- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

It's summertime and the cooking is easy because you have all of those wonderful summer fruits and vegetable at the peak of freshness.

Let the taste of summer come through in light and simple preparations like thick slab of ripe summer tomatoes with lemony avocado salad or a seafood medley of scallop, salmon, and shrimp, and fresh corn topped with lemon scented breadcrumbs.

I'll show you the secret to making perfect boiled potatoes, one of my favorite summer side dishes and for the dessert, broiled fig in a tangy peach sauce.

If you can stand the heat, get into the kitchen and join me for a sumptuous summer meal.

Next on "Today's Gourmet".

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Today we're doing a sumptuous summer meal.

Summer for me is potato, corn, a lot of seafood, all of the stuff we're going to use today as well as tomato, of course.

I need, there is an incredible amount of new potato on the market now.

I always try to go to local market and get nice stuff, preferably organic if possible.

If not, use your local market.

We can see those potato here we're going to use today.

Those tiny one are Yukon gold.

They come big also.

The bigger one are yellow Finn.

Then those are your regular red potato.

You have the fingerling potato here, in France, in Leon it's a specialty.

My mother had that in her garden.

You can just push it with your thumb like that and it peel off, ya know.

This is the most waxy terrific potato.

Then you have blue potato here, the so-called orange or blue potato.

They change color actually, when they cook they get lighter, but interesting.

All of those are new type of potato, which is real fun to go to your market and try to find and do things with it.

We're going to do first a regular boiled potato.

And this is really important for me.

It seemed like nothing, a boiled potato.

We call that pommes persillade, parsley potato, but you have to do it well.

You see I have one size potato here.

This one is peeled.

I'll tell you why and this is the bigger one.

When we do potato in a professional kitchen, we peel them because we shape them after, I cut this one in two, so it's about the same size than this and this one, let's say I would cut in four.

What you do first is to cut all of them so they have the same shape, I mean the same size.

Then you start shaping them.

The point is that in a professional kitchen, we peel the potato first because all of the trimming we're going to use in soup, potato croquette, there is nothing wasted.

If you have a potato like that, to trim it what you want, you want to get rid of that flat face here.

You want to create smaller and smaller faces if you want, so that at the end basically you have a kind of roundish potato.

You know, odd shape and the same thing.

So they will all look the same by the time you finish fooling around with them.

And as I say, again, nothing is lost in a professional kitchen.

This is used for mashed potato or another thing.

If you have no use for it, then instead of peeling it first, there is no point.

You might as well cut it directly at I'm doing here.

As you see, this one is a beautiful golden color inside.

That's what they're called Yukon Gold.

And they are very waxy firm, delicious potato.

This is a bigger potato, but as I say, again, it really doesn't matter because by the time you finish turning them, you know, we call that turning.

Then they should all have approximately the same size, you know, and that the idea of preparing potato.

Now you put them in cold water.

What I'm going to do, you wash them first if you want, and then in cold water there, that's it with a dash of salt.

This has to come to a boil now and that has to cook for about 15 to 20 minute.

Potato are very good.

You know, people don't realize how good potato are.

Actually, you have less calorie in a potato that you have in an apple, except if you load it with sour cream or butter, all kind of stuff on top.

It's going to be different.

But by itself, potato are excellent and they have more potassium actually than the banana.

So eat potato.

The next thing we're going to do is the seafood.

A seafood medley here and what I have is a whole slab of salmon that I have here.

I have some shrimp and I have some scallop.

The first thing that I'm going to do is to put a little bit of oil in there, a little bit of olive oil and about a tablespoon, not even half a tablespoon at the most of butter just for taste.

We'll start melting that.

We're going to saute this, saute all our medley mixed together.

The first thing that I want to do, I have a series of bone here.

You want to remove those bone with a little plier like this and those bone are straight down.

You see, you can feel them with your finger.

I know that I need glasses.

I can see that now.

But you see those are the bone here.

There's about 30 bone going right through.

The rest have been cleaned before.

Then you want to remove the skin, take a large knife, grab the arm of the skin like this, and you start in a jigsaw fashion to remove that skin.

