- Hi, I'm Jack Pepin.

One thing I love about America is great diversity, and that means a great melting pot of foods, flavors, and unique taste.

Today's menu, the tribute to some of the ways my friends have influenced my cooking.

A Vietnamese squid salad, tangy, low in fat and spiked with hot pepper, lime and mint.

Veal patty from Russia, they're called pojarski, and I serve them with a flavorful sauce of yogurt and horseradish.

For dessert, a crunchy cookie en brimming with fruit.

So join me, we'll cook with flavor from all over the world on today's gourmet.

(bright music) We have an interesting menu today, which drove from many part of the world.

We have a squid salad to start, inspired by a Vietnamese chef friend of us, been with a terrific cook and my wife is kind of addicted to that salad.

Then we have a pojarski, which is really Russian.

Finally, we have a cookie en with fruit, more in the style of nouvelle cuisine.

And what I want to start with is those squid.

And as you can see here, the squid are not clean.

You can buy them clean just as I have them here, though they're tiny squid.

The way to clean them is just to pull out the head this way.

And now that head, you see the eye, we just cut under the eye to get the tentacle.

And usually here on that part, there is a little rub which may come out, which is the beak which you remove also.

That's about all we do to that.

You put it in water to clean.

The rest of the body, there is a, what we call the pan, which is like a piece of plastic almost, you know?

Here, it look like a piece of plastic.

The pan, PENE, the cartilage as bone.

And then we remove the skin, which as you see, slide very easily.

Although I'll tell you, in Greece and other part of the world, very often they don't clean it as much as we do here.

Then we empty the gut inside.

This, in turn, you have to wash it, as we have done here.

And for that particular recipe, we cut it into a ring, about one inch pieces.

As for the tentacle, you leave them as they are, you know, and this is what we are going to use for our salad.

The important part here is that we're going to blanch this in boiling water, and we're going to cook it very, very little.

The water is boiling here and what I want to do is just to put it in there and stir it a little bit, just for the pieces of squid to firm up, you know?

But you don't wanna cook them long as they would get tough.

So it barely comes back to a boil.

And during that time, what I'm gonna show you is the rest, that is the source for it.

And we have an interesting mixture from garlic here to Thai pepper.

Those Thai pepper are very, very hot.

I have lime juice, I have lime here.

We have coriander or cilantro or Japanese parsley, Chinese parsley, and there are many different type of name.

Mint, we use a lot of mint in there.

Finally, the nuoc mam, the nuoc mam, which is a traditional Vietnamese fish toast, and a bit of sugar in it.

So we're going to mix this into that bowl.

A couple of tablespoon of this.

See the interesting part of that recipe that there is no fat, nothing in it.

Usually in those type of recipe, we put a lot of olive oil or other type of oil.

Here, there is nothing.

So it's a very lean recipe.

The squid itself, you know, are there any type of fish?

It's quite high, is high in Omega-3, which is the type of fish oil which is good for cholesterol.

On the other hand, however, the squid itself is not that low in cholesterol.

It's higher, about 200 milligram per three ounces.

So it is higher than scallop, for example, which would be very, very low.

But it's still good.

Now those Thai pepper are very, very hot, you know?

But you know, when I deal with pepper like that, very often I touch them and touch the point of my tongue to find out how hot they are.

This one is hot because sometimes, you know, you have a serrano or one of those pepper and it's actually not very hot, you think it is, and the next time it kind of blow your mind.

So you do have to test it a little bit.

We have a bit of sugar in there, the lime juice, and a lot of mint, you know, a lot of mint and the hotness, you know, of the pepper and the coolness of the mint.

And again, that mix with the cilantro, or Chinese parsley, as I say, there is different type of name.

Now, if you don't like it, you can omit this, but the combination is absolutely wonderful here.

Okay, so what we have here, as you can see, a lot of herb, and finally into this, we put thinly sliced onion.

I have a cup of thinly sliced onion here, my grain, and that's about it.

I want to get to my squid here, which I've been cooking at least as much as they could.

They could even be cooked a bit less, as I say, barely comes back to a boil.

Then we combine it here and that, we are going to stir together.

It should marinate, you know, a little bit, develop some taste.

But this is a really addicting salad, you know?

So here we are, right here.

I'm gonna clean up my mess, always clean up in the kitchen, make my wife happy.

