- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

- And I'm Claudine Pepin.

Papa, who do you suppose came up with the expression, "As easy as pie?"

- I don't know.

Are you taking exception to the idea?

- Well, yes.

I mean, a pie crust is a difficult thing to make and I've never really gotten the hang of it.

- Perhaps a little pie lesson would be in order.

We can start with a classic Tarte Tatin, and the upside down French apple pie with a simple puff pastry crust.

Of course, we'll have to make a custard fruit tart.

It's not much other than cutting ripe fruit.

And my version of Linzer Torte, made with fresh raspberry, so it's moisture and softer than the traditional kind.

Join us for a picnic of pie.

- Next, on "Jacque Peppin Celebrates."

- What do you want me to teach you today?

- Dough.

- Dough?

- Dough.

Making dough.

- Cooking?

Making dough?

- Cooking dough.

You name it.

- Okay, well let's start with a classic, the Tarte Tatin.

- Okay.

(Jacques speaks in foreign language) - You know, the sister Tatin, (speaks in foreign language) around the Luau Valley, they used to do that famous tarte, which is an upside down tarte with the dough on top.

And for that, I've started with a caramel here, just water and sugar.

And I'm cooking it, I have about a third of a cup of sugar here, until it turned into caramel in there.

Then I'm going to peel this or not peel that.

You know, we can use it with the skin on.

Okay, so, I'm going to cut the center of it, this way.

The center of it here.

My caramel is not burning, is it?

- Well, it's gonna start really soon.

- Okay.

And now, because I'm not going to cool it off, it's probably going to get slightly darker when I take it out.

So I'm gonna take it out now.

If it get too dark, at that point, you have to be ready with a tray of water and just lower it, it will stop right away, you know?

Let's do the dough during that time.

- [Claudine] Okay.

- Flour, you have a cup of flour.

Sugar?

- A teaspoon.

- Yeah, about.

- Okay, that's two half teaspoons.

- A dash of salt.

And I'm giving you about three quarter of a stick of butter.

Now you want to emulsify that a little bit.

(food processor pulsing) That's it.

Let it turn.

That's it.

Stop it.

And then we put a little bit of water.

One, maybe two tablespoon.

Go ahead.

(food processor whirring) That's going to be okay.

- [Claudine] That's perfect.

- Now, look at my caramel here, Claudine.

You see it cool off a little bit.

I want to cover the bottom.

Here's what I want you to do, is to arrange the apple around like this, this way.

Okay, this, this.

Okay, put the one in the middle like this.

Another one, we can put three like that.

All right.

We put dry apricot here.

- And, almonds.

- And some almond.

Good, we can even put a bit of a raisin or currant or whatever.

- Currant.

- I don't usually put, that's enough.

So that, we gotta put on top of the stove because I want to cook that back with a little bit of water to soften my apple.

If I don't put water, the caramel is going to start burning.

So I put a little bit of water, like half a cup or so.

And that will melt the caramel and it will draw the moisture out of the apple and the apple are going to start cooking.

And I want the apple to cook and end up being soft and all of the juice of the apple to kind of reduce before I put it into the oven.

So this is the rest of my apple that goes on top.

See all of the, remember that we put the nice one in the bottom.

You don't want to disturb it.

Remember that this is the top, which is upside down.

(apples sizzling) A bit of sugar on top.

I have the caramel, remember?

- Yeah.

- And some butter.

I have two, three tablespoon of butter here.

I'm gonna put a cover on this, so that again, the moisture come in and the apple can of soften and the juice come out of the apple.

If you don't do that, if you have a lot of juice boiling and you put your dough on top, you put it into the oven, depending on the amount of moisture in your apple, there is no way of controlling it.

Time you take it out, you un-mold it, there's too much juice.

- Oh, okay.

So you keep the moisture to soften the apples and then you take the moisture out so that it doesn't mess up the dough.

Right?

- Exactly.

Now you can gather it with this.

- [Claudine] Gonna get rid of this.

- [Jacques] Like if you are, a bit, kneading the dough, you know?

That's it.

Now my dough is holding together here.

- [Claudine] Perfect.

- Now you wanna roll it between plastic like this.

That's it.

Especially on the fresh dough that I just made, if you do it, it's sticky, you know?

You have to use a lot of flour.

And when you use a lot of flour, it get dry, you know?

So you do this.

Okay, so you wanna spread it out a bit this way, that way, because you want it to be about round.

Roll the border so that, so that it get a bit thicker at the edge.

But I mean that basically, now you can do that ahead and just grab this, put it in your refrigerator, okay?

