it.

And you mix that together well.

Then we add that sugar and almond mixture here.

This is relatively a fast cake, you know, that you do, quite rich.

It's one of those cake without flour, you know, which now have been done in the area of nouvelle cuisine, but it's not that new.

It's always been done.

And on this side, I have my egg white, which have been beaten here.

Now that cake is not, of course, without calories but with the sauce, it's in the area of 250 calorie, which is not enormous, you know.

So we mix our egg white, which I beat before in there.

Fold it together gently.

Notice again that I make the bowl turn with one hand, you know, while I'm folding with the other hand to keep the mixture light like this.

Almond cake, we used to call the bread from Genoa in Italy, pain de genes in French, a classic dish as I say.

Used to be much richer than that, but it is quite good this way.

So this, we let now to go into the oven, about 350 degree in the area of 35, 40 minute.

It depends, this is a inch cake, you know, so we'll put that on the side.

I have one which is already cooked right here that we are going to unmold later on.

And with that, we're going to do a sauce.

And the sauce is made with mango, although you can use another type of fruit, you know.

I like to do it with mango.

So I have here mango.

As you can see this one is cut in half also.

I cut it right there.

And what you can do, often, we cut the flesh like that.

That's a conventional way of serving mango across and just twisting this out, you know, very often you will be served mango in that form.

That's one way of taking it out for me.

I can do that or cutting it with a knife.

The flesh of the mango here.

It has to be ripe.

If the fruit is not ripe, you know, just forget it.

Doesn't have any taste, so pick up another fruit.

But I should be able to scoop it out this way.

We have about a pound of mango together here.

I have one and a half mango.

And with this, sometime they are already like that.

I like them when they are more orange, you know.

I have a tablespoon of rum there, dark rum, some lemon juice, a little bit of water.

And now the sweetening agent, I put a couple of a tablespoon of honey, you know, in there.

Again, you know honey, I remember in the farm when we had honey which came from organic farm when I was a kid, it wasn't called organic.

It was the way things were, you know.

And we had that honey with different flavor from the mountain, and that was good.

So this is going to turn for a minute.

You can do a terrific sherbet actually with that, you know.

By freezing it, it makes a great sherbet.

And what we want to do is to unmold that cake here.

Taking the, oh, the paper stay in the bottom here.

That's good.

This is about fine.

And I like to turn the cake back the other way.

It looks a bit nicer on this side I think with the top, it'll hold.

And we are going to serve it directly in there.

I have the sauce.

Nice, creamy.

Mm, so that's very good.

We'll serve that on the plate, a little bit of the sauce underneath or on the side.

Very simple food, as you can see.

Just a slice of cake, we calculate that for six.

I think it can serve in that type of portion.

It'll serve eight portion, and that's plenty with us.

And here we are, maybe with a little natural flowers next to it.

Our beautiful dessert for the homemade cooking.

And now of course we have to finish the veal.

And the veal has been cooking for quite a while.

With the rest, we are going to take our veal out here like this and I'm going to slice it directly on the board here.

Mm.

We have some sauce that we'll put in the bottom of it.

Again, that type of homemade dish, you know, the tomato are in their, artichokes bottom, the whole thing.

This is really type of food that you like to be sitting around the table with the whole family and enjoy it, you know.

It has that type of warmth, you know, that type of color also, you know.

So some of this.

A little bit of my veal on this side.

A couple of slice, I like to bring it to the table this way.

I mean the whole roast, you know, with maybe a couple of slice in front of it.

It's really in the bourgeois, bourgeois style, you know.

Some herb, here I have beautiful chervil that I put on top, a bit all over.

And here, we have our roast of veal for our home dinner.

Now let's bring our roast to the dining room.

A dish that my mother relished, I wish she could be with us, sitting for us.

I'm going to tell her that all her life she cooked, and all her life she was organic.

You know that she, I'm sure not aware of it.

And what does that mean?

It mean that in her kitchen, she always keep the peeling of the vegetable, what's left over and that's good.

My father was doing a compost pile, you know, to use for his garden.

And that was a natural way.

First it saved, it saved money.

It mean no pesticide, no insecticide, natural fertilizer, so that you don't damage mother nature and all this.

And this is the way things should be.

And this is the way I like to cook, and I like to do my garden myself.

In any case, we have a beautiful menu today for you.

The soup here, that soup with the potato, a lot of garlic in it, strong smell, nice crouton on top of it.

This is a soup you can have hot, as well as cold without the crouton.

We have that roast of veal with the natural juice, the artichoke, the tiny onion in it.

I mean, our whole menu is under 900 calorie with a very moderate fat content.

We have a salad.

You can have a salad, you know, so that you have a lot of green.

Look at those tiny tomato, how beautiful they are.

And of course, we splurged a little bit on the dessert.

Remember that at home, most of the time I have no dessert.

I finish either with my salad or fruit.

But when I have guests at home, I like to do a little dessert.

And that almond cake is easy to do with that mango sauce.

I'm sure you're going to enjoy it.

I sure hope that you're going to do that dish for your friend.

I enjoyed making it for you.

Happy cooking.