- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

When you take the time to cook for family and friends, it's always a labor of love.

But today's menu goes beyond that.

It's truly a romantic dinner.

Naturally, we are starting with the favorite food of the lovers, oyster, prepared as an elegant gratin.

Grilled flank steak is done in a piquant honey and soy sauce marinade and served with caramelized mushroom.

Dessert is raspberry velvet.

Pureed berry are frozen to make a simple and refreshing finish.

With food like this, any day can be Valentine's Day.

Join me for a romantic dinner on "Today's Gourmet."

(bright music) We have a very romantic dinner tonight, a special evening, and we're going to start that special dinner, special romantic evening with, what else, oyster.

And this is a different way of doing oyster than the conventional way we're going to poach them.

There are over 100 different type of oyster on our East Coast, West Coast, and different other part of the United States.

And you should investigate those area a little bit in your local supermarket.

We are opening here with a specific opener for oyster.

Those are very deep little oyster.

And what you wanna do is to put it, insert it into the little hinge here, and break it open, take a large towel as I did because it may go right through your finger and it can be dangerous.

Be sure that at that point you keep all of the liquid that you have in there.

You can notice that the one that I'm buying now is nice and lean.

The one I bought before was very, very milky.

And certain time of the year, it's milky as those are.

So what we wanna do here is to poach them in their own liquid.

What you wanna do is for the mantle outside, you know, the little border that they have on top start wrinkling a little bit and they will be cooked enough.

So you wanna put that on low heat.

And we wanna do a topping for that on top.

And the topping we're going to do with fresh breadcrumb.

Remember that if I take one slice of bread like that, maybe a slice and a half here, one slice of bread will give me approximately half a cup to two third of a cup of breadcrumb.

If I put it in the oven, that same slice of bread, if I put it in the oven, you know, do a little crouton with it, that will give me approximately three tablespoon of breadcrumb.

So dry breadcrumb has nothing to do with fresh breadcrumb.

You have to be sure of this.

In this we're putting some tarragon.

I have a little bit of a fresh tarragon here.

I have some chives.

You can chop them and mix them in your mixture.

See, when you do a veal chop or something like that with breadcrumb and you dip them in each side on dry breadcrumb, you may end up using approximately a quarter to a third of a cup of breadcrumb per scallopini.

Well, that third of a cup of dry breadcrumb may be the equivalent of like four slice of bread.

When you use the fresh breadcrumb, of course, it's much more delicate.

And when you put it in a skillet to saute with a little bit of oil and butter, it doesn't even absorb it.

Doesn't even absorb it because you have moisture in it.

What we wanna do here in the same way, we put a little bit of olive oil, just enough to moisten the bread.

You wanna rub that one again the other.

The idea is to moisten the breadcrumb with a tiny bit of oil.

Not enough so that it become gooey, but that will form a beautiful crust on top of a rack of lamb or other thing like this.

So what we wanna do here is to mix.

Our oyster are cooked enough.

And what I wanna do is to drain them.

Maybe I should put this in there and this one here.

They are barely cooked as you can see.

And the liquid there, you can keep it and freeze it.

We have no use of the liquid in that particular recipe.

There and in there, we are putting a little bit of oyster sauce, Chinese style and hot chili sauce.

This is our seasoning here.

We want to place that into a little gratin dish.

You could have individual gratin dish to do that, which would be very nice.

And we put our breadcrumb on top, nicely all over.

And that will go under the broiler for a couple of minute, just so that it have a nice little crust on top.

I have this one, which is of course here.

And this is a very delicate, simple way of serving oyster.

And you can try it at home in individual dish or in a large gratin.

(bright music) And now for our main course, we're going to do a marinated flank steak that I'm going to cook on the barbecue.

Nothing wrong with beef.

Beef is one of the highest sort and the best sort of protein.

I'm going to do an interesting mixture, a kind of marinade with it.

I have some coriander seed here and I use that little spice grinder to really get it fresh.

Some black peppercorn.

And you wanna ground this.

Take tag on, you know, in there.

When you do a pate, when you do a pate in the French style, you put all those grind in it.

You put thyme, you put bay leaf, all the dry ingredient and you have a powder of spice right away, you know?

So I put those in there.

I'm going to put a little bit of soy with that.

A bit of honey, a little bit of cayenne, not too much because your cayenne is going to blow your mind.