And on that dough, now, which is ready to go on, we'll bring a little bit of the edge up to make the edge a bit stronger, if you want.

- Thicker?

- [Jacques] Thicker.

- Usually you would let a dough rest.

Is that correct?

- Well, this one doesn't look too tired, so.

(Claudine laughs) Yeah, I mean we say that, and sometime it is necessary depending on the type of dough.

Sometime, it is less important, you know, on this one.

But this, however, it's going to be hard for me to take it out.

You wanna put it a few minutes in the refrigerator.

- Okay.

- Or in the freezer for that matter.

- I'll put it in the freezer.

Okay, now look at that.

You see there is bubble there, but it's basically almost like caramel.

It's not the water anymore.

And when I move it like this, - [Claudine] The whole thing moves.

- the whole thing move like that.

So it's ready.

- All right, I'll get the dough.

- This.

I stop this.

Put that right on top of it here.

I'm gonna spread it out to the side.

Bit of sugar on top, Claudine.

- Okay.

- Give the thing a couple of mark this way.

- [Claudine] Just on top?

Sprinkled?

- Yeah, that's it.

To give me a bit of caramelization there.

That's it.

And that's ready to go into the oven.

- Okay.

- All right.

Now see the beauty of that pie, you don't have to un-mold it right away.

In fact, you should not un-mold it right away.

This is stuck to the bottom full of caramel.

So you have to put it back on the stove and move it like this.

I have to cook it for a little while until you start moving and then I can un-mold it.

Need to do that on top.

I'm just going to un-mold this.

- [Claudine] Ah, that looks beautiful.

- Okay, and this is our Tarte Tatin, upside down.

Now I'll show you another type of tarte with a totally different type of dough.

So put your flour in there.

Two, two and a half cup of flour.

I have powder of sugar.

You want to put eight ounce of butter here.

And you want to mix with it again with the food processor (food processor whirring) until all of the butter is incorporated.

- So you don't want little pieces of butter?

- No, no.

No, no.

You want it totally incorporated.

One egg yolk.

- One egg yolk.

- And a little bit of milk.

Just put a little bit here, we'll add more.

That should be enough.

It may be enough, I don't know.

Let's see what it takes.

(food processor whirring) - [Claudine] It's going.

- Okay, your dough will gather like this.

You see?

This is a dough, which is like modeling clay.

Doesn't have any resilience.

Doesn't bounce back.

Why that?

Because there is basically no liquid.

The more water or milk, but water and flour you have, you mix together, the closer you get to a bread dough in elasticity, the closer you get to basically sugar, flour and butter, closer to a cookie dough, no resilience.

- [Claudine] Hmm.

- Okay, so we want to do a big tarte with that.

Okay.

Now look, you see how that thing is?

Usually you let that rest a little bit, you know?

Because it's soft.

Put a little bit on top.

- On top?

- Yeah.

You know when you put your dough like that, you don't spray, it's not salt here.

When you do pastry, it's this.

You know, you throw your thing like that when you put on the table.

(both laughing) Try it at your house before you try it at your mother's house.

Okay, well that's enough.

Okay, now you can see that that dough, it's very, very soft.

- Mm.

Oh Papa, what about the caramel?

I know we're doing caramel with this.

- Oh yeah, I forgot it.

- Okay, wait, I'll do it.

Don't worry.

I know how to make caramel now.

- All right.

- [Claudine] You need sugar and water.

Sugar.

- Yeah, and you have to put not too much water, just enough to moisten it.

In that particular dough, what we wanna do is kind of a cookie, an enormous cookie.

And when that cookie is cooked, we're going to put a layer of caramel in the bottom, which will get hard.

Then we do a pastry cream on top and the fruit.

Pretty sophisticated tarte.

Okay, I'll bring that on the side here.

Nicely to roll there.

- [Claudine] I'm gonna put that right underneath you, right?

- [Jacques] Yeah.

And I will unroll that the other way, you know?

- [Claudine] Just on plain parchment paper.

- Plain parchment paper.

Okay, caramel is working.

- Caramel is working.

- Okay, now here is what we do.

We bring the side together like this.

Now you see in some area, like here, it's more inside, here it's more out.

So it's not exactly the same.

So first, we just bring it like this, okay.

I'm trying to get it round.

So now I'm doing another turn.

Still bringing the parts which are not quite round, more inside like this one here.

Now what we've done here, I have pressed the bottom of that dough so that the top of that dough is very pointed and the bottom is like a triangle.

So it doesn't collapse on itself.

What I'm saying is that if I press the dough straight, like that, as you start cooking, it collapse.