When I do a lot of cooking at home, often I am just by myself in the kitchen and I clean as I go along, because I have no choice.

This, I can put away now.

And what we want to do is to serve the salad.

So we can serve that on nice green, as I have here, you know?

Which would come out very good.

Here we are.

And that in the center of it, beautiful squid salad.

And as you see, there isn't that much squid.

I mean, I could put more in the mixture here, but they are really wonderful this way.

And now what we want to do, this is our first course, we want to start working on the main course, which is a pojarski, pojarski basically, it's Russian.

And the pojarski means basically ground meat in Russian.

And we are going to do a sauce and the sauce, I'm going to grate some fresh horseradish here.

I have the horseradish here.

In my garden, it grows.

I peel the end of it.

And that is absolutely terrific, you know?

So what I have here, just ground a little bit of it, the part which I clean up and I can smell it, you know?

I mean, you can feel it, you know?

This is, of course, absolutely terrific.

I mean, if you put your nose on top of it, it can make you cry so strong.

So this is going to be for the sauce for the pojarski.

The pojarski is going to be a mixture of ground meat, which I have here.

Oh, I need my food processor again.

I wanna do some parsley in it, you know, I bathe about as much parsley of this, a couple of clove.

I have three clove of garlic here.

And we're gonna chop that, first.

It doesn't matter if I have a tiny bit of horseradish the bottom, you know?

All those tastes are going to go together well.

I have this here, and we do with this, I add maybe a bit more, I'm going to put some bread into this fresh bread, you know, fresh bread crumb.

To make fresh bread crumb, don't use the dry bread.

It makes different.

And what we do there, so I have a nice mixture of bread, parsley, and garlic, which I have here.

And this is going to be like a binding agent, you know, for the pojarski.

Look at that.

It's beautiful.

So we wanna soak that with a bit, and I have a bit of a skim milk here.

I want to soak this.

And after that, mix the veal.

You can see that veal is very, very lean That's what I want, a very lean veal into this.

I have a pound of veal, a dash of salt.

Usually in those things, you know, you put eggs and all that.

We are not putting any eggs here because we are putting the bread and the thing.

So, and the onion, I have chopped onion in there, of course, a lot of shopped onion in Russian cooking.

And what I want to do with this now is to mix it and shape it, you know?

So the best way is to mix it with your hand.

Remember, you're alone in your kitchen and it's perfectly fine, providing you clean your hand after.

And also the fact that this is going to be steamed at very high temperature, it's going to cook.

So it's perfectly fine.

So you mix that thoroughly.

You see the bread in it, which is soaked in milk.

If you want to avoid milk for some reason, you can soak it with a little bit of chicken stock or something else, you know, or water, really.

This is, you know, the classic mixture for home cooking that you do when you stuff a tomato or when you do different type of thing, that type of vining.

So here what we have, we have four here that we can mold, you know, by hand like this.

We have four.

I think the first one, I did a bit big.

I think I need a bit back.

To have it approximately, remember, I have a pound.

So that four ounce of meat per person, four ounce of meat per person plus then the bread, the onion, that type of thing.

So those things should be about close to seven ounces, six and a half, seven ounces a piece.

And you know, again, we used to saute that type of thing here.

What we're going to do is, if you want to do it ahead, you can cover it this way.

What we are going to do here is actually to steam it.

Let me rinse my hand a little bit, here.

Okay, and we're going to steam it in a steamer that is on top of water that we have right here.

The water is boiling.

I wanna put that directly in there.

And that will take about 10 minutes to boil, you know?

And while this is cooking, we want to start the sauce of the bit, and the sauce, again, Russian style is going to be made of onion, which I have here.

We have yogurt, I have yogurt, tea, I have again, cilantro, I have mushroom and chicken stock.

So what we want to do first is saute the onion a little bit with a little dash of oil.

I have ripe seed oil here, which often people call canola oil.

So we want to saute this, but remember that with a sauce, as we are doing here, a sauce made with yogurt, the yogurt and the cilantro is going to be used at the end.

Otherwise, it would break down.

The mushroom, however, we put it now into what we call a Julienne.

That is, you cut the mushroom in slice, stagger those slice together and slide them.

And that's about it.

I have plenty here.

Anyway, what I want to put it in there, saute the mushroom also.

The mushroom are going to render some liquid.

I have about that much.