And finally, a little bit of garlic.

Here, maybe two clove of garlic, which I'm going to chop.

Crush your garlic.

To do a puree of garlic that we're going to add to it.

And this is basically the extent of our marinade, which of course you can do a lot of other thing.

I have a flank steak here.

As you can see, this is a very lean cut of meat.

You want a lean cut of meat.

We have a flank steak, which is approximately a pound and a quarter.

By the time you finish cleaning it, you take a couple of ounces off.

Be sure to remove all visible fat on it, on each side.

Look at the other side also.

This is an interesting piece of meat.

Not only is it very flavorful, but you have to cut it in the right way.

Very fibrous, you know, in the long way.

So you have to cut it against the grain, or you have problem.

So what we'll do is to put a little bit of this in there to rub our steak on top of it and to marinate it.

I mean, you would want to marinate it for a few hours.

Of course, we don't have time to marinate it for that amount of time.

So we're going to put it practically directly on top of the barbecue.

I have my barbecue, which is nice and hot now.

And I'm gonna put that right on top.

It will take a couple of minutes on each side, you know, to cook.

Here, and while this is cooking, I wanna discuss mushroom with you.

And as you can see here, I have an array of absolutely delightful, beautiful mushroom.

The classic chanterelle, girole, we call it in France, you know, wild mushroom you find in the wood.

Those are all raised mushroom, which is amazing.

This is the so-called hen of the wood, which is a parasite mushroom growing directly on the tree.

Don't confuse with the chicken of the wood, that the hen of the wood, another type of flower.

Here, we have a blue, as well as a golden oyster mushroom.

You know, the oyster mushroom, those are different species.

This is an armillera miella, which is a honey mushroom, very prevalent in the fall.

I buy it last year, I caught over 80 pound of those.

This is a puffball.

And this is a shiitake, a new type of shiitake, quite thick, a bit like the chrysanthemum shiitake.

Those are, of course, new mushroom that are available in the country now.

And it's very exciting to see the different form of the different type of produce, which are grown now.

In any case, here, what I want is the standard regular mushroom.

And very often, I go to the market, and people will recommend to use the tiny button mushroom, where it's totally closed, where no gill is apparent here.

Well, I go to the end of the market and buy the cheap one very often, where the gill is apparent, which is all black, which is soft.

Not only is it probably half of the price of the other, but in addition to that, it has twice as much taste, because it is mature, it's cooked.

Now, don't forget to wash your mushroom.

You know, at the last moment, you do have to wash your mushroom.

It's a fallacy that you don't wash mushroom.

The point is not that you don't wash mushroom.

The point is that you don't wash it until you're ready to use it.

Look at my plank steak, it's beautiful now.

I wanna cook it a couple of time, a couple of minutes on the other side.

There is another thing you can do here.

See the wood that I have here?

Those are actually stem, I mean, the one on top here are stem of basil.

When your basil is in your garden, and you have no more leaf, you break those stem, and you use them to grill or to flavor the meat with.

Those are rosemary stem, and those are a thyme, thyme stem.

You know, just the wood of it, and you could, I have briquette in there.

You could push the briquette together and put that right on top of it.

It would be very odorous and very flavorful for the meat.

But going back to our mushroom, which we're going to cook here, we wanna put that with a great deal of shallots.

I have some shallots here, which are those red, beautiful red onion there.

It's the classic accompaniment to mushroom.

I cook those mushroom a long, long time.

And I'm not kidding, I cook those mushroom 25, 30 minute, you know, because they render a great deal of liquid.

So I cook them slowly in their liquid, and until the moment they start caramelizing with a little bit of olive oil in it, and you can finish it later with some more herb, if you want, and some butter.

In any case, I have approximately a good cup of sliced shallots here that we're going to add to it, which I put right back into my little bowl there.

And I think that my steak is, well, it could cook a little longer.

You know, it's a fallacy to think that you put meat in the oven, and you form a coating on top, and that keep the juice inside.

What keep the juice inside is how the meat goes into the oven, around the grill, exposed to it, it tighten.

And by tightening, it curl up, and it squeeze itself out of juice, and the juice goes throughout the center of the meat.

Mean that if you do a roast beef, you put it in the oven, get it out of the oven, cut right through it, the whole center is liquid, totally liquid, lukewarm, and all of the outside is gray, overcooked looking, and you say, "What's going on?"