- Oh okay.

- But if I press it pointed like that, it's fine.

Okay?

So now we decorate it.

So I put that finger here and that one, I do this, this, this.

- Oh.

- This, this, this.

Now I'm gonna do, do you see that?

- That's very nice.

- Okay, we puncture the center a little bit and we do that big cookie there.

You don't have to put anything in there that goes into the oven.

20, 25 minutes.

So I have my caramel here, which is getting there.

On top of that dough, we usually do a pastry cream.

Claudine, you worked on it before.

- Pastry cream is milk, eggs, sugar, vanilla, corn starch.

- And a bit of corn starch.

Can do it with flour or corn starch.

- But now I'm gonna incorporate some butter and some rum.

- So, why don't you mix your butter and rum together here?

During that time, my caramel is ready.

I'm going to glaze my caramel tarte here.

(whisk scraping) Good.

You see my caramel here?

It's going to form a shell hard on my dough, so that when I put a pastry cream, the dough is not going to get soggy.

I have that hard layer in between.

And eventually the pastry cream, however, will start melting the caramel.

And when you bite it, you should just have the pastry cream and a little bit of crunchiness of that caramel.

Okay, so before I put it in there, that has to cool off a bit.

It's still sticking.

What kind of fruit are we going to throw in there?

- We have a bunch of different fruit.

We have mangoes and kiwi.

- We have mango, we have kiwi.

- And these are feijoa?

Feijoa?

- Feijoa.

- Anyway, they taste really good.

They're also known as pineapple guava.

- The pineapple guava.

Yes.

You know, I wanted to put some of those pomegranate in between.

When you open a pomegranate, you know, use a spoon, - Use a spoon.

- like this to go in between and break it open.

You break it open like this.

- Put this over here.

- And then you break it into segment like that.

Now to take those out of this, all you do, you put it outside on your hand, and give it a good spanking.

You see that?

- [Claudine] Wow!

- Everything is out of it.

All the white pieces, you know, membrane, if they fall in there, they float to the top.

- [Claudine] Oh, so that's why you're doing this in water.

- Oh yeah.

It makes it.

- Makes sense.

- So you wanna try it?

Open your finger, so that it doesn't.

- Yeah, that would help.

(both laughing) Oh hey, look at that.

There's the white stuff going in there.

- Yeah.

Okay.

So we are putting the pastry cream layer.

As you can see, you know, a pastry cream automatically is going to start melting the shell of sugar, which is my caramel.

So you don't really want to do it too, too early.

I'm first going to put down your mango on the outside.

We do the layer like this.

That's good.

Okay.

So we can do kiwi inside like that.

That's it.

- [Claudine] I have strawberries and bananas?

- [Jacques] Ah, strawberry would be good.

Starting to look like something, yeah?

- [Claudine] Yeah.

It looks beautiful.

- Okay, that's it here.

What do we put in the center?

Your feijoa?

- [Claudine] There.

- Okay.

- Just- - That's beautiful.

- Don't!

(both laughing) - Give me the thing over there.

- Touch it!

- Okay, give me a spoon, and we have a little bit of apricot glaze.

- [Claudine] How about the pomegranate seeds?

- [Jacques] You can put, well, we'll put that on top.

- [Claudine] Okay.

- Of the decoration.

So you see what I'll do here?

You know the glaze really add a lot of wonderful taste to it.

- [Claudine] Yeah, it also keeps it nice.

- Bit shiny.

And finally, we can put... What do I do, bam?

- (laughs) No.

- Okay, we put that, let's be beautiful like this.

Okay, and this is our custard fruit galette, with a pastry cream, fruit and apricot glaze.

I wanna show you how to do a dough, which is very delicate and one of your favorite dessert, which is the Linzer torte.

- Ooh, that's my favorite.

- So go ahead.

- Okay.

- Put your flour in it.

Sugar.

I'm gonna put vanilla.

- This is - Put your almond in there.

- [Claudine] cardamom?

- [Jacques] No, this is mace.

- Mace?

- Mace.

Yeah.

Cinnamon.

Or you can vary your things, you know?

That in there.

- These?

Goes right in?

- Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And let's turn on that first.

In fact, I shouldn't even have put the vanilla, you know?

Just the flour and the... So the flour and the nuts, til the nuts are very powder-like.

(food processor whirring) That's why you don't want to have any of the butter in it.

- That's okay, it's dessert.

- Feel what it feels like.

Yeah, it's very soft.

A little more, even.

And then now one and a half stick of butter.

Go ahead.

(food processor whirring) Three egg yolk.