A dash of salt on top of this.

Remember that this is this, and this is going to be for our sauce at the end, you know, but not now.

I have the grated horseradish and so forth.

So now, what I want do in there saute a little bit, is to put chicken stock to cook it for a few minutes with the chicken stock.

And while this is cooking two, three minutes, let's check out the patty.

Yeah, the patty are doing fine, cooking like this.

And now I wanna show you how to use herb.

In the summer, I have a lot of herb in my garden and it's so expensive in winter, so I can take advantage in the summer to use those herb.

As you can see here, from thyme to basil, of course, here, and chive.

I wanna show you what to do with the basil because the basil is the hardest thing to do.

You know, this is the thing which get black, but it won't get black.

You see, I have boiling water here.

If I put that in boiling water to blanche it, that is, it would get wilted right away, you know?

So you leave it like 10 second in boiling water, it's fine.

Then you cool it off right away in cold water.

If you don't do that, it's going to get yellow.

But see, by doing that, of course, it go down a lot.

I mean, the volume disappeared like the eighth or tenth cup that you add amount to nothing.

But the difference is that it's going to be staying green the whole winter.

So what we do here is to cut it into pieces, then put it into a small processor like this, you know, with a little dash of oil, little dash.

This is not a pesto, a dash of salt.

You put that on top, you make a puree outta it.

And that puree here.

Now what we do, we put it in package, you know, in the freezer.

And that's the beautifully nice and green.

You know, I have little piece of plastic wrap here.

What you do, you take a package of that, like one tablespoon because at that point, it's pretty potent, you know?

You fold it, you put a label on top, you know, we put a label on top, whatever this is basil or parsley or whatever.

And those are frozen, come out of the freezer.

And in winter, you can use them for a lot of thing.

And now let's see if our sauce is ready.

We want to finish the sauce that is put horseradish in there, which I put here, yogurt and cilantro, and this is it.

Now, you know, I have to reduce the cooking because I don't want it to boil.

I don't want it to go above 160 degrees after I put the yogurt, or else it is going to break down.

And now let's see, those here, those here are not quite cooked.

I have some which are cooked underneath here.

I'm gonna take them.

See, those have been cooking long enough.

Now those are nice and firm.

You take them directly from here, doing there.

You wanna take your sauce on top, you know, very flavorful type of sauce.

And actually, you know, I can see that that sauce heat up a bit too fast.

I should have taken that out and it had a tendency to break down, but it'll be fine.

You know, a bit of cilantro on top if you want, just for color.

And this is our pojarski main course for our Russian mixture.

(bright music) We are a Vietnamese first course, or oriental, at least, an interpretation.

We made a pojarski, I mean, Russian type of thing with a sour cream and so forth.

And now we're going to have a dessert, which is much more in the style of nouvelle cuisine, very light and all that.

It's actually a cookie.

And those cookie can be shaped around those like, horn of plenty or in a different type of mold, you know, so that they are used as a receptacle.

So you can put fruit or ice cream or whatever in it.

We are going to put fruit in it, and it's a very easy battle to do.

The first thing that you do is to put the butter in there and sugar.

So I have a two tablespoon of butter and a quarter of a cup of sugar.

And I think I put the egg white in there also, one egg white.

And then we process this.

On this side, it works much better for like four, five seconds, you know, until it's done.

Then we add a little dash of vanilla, like a half of a teaspoon and two tablespoon of flour, you know, and that's it.

This makes four.

I mean, I can do even easy six cookie with that, six large cookie.

So it is not that much.

Of course, if you do that for Christmas or some other thing, you probably would want to do a larger batch, you know, of this.

Actually, a larger batch is going to work even better in your food processor because when you have only a very tiny amount, you know, sometime it is difficult to do it well.

So get rid of this and this, and I'm gonna put this in there.

Okay.

So this is my batter, and that of course can be done ahead, but you don't want really to refrigerate this because you want it to keep it soft, you know?

So you can use it in a very special way that I'm gonna show you how to use, you know?

So here we are.

Be sure to pick up all of it here.

And I even mix it a little bit here if I feel that it's not mixed enough.

It's well homogenized.

Okay.

So now I put a cookie sheet in the freezer, you know, and I have it here.

And the cookie sheet is ice cold.

This is a nonstick pan.

If you use a nonstick pan, you don't have to put anything on it.