You see what I'm doing here?

I'm not using with an horizontal or vertical knife.

It's about 45 degree angle and you're doing a jigsaw like this and this is a technique which is used removing the flesh of the skin like that of skin of fish and you know, all the technique.

So there in our recipe we need approximately 10 ounces of fish, which is about what I have here.

So I'm going to cut that into large pieces, pieces above a good one and a half inch, pieces like this.

Then I have my scallop that I have here and the shrimp.

The shrimp, as you see, we are going to remove the shell.

When you remove the shell sometime people tend to break the tail here.

Just press the tail like this to get it so, and pull on it.

You should get the end of the tail in there, you know, and that's important.

It's all meat.

And then you can, if you want, also, what I've done here, see here I have the end of it.

You can cut the top to remove the vein if any here, this is pretty clean.

So we put them directly in there (oil sizzles) with the scallop and with the fish, a very fast recipe.

This is done you know, in a couple of minutes.

So you want to hurry there when you have everything ready.

Practically, when you guests are sitting down at the table, we want to put some shallots in there.

And the shallot are those tiny red onion.

I love shallot.

We're going to season that with shallot, garlic.

All right, my shallot, I have more here.

I can add all of my shallot in there.

You could also put a dash of white wine, which I don't have in the recipe here, but you could.

(pan rattles) Dash of salt of course in there.

Freshly ground pepper.

(grinder scrapes) At the end, it have the best taste like this.

And then continuing with our seasoning, I want to put garlic in there, head of garlic.

Break it like that to separate all your cloves.

And those are peeled.

I'm gonna put like three clove of garlic like this depending on size, again crush it and the crushing will release the essential oil, you know.

I love garlic.

If you are a bit shy of garlic, cut the amount in half.

If you don't have garlic, you can eliminate it from the recipe.

It's perfectly fine.

But there, this is a classic type of combination of flavor for me.

So now I have my garlic in there.

I want to put at the end, other filler, and for crunch in it a bit of corn.

So I have a beautiful yellow corn here.

This is the season and I want to cut this.

So I cut the corn.

As you see this way there is different way of cutting it.

Often people put their knife flat and apply pressure and you know it doesn't work.

From that position, if you do this and start cutting, look how easy it is to cut because you're using your knife the right way.

You are actually cutting rather than crushing it, you know.

Here I have, here I can even use the rest of the flesh around and I could actually put two of those in there.

And again, without poaching it or anything, I'm going to have a nice crunchy.

(pan scrapes) This is practically finished, and I'm going to cover that, cook it couple of minutes more.

And during that time the topping of this I'm to do, I'm going to do a bread crump with that and I will do that bread crump in that little blender here if you want, which is very nifty and easy.

So I have about a good one to two slice of bread, fresh bread crump, ya know and you want to do it coarsely, you don't want to do it too fine so.

(mixer whirs) Just what I need here, okay?

Obviously I have a coarse, a very coarse bread crump here, which is what I want.

I could leave it a bit longer and have it fine, but I want that texture so I put it directly in there and conventionally, if I were doing that in a skillet, I would put a lot of fat in it, a lot of butter and oil.

So here we do it this way, I put just a little bit of oil, this like one two teaspoon and what you do, you rub the breadcrumb one again the other to slightly moisten them with the oil.

So you have a minimal amount of oil so it's not enough for the whole thing to get gooey.

And then we put it on a cookie sheet like that.

I line it up with a piece of parchment paper because I'm conditioned by my wife, she want me to do it this way so she doesn't have to wash the pan after, you know, and it's smart.

So this is what we do.

I think I'm gonna stop.

My fish is cooked, we're gonna put that in the oven right here.

Oops, this is hot.

I put that the other way and you can see you get a nice color here.

All nicely brown all around.

So what we are going to do here, is actually just taking this, it's much easier and put that directly into that bowl here.

This is to top our medley of fish, you know.

And to flavor that even further, we're going to use parsley and lemon.

So let me see, with the vegetable peeler, I'm gonna take thin slice of the top, only the top part of the skin and parsley.

What I will do first is to cut, my potato are cooking good there, cut the rind into little pieces.