That's it.

That's good.

Now it's together.

Okay.

I'm gonna put that directly on the pan that I'm going to cook it in.

And you need about two thirds of it to do the dough.

And you need a little bit for the outside, you know?

Okay, so let's say that I'm keeping about a third, a quarter of the dough here.

That's it.

Hold that.

The rest, we're going to roll it now, into the tarte, you know?

If you think you have problem rolling it this way with this, turn this upside down.

- Turn this upside down?

- Right.

And you do it on this side or you do it on a flat tarte, you know?

One of the best way of doing it, using a piece of plastic like this.

That's it.

Roll it, so it's again, just like the cookie dough, you know, it could be a bit thick, it doesn't really matter for that.

Okay, that will be big enough, right?

- [Claudine] Mm-hm.

- So cut that right in it, you know, this way.

Push through with the plastic and all.

Yeah, that's it.

All right.

And we remove this.

You wanna gather that now.

And then I put that back here.

And now, it's fit.

Okay, so with the rest of it, we're going to do the border here, you know, to roll this in kind of tube like this, you know?

See I have it there.

I'm gonna put it around.

It doesn't matter if it breaks, you know, because we're going to press it anyway.

- Here.

- Okay.

No, yours is fine, you see?

I have this here and want the border to come above the rim because we bringing it back into it.

So this, I'm pressing it on board.

I know, before you tell me, because it doesn't look good yet, this will go back on top of the berry.

With the rest of the dough, what I want to do, while you're doing this, is to roll the rest of the dough in little strip to put across here, so.

- Okay, well you do that.

- Telling us what you're going to do there.

- And I have fresh raspberries.

And I have some raspberry jam, and I'm gonna put all of this through the food mill.

(berries sloshing) (metal rattling) And then I bring it back so I get all the seeds out.

- [Jacques] Good.

- And now that this is done, - Okay.

- there's still a few seeds that sort of escaped, but I don't think it'll ruin the dessert.

- You could strain it even, if you wanted, at that point.

I mean, the point that conventionally Linzer torte is done with only raspberry jam.

And by the time it cooked in there, for me, it's like raspberry leather.

And it's too, no, you know the raspberry leather?

It's really too gooey to, this, by the time it cooked is going to be just like raspberry jam, you know?

So we put that on top.

Okay, so here we have, what we have to do is this, to put that on top there.

We have to do this here.

One in the center.

You don't have to worry too much about the end because you're gonna bring that back on top.

- Okay.

- And as it cook, this is going, you see it look a bit messy here?

- Yeah, - There, but you won't see that because that'll melt.

- [Claudine] Oh, okay, here I am stressing out over here.

- That's why you bring it back, right?

That's it.

That's it.

- Okay.

- And then you put that into the oven.

And you know, I know that you couldn't wait for that.

So I have cooked one for you here.

- [Claudine] Ooh!

- [Jacques] And here we are.

And I have sugar here.

- [Claudine] Oh!

- You see the sugar that I have?

But there is no sugar in there.

- What did you have, this complicated method of doing this?

- No, you put the sugar like that when it comes out of the oven.

You see if I put sugar like that?

It will stay there.

It doesn't melt because that's dry.

So when it's still hot, piping out of the oven, you put sugar, so it'll stay on the dough, but it melt whatever fall on top of this, you know?

- You have answered a question I've had for a long time.

- Oh yes?

- How do they do that?

- [Jacques] Okay, a little slice.

That will be your slice, huh?

- [Claudine] Mm-hm.

- Okay, and maybe a little spring of mint next to it.

You know, like this.

And here we are, our fresh raspberry Linzer torte.

This is a world of tarte.

That's what I see.

And I hope you understand those dough.

I mean, remember the first, the Tarte Tatin, you know?

- Mm-hm.

- Piece of dough on top, which we turn upside.

This one, remember we have not only the big kind of cookie, we have the caramel and we have the fruit and the glaze.

And finally, - My Linzer torte.

- Your Linzer torte, which is a real special dough.

- Yes.

And for that, I picked a Chenin Blanc, which actually has noble rot on it.

- [Jacques] Right.

- And this is a dessert wine.

Dessert wine, the grapes sit on the vine longer, they kind of start to become like raisins, and then you press the juice.

- Good, so whatever fruit or whatever the dessert you do or whatever pie you do with your children or with your husband or with your friend, I'm sure you're going to enjoy doing them as much as I enjoyed cooking with you today.

- Absolutely, Papa.

- Thank you very much.

- Thank you.

- And happy cooking.

- Happy cooking.