If you let that meat the time to rest, the myoglobin, which is the muscle tissue, will relax, will go through the meat.

The meat will relax, rather, and the myoglobin go through the meat, and accumulate in the pan around you.

You have that liquid coming out.

The meat is rested.

It's been from the first slice to the last slice.

It's nice on the other side, too.

So that's what I wanted to do with this now.

I wanna put that directly in the oven, so that it has time to relax for an hour, or up to an hour, that is, and about 200 degree.

I'm adding here the shallot in there, and we'll put that in the oven.

And now that I've explained to you, I mean, look at that piece of meat.

There's a great deal of liquid coming out of it here, and this is the liquid.

It's an indication of doneness.

When, as I said, the myoglobin start coming out of the meat, it indicate that it's cooked.

And often, you'll see a chef who is pushing on the meat to know whether it's cooked or not.

Raw meat is soft.

As the meat start tightening, it get springy, because you have that liquid in the center of it.

And by the time it start braising, that is, the liquid come to the end, it start coming out the other way through a process of osmosis.

Eventually, your piece of meat is going to be like a piece of board, and that piece of board basically like a pot roast.

So you have that process by which, by touching the meat, you know more or less where you're at.

Require a little bit of practice, but it is a reliable method.

Of course, most of the time at home, you never get the chance to practice that type of thing, but when you're in a restaurant, if you do 15 rack of lamb the same evening, then within a couple of day, you get the feel of it.

So look at my mushroom here, what I have done, I have those mushroom cook 20, 25 minutes, even slightly longer to the point where they are caramelized, you know?

And now I wanna put a little bit of salt on top of it, a dash of pepper, and a piece of butter.

Put any butter in it, about a tablespoon of butter, and parsley, chopped parsley in it.

We can put other type of herbs, of course, some chives, whatever you would like to put.

Here we are, and it is basically ready to serve, and that type of caramelized mixture in the mushroom is going to go very well with our meat.

So what we have to do now is to slice our meat, and you would wanna slice it and use the natural juice, you know?

That type of meat, as I was explaining before, is kind of stringy, that is, not that it is stringy, but it's kind of tough if you cut it along with the grain, so be careful to cut it against the grain.

And you can see now it has rested to the beautiful color.

Now this is medium rare.

You may like it more rare or more cooked, it's entirely up to you.

It seems now that when you don't have something raw in a restaurant, there is some type of, something attached to it, you know, in term of habit, if you don't have it very rare.

You can have your meat very well done too, it's perfectly fine.

What we wanna do, of course, is to use the natural juice.

Notice also that I put that flank steak back into the marinade that I had there.

If you do that, be sure to put it in the oven to cook for a while, because of salmonella, you cannot put your cooked meat back into a raw ingredient and serve it as such.

You would have to be careful of this.

So what I have here is our mushroom, which are really strongly caramelized.

I can smell juice of it.

Maybe I'll put a little bit on the other side.

I could have put it underneath or the bed underneath, you know, a bed of mushroom under the steak.

And any of the wild mushroom that I show you, of course, would be perfect with that too.

So we finish with that little bit of mushroom, and this is our main course for the day.

(bright music) And for our romantic dinner that we started with oyster, we're going to finish with raspberry, of course, a refreshing frozen dessert, very good replacement for ice cream.

It's much less caloric.

It has no fat, no cholesterol, and it has intense flavor.

So we have here fresh raspberry.

We have frozen raspberry.

You can also use those frozen raspberry, providing you use the IQF, so-called individually quick frozen, no sugar around.

In fact, those sometimes are very intense in flavor because they pick them at the time when they're really ripe.

We have fresh one here.

We want, there is different way of pureeing the berry.

One way is to do it through the food mill, which I'm, in my opinion, is the best.

There is different blade to that food mill.

We took the small blade, but don't put it this way as most people do, which is the smooth side.

It goes this way.

Most people put it upside down.

That's why it doesn't work too well.

So you put this one in there, the arm, and we're going to push it through.

Right there, it has two thing on there.

And we're putting our berry.

We have 12 ounce of berry here.

I have more than I need.

And we're going to put it right through with raspberry, other sweetening agent.

Oop, one fell in there.

Other sweetening agent.