If you don't use that nonstick pan, you will have to butter, do something in it.

Now if it's ice cold like that, that the whole idea, you take a brush, you know, to brush it on top of it, like this, you see?

And we can brush that into about six inch thickness.

That's it.

Now you see, I have another one here.

If you don't have that in the freezer, it's harder to spread it, you know?

But now it makes it very easy.

The reason is that the thing is ice cold, you know?

So I have two large one, which could be shaped, you know?

Then you can have some smaller one, you know, small, round one if you want, like this.

Use it as a regular cookie.

Actually, you know, you can also mold them with a spoon.

But often, when we do smaller one like that, we use them eventually as as a sandwich, you know?

Then I can do a long one like this, also, you can see, and it's fine.

You know, any type of shape.

And that could be rolled like, you know, a swirl or something like this.

You can see here that I have basically off of my cookie mixture left.

So I have quite a lot of cookie.

This, I'm not going to put it in the oven because I have some in the oven that I want to show you, which should be closed to be ready now.

Yes, I think those are about right.

When they have that color, you want to use them right away, you see?

And if I lift up the end of it with a fork, when they are silver, they are very soft.

You see?

I could lift it up, put it directly on this and roll it into a cornucopia.

Now look at that.

Okay.

Now I have another one here.

If it's still soft enough, you know, it goes pretty fast, I can put it inside to mold it into an inside mold.

This one here, which stick to that, I could mold it on the outside.

This, you know, look there.

Now within minutes after, not even a minute, you know, nothing are going to get hard, and this is it.

But you know, look at this one that I could roll also in the other way.

It's already getting hard.

But if this get hard, all I have to do is to take that tray, put it back in the oven, 15, 20 second, 30, it's softened again, then you can take it out.

You see this one, up, it's crunchy already, and very good.

So I have those in there.

What we want to do now is a sauce, and the sauce is made with different type of fruit where you can choose whatever we want.

Whatever you want.

I have lemon juice here that I put in a tablespoon of sugar, which doesn't want to come out.

Here it is.

And with that, we put banana, the banana (indistinct) seed to discolor it, you know?

So in the citric acid here, in the citric acid, it's not going to discolor.

Always when you cut a banana, eat a piece, it's good.

Okay, I have a couple of banana, you can put those.

I have, of course, a lot of red berry, you know, which are good in there, can keep all one and dry fruit.

It's always an interesting thing to do, dry fruit and fresh fruit together.

I have dry fig here, you know, and then you toss together.

You have the nice acidulated taste, you know, of the fruit, which is good.

So what we do here, we can do two different one.

Here, you can have one.

You see, this is hard already.

And use that other horn of plenty, which comes out of this.

You can use another one of the receptacle here.

We could have yogurt, we have a little bit here.

You can put a little bit of yogurt inside, if you want, like you wanna put ice cream, and the fruit on the outside.

The fruit, oh, this one should be, I'm sorry, this way.

So it kind of imitate the fruit coming out, you know, of your horn of plenty here, you know, a whole area of different type of fruit.

On this one here, it could be on top of the fruit, and some of it as decoration around, you know?

And then you can put a little bit of a mint if you want, for decoration, like around like this.

A beautiful, light, elegant dessert, which is going to go after the pojarski, which are pretty rich, you know?

This will be absolutely beautiful.

Another added thing, if you want, we can even put a bit of powder sugar and you see the powder sugar, we put it even on the plate itself to give a whole kind of a dust flour.

And this is our beautiful dessert for today.

We have a really interesting menu today, a real melting pot.

This is what I am.

This is what we are in America, a melting pot.

And it has less than 30% of its calorie through fat.

So it's very light and elegant.

Of course, we have to start with that squid salad, which is really spicy, and that cool of the the mint, you know, with the hotness of the pepper, you'll get addicted to it just like I am.

And the pojarski, Russian style, a bit sour.

And the cilantro, I mean, we did that, remember, with yogurt.

Even though it's a cream sauce, it looks very good.

A salad, of course, and the beautiful dessert with the crunchy horn.

And with that, what can work better than a sauvignon blanc from the Napa Valley?

Nice, fruity, crisp.

You know, it's a romantic wine without any pretension.

It's great.

I'm sure you're going to love that menu.

I really enjoyed making it for you.

Try it at home.

You will enjoy it.

Happy cooking.