- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

I love new and old, sophisticated and simple.

And I like to contrast different food when I cook.

Our first course today is salmon wrapped in leaves of nori, a Japanese style tidbit; boneless Cornish game hen stuffed with bulgur wheat, apple, and onion; a salad and fresh fruit complete the meal.

Join me for this healthy and eclectic menu.

It's city and country cooking on "Today's Gourmet."

(pleasant music) (pleasant music continues) And today's menu come from city and country.

We have a nice mix, salmon to start and Cornish hen, which I'm going to show you how to bone.

The salmon, I have a nice piece of filet here, which is what we're going to use.

We're going to wrap that into nori sheet.

And those are interesting dark purple type of seaweed, you know, which are used a great deal by the Japanese, also by the Chinese.

We are using it now in many type of cuisine.

It's very handy and nice to use.

Beautiful.

It has a nice taste of the sea, and it is good.

It doesn't have any calorie or anything.

Also, now it comes dry and packaged like this.

You can buy at the market, and all you have to do is to get it wet and it gets soft right away.

You can fold it.

So what we are going to do here very simply is to cut a strip of salmon to put it on top of it and roll it into a nice little package, you know?

This is what is used for sushi, you know?

Of course, people think that sushi often is fish.

It's not necessarily fish.

Sushi means sweet rice in Japanese, so sometimes you can have sushi without fish.

So what we are doing here very easily, again, wetting it, just plain water.

Sometimes, you know, I have seen people doing it with rice wine or other thing like that.

It's not really necessary, and you can have all kind of sandwich with this to, again, little piece of salmon.

Those are usually farm-raised salmon.

The so-called Norwegian salmon come from Norway, it come from Canada, and it come from Chile.

There's a species of Atlantic salmon, which is farm raised.

So in a sense, quite safe to eat because it is controlled, you know?

Although there is still a lot of wild salmon that you can buy at the market, which is very good too.

So what we'll do here, we're cutting that into six piece.

I'm just going to cut one this way.

And we serve four piece per person here.

You see like this, I'm going to put that in the plate to steam it.

Here we are.

So quite easy to do.

And of course, you can have other type of fish and we put that directly into our steamer here.

I have some water underneath, and that will take about five minutes, you know, to poach, to steam rather.

And it's a very healthy way of doing it.

And during that time, I wanna show you how to bone out the salmon.

You know, I have a large salmon here and which has been scaled.

And what you do, one of the easiest ways to run your knife, a large knife this way.

Turn your knife to have it flat on the central bone and just go down on the bone (knife scraping) this way to have the whole side bone out.

And you do the same thing on the other side, you know?

So it is relatively uncomplicated.

Also, most of the time, you're going to go and buy directly from the fishmonger.

Now, you can run your knife as I'm doing here to remove those bone.

This is the whole idea, I mean, the skin here.

And finally, what we wanna remove there is those tiny bone here that you have to pull out with this.

Now, there is a series of bone, there is about 30 bone all the way down here.

But I'm not going to remove all of them.

What I wanna show you is to remove the skin.

Now, to remove the skin, I cut here.

And with the knife, you go in a jigsaw fashion.

See the idea is that if I go straight, I can't.

So I move the knife jigsaw.

Notice that the knife is not flat or perpendicular.

It's about 45-degree angle, and I do the opposite with the skin to get that type of technique, you know?

This is very useful because it's used for many, many different type of thing.

We can do a great gravlax with that now, you know?

So what we do in that particular recipe, we roast the skin.

And that's why the skin we were sure to scale it.

You put it into a non-stick pan like this to do a type of crackling with the skin.

Remember that the salmon is a fatty fish, very fatty.

And the fatty oil or fatty fish oil is very good for you, tend to lower cholesterol.

So of course much less fatty than meat would be.

So what we have here, with those, I have one ready here.

(oven slams) Just like a regular crackling, practically, you know?

We're going to serve that with a sauce.

So the sauce, I have a little bit of (cutlery jangling) lemon skin like this.

(peeler scraping) And I can take it with a vegetable peeler this way and make a julienne out of it.

Remember that here, I'm taking only the surface of the skin, which is the best part and cutting it into a fine shred that we call a julienne.