(knife scrapes) You know, you could use a grater of course for that is perfectly fine.

I could actually have put that also in that little blender that I had there, in that little food processor, you know.

But now I'm cutting this.

(knife thumps) I did not want to mix it with the bread because remember the bread is going to go into the oven.

I don't wanna put that into the oven with the bread because it would tend to be a little too brownish if you put it in there and you lose that wonderful fragrance of the orange skin, you know.

Here it is now.

You know this is a beautiful garnish actually that you can put, you do a rack of lamb, for example, on the broiler or on your barbecue and you sprinkle that stuff on top.

That's very good.

You can do that with a piece of fish as we are going to do it.

But also with a piece of grilled chicken for example.

So that will be the garnish on top.

I can smell right here the essential oil, you know, that you have in the skin of the lemon.

So let's see what our potato are doing here.

See my potato are boiling good, but of course, they are not totally cooked.

So what I'm going to do is I have some which are cooked here and I'm going to use those first.

(stove clicking) Oop.

That's it.

I'm going to use those I know are cooked.

I can feel it with the knife.

Yeah, very cooked.

So very important for the potato is to empty the water.

You see when you go in a restaurant and you have potato which have been in water, you know for three hours and stay in the water, forget it, the potato is dead.

What you do, you take the potato, you take the water out of it and as you see, I put that back right on the flame.

The flame is on here to eat, actually, any remaining moisture out of this.

And that's going to be good by doing it this way.

And after that I can add a little bit of butter and parsley to it.

But first I'm going to serve the fish, which now is ready.

You see I have a lot of moisture which came out of the fish.

My salmon is barely cooked here.

I can see it.

And you see the, a lot of liquid comes out of it and the corn around gives some liquid.

Put that on top, a bit of that mixture right there is beautiful, goes well.

I messed up the plate here a little bit and now my potato are dry.

So now I can put parsley on it, a little piece of butter, like a tablespoon.

I think there is a piece, a tablespoon, tablespoon and a half for four people, which is relatively little.

I put a bit of salt in the water so I don't need anything else.

And this is the classic serving that we are going to do with that medley of fish right there.

And now in a sumptuous summer meal, we're going to start first off with a tomato avocado salad, sumptuous because of the richness of the avocado and tomato.

What's more summery than tomato?

So the first thing that we're going to do is a little bit of a dressing for the salad here.

And what I have is fairly simple, a dash of salt, freshly ground pepper.

I have this one is freshly ground also.

Lemon juice, you can use vinegar if you want, but I like lemon for the summer.

You wanna press it and strain it through a strainer or through your finger for the pit and a little bit of olive oil.

I would say about two and a half to three times the amount of olive oil that you put either in vinegar or lemon juice.

You stir this together and we are going to stir it (tongs clank) with, I like those, those little implement there to stir the salad.

So I use about half of it here for the salad.

You want to do that at the last moment remember, because it is going to get wilted.

So not much more 10 minutes before you serve it, you know.

So I have this here and now what I want to do, eat the avocado and that avocado there, you know, you can see that it's ripe.

You can press on it and see that it's ripe.

Very important to know whether it's ripe or not.

Took a sharp knife and watch for your finger, but you cut all around and then after you twist it to expose the seed or the pit, rather, then after with a knife, just go into it to press the pit and remove it this way.

See this one is a bit damaged here, so we'll remove it.

And what I do here conventionally, I go with the knife, cut it into dice directly into the shell.

I mean, you know, this is very soft though.

You really don't have to press munch with your knife.

You wanna be careful if you're a bit afraid of cutting yourself, put a towel underneath.

And now that I have done this, I can use a spoon and actually empty it directly in there.

It's all cut.

Very often people keep the shell, you know, you can keep the shell and use it to, as a receptacle to put the avocado in it.

So here again, remember that the important part also because of the citric acid in the lemon juice or vinegar, acetic acid, then it'll prevent the discoloration of the avocado.

So here we have this.

They also say if you put the pit of the avocado into the salad or the guacamole when you do, it prevent discoloration.

I will do only one here.

So this is my avocado and this the tomato.