I'm putting a third of a cup of raspberry or blackberry jam, rather, you know?

They're intense.

So like that, you don't have to put any sugar, just a bit of jam.

You know what you can do with that?

If you have some of that stuff left over, some of those grains, you can put that in your vinegar.

People like raspberry vinegar, you know, a thing like that.

But you might as well use those seeds there.

Or sometimes you put them in a stock, if you do a stock for a game, for example.

But basically, all of what I have left here is the seed.

So I put it right through, clean that up.

And now there is quite a lot of seed left.

It remove about 80%.

If you really don't want any more seed left over, then we put that through a sieve.

Not too thick, a sieve like this, you know?

Which is not too thin.

The thin one, you're going to have problem if you put it in the very thin one.

Now, one of the common mistakes, people take a spatula like that and go around the side of the mesh.

What happen is that each hole is filled up with one seed, and it get blocked.

So you don't go with your spatula like that.

You just bang it on the side.

That make it jump, and you see the whole thing go through it.

And it's only at the end when you have practically none left over, then you can do that just to finish it up.

But not at the beginning, 'cause now the hole are plugged.

So I have all of that in there.

And what we wanna do, we're going to serve that in a decorated glass here.

And I have lime juice here.

You can use lemon juice.

We're doing a kind of fun thing, like a type of margarita.

We have a beautiful glass, just dip it in there, and you go directly in sugar.

You know, to have a nice rim, a nice border with it.

And you wanna put that in the freezer to freeze the glass as well as the mixture, because we wanna do a slush with it.

I put it here.

Have another one here.

And as you can see, what happen here, not only is the glass absolutely beautiful frozen, I have it ready here, but my raspberry is what I call a raspberry slush.

That is, it's not like a sherbet.

You know, it's not like a sherbet.

That is, it's not solid totally.

It's still partially liquid and frozen.

The idea was there, of course, because I did a glass with the sugar and the citrus juice, lime juice.

It's a little bit the idea of a type of margarita if you want, you know.

You could add actually a little bit of raspberry brandy.

Be terrific in there.

So you wanna fill up those at the last moment.

Of course, this is very full because it's so intense in flavor.

And I think maybe a tiny decoration with a little spring of mint will go very well on top.

It's really a delightful finish for a romantic dinner.

(bright music) Of course, a romantic dinner, let me always start with champagne.

It's a special evening.

So let me put that on the side and show you how to open champagne.

I have a bottle of one of my favorite champagne here.

And what you wanna do is to take through the piece of foil that I removed and the metal cage that's on top of it.

Be sure to keep your hand on top so it doesn't get away from you.

Throw that back into the pail.

Keep your thumb on top of it.

Then, I usually do it with that hand, actually.

What you wanna do is to hold the cork and move the bottle, not the cork, really, and hold the cork.

See, the cork is ready to go now.

I can feel it.

Should just hear a little bit of the "pshht" of the champagne at the end.

Now, as you know, the champagne has to be poured twice.

You have a couple of people, you start pouring champagne, then you come back around and serve champagne.

Otherwise, you get cheated.

You just get a little bit in your glass and you want a full glass of champagne.

And you look at the quality in the size of the bubble, you know, which are very tiny bubble, a lot of bubble.

That's a good quality champagne, of course, with the fragrance and many other thing.

So I think we're going to have a great special evening tonight, starting with our breaded oyster.

It's a different way of doing oyster.

You can have them on the half shell, but to do them this way, you have them ready, you poach them, so you can do them in small, individual gratin dish, different type of herb, a little bit of bread and a nice gratin.

It's a delightful, very elegant type of first course.

Then we get with the flank steak and you see our flank steak, we slice it very thin.

Again, the grain, we have a marinade in there with the soy, with the hot pepper and all that.

You can change the marinade as much as you want.

You want a nice salad with that dinner.

And of course, we finish with that raspberry velvet, which is so refreshing, concentrated in taste.

And to eat our beef, I think we'll go with a Riora, wine from the north of Spain.

This is a wine made from Tempranillo and Mazuelo grapes, very berry, strong in flavor, slightly, almost maderized and so forth.

And that type of wine, which are extremely good buy on the market now, is going to be a perfect finish for our dish.

I hope you enjoy the romantic dinner tonight.

I hope you're going to do it for your friend.

I enjoy doing it for you.

See you next time and happy cooking.