I have a beautiful tomato, three quarter of a pound here.

And four, our recipe here, which would be four.

You know, we would do four large slab like this and you serve one of those per person.

And this is the presentation that we're going to do.

First, a little bit of salad.

And this is so-called mesclun salad that is a mixture of different type of green, specialty of the south of France.

I do that in my garden.

Very simply, you know what I do?

I buy about six, seven package of salad, red lettuce, arugula, romaine, iceberg, any of those lettuce perfectly fine.

I mix all of those seed together and I sprinkle them in an area of the garden, like if I planted grass and then they grow very tight, one next to the other and I cut it when they are very small.

So you put your tomato in the center of this and then a little bit of our avocado salad, which is quite rich, rich but high in fat, but unsaturated fat, so feel good for you.

And if you want, and I love the taste of cilantro with the avocado so I'm putting a little bit of cilantro around.

And now let's move to our dessert, which is a very simple recipe, also a fig.

I have two type of fig here, the black mission fig and the kadota fig.

They are usually slightly different in color in the center, it depend on the ripeness also.

Those are going to be redder in the center and in our case today all I'm going to use is the black mission fig which is one of my favorite.

Again here I can know that they are very ripe, you know, so I will use a few of those and cut them in half this way to expose the beautiful pink flesh.

Remember that those are great also to be served with prosciutto in the Italian manner, you know, or many other type of dessert.

Sometime I cook them with wine.

What you wanna do is to sprinkle a little bit of sugar on top of those and we're going to put them under the broiler for about five, six, eight minute, depending how close they are from the broiler to get a nice little shine, a nice little glaze on top.

So here I have one, whoop, which is ready.

And you, as you can see here, I have a beautiful shine.

The shine of the glaze of the sugar, which melted on top of it and caramelized.

You cannot do that too, too much ahead.

The reason is that the moisture in there will eventually melt that shell of caramel on top.

But let me put it on this side and we are going to do a little bit of a sauce with that, very simple sauce.

I'm putting a bit of preserve, I always love to use preserve and the best preserve make the best sauce, you know, made with the purest fruit.

And this is a peach preserve.

I dilute it again for acidity with lemon juice and flavor it with a little bit of dark rum.

And this is a great combination.

Now if you wanna serve those by themself, it's perfectly fine also, without, if you want, without the sauces.

But there, I like to do the sauce.

So what you would want to serve is probably four, four of those, that is two little fig.

Basically what we have here is about four ounce, I think per person.

I add the sauce around and you could, if you want, looks very scrumptious and delicious this way, decorate it with a little piece of, little rind of lemon.

I cut it in the center so you can twist it around if you want to do a type of curl this way to put on top as a decoration and that give it the finished touch.

You know, figs have been a delicacy, especially in Mediterranean country for over 5,000 years and we use them in many way.

I mean the Italian use them as a first course with prosciutto, which is really terrific.

In any case, the menu we had today, that sumptuous type of summer meal, you know, is basically meatless.

There is fish in it, but it really represent the summer, you know, think vibrant, fresh, salad, and so forth.

We start with that beautiful green salad with tomato and with avocado.

If you decide not to put the avocado, then you can do it without the avocado, it'll be perfectly fine too.

Then we have that medley of fish, I call it a medley of fish.

Often in summer I do those type of fast stew, you know, where you saute things together with little bit of oil or a little bit of wine, herbs, and so forth.

Finally, the potato, which you remember, put them back on the stove after they are cooked to draw out the moisture, a little piece of butter.

And finally, a beautiful broiled fig with that.

Fig are very high in dietary fiber, in potassium.

Of course, in that type of dessert, there is no fat, no cholesterol, it's light and tasty and so it goes with the rest of the meal.

Now, for our mixed menu that we have today, and we had a lot of taste in those menu, I picked up a wine from the central coast of California, from Santa Barbara County.

This is a new incoming place where new wine have been done.

This is a hundred percent Chardonnay, very full, very buttery, and I'm sure you're going to enjoy it.

So relax, get on your porch.

It's summer, cook with your friend.

Enjoy it.

I enjoy cooking it for you.

Happy cooking.