Here we are.

And that's going to be part of the sauce with lemon juice.

(lemon squelching) Lemon juice, a little bit of balsamic vinegar.

We have that balsamic strong vinegar and a little bit of canola oil.

That's all we want in there.

Maybe a dash of salt.

That's about it.

And now, we can prepare our salmon.

It should be cooked by then.

You can see the color like that when it's cooked.

Watch out not to burn your hand when you grab those plate.

It should be still slightly rare in the center, which it is here.

I'm putting four.

You can even put five if you want.

A little bit of the crackling on top, you know, all around.

You know, it's an interesting, very crunchy type of thing, unusual.

People are not used to use this.

(skin crunching) It's delicious.

And we put a little bit of the sauce on top.

Even some of the skin of the lemon would go well here.

And a bit of the juice around oil.

A very interesting, very Japanese, very oriental type of look.

Very pretty and very flavorful.

After our light, delicate salmon with the nori around, we want something substantial.

You know, something nice and filling.

And that's what we're going to do with those tiny little chicken that we have here, which are called Cornish hen.

And those Cornish hen, our baby are bought upon a quarter, about four weeks old.

And actually, they're a hybrid between Cornish and White Rock chicken.

And what we're going to do, keep the trimming to do stock.

You can take the end of those wing as I did already.

And the first thing, we'll take the wishbone here under the skin.

You have the triangle, which we call the wishbone, and what you wanna do with the point of a knife is to cut on one side of it.

On one side of the other one.

And now, pry it out with your finger, your thumb right I'm doing here.

You can see that triangle here is conventionally there, and it's in the way when you cut.

So we take this out.

Now, to bone it out without cutting the skin, I will use the joint of the wing here.

And you can put your finger and feel the inner joint.

Right there, I will cut with the knife and wiggle the knife to go into the articulation.

Same thing on the other side, the other articulation.

Now, I will take it this way.

And with my thumb, push it out as you can see with that thumb here and inside to separate it from the central carcass.

The same thing with the skin, keep pulling gently.

Especially on the back here, you don't wanna break the skin.

And now, it's all loose there on.

I have the central breast here, central.

Don't worry about the filet.

Put your two finger there and pull down.

Pull down until you are at the end of the sternum.

So now, it's basically almost like if I'm taking his pajama if you see.

I have the leg here and there is a joint.

I have to cut here and break at the joint of the leg.

I can see the sinew right there.

I cut through that large sinew, and I can pull out.

The same thing with the other leg, cut the little oyster, cut through the sinew and pull out.

Now, basically, I have only the carcass left as you can see here.

The whole carcass and the two filet.

To remove the filet, I use my thumb here and run it around the side to get one filet here and the other filet here.

Look, it's exactly the same technique you're going to do with a chicken to do a galantine or ballotine.

I have the whole carcass left here, and I have cut at the joint here, here, here, and there.

This is it.

This is for stock.

Now, it's still upside down and it looks pretty messy.

What we do now is to take the end of the bone here that I cut, which was attached to the carcass, and scrape it.

This is the leg.

So I'm scraping the thigh bone.

(knife scraping) Now, I'm at the joint of the knee, if you want.

Now, I have to cut around the joint.

See there isn't that much cutting.

Like here, I'm cutting, but before I was scraping.

After I go around, again, I scrape to have now the thighbone, the drum.

The drum, and then I cut at the end of this here.

That again, for stock.

The same thing with the other leg.

It's a technique, as I say, which is very useful.

And if you understand the place where I cut, then you will be able to carve in the dining room.

You would be able to cut a chicken into four piece.

You would be able to do any of those things because you always cut in the same place.

Again, right here, I cut it.

Now, I have all my bone to do a great stock here.

Now, we have to put that back.

This is inside out.

We put it back the other way.

It's kind of messy but there is a science to this.

Now, I have the whole chicken as you can see here, wobbly and so forth.

Remind me of a cartoon I saw in the New Yorker, which were showing a picture of the boneless chicken ranch, you know, which is that here.

So this is what we do.

We just have to stuff it.

We have it here.

And now, we are going to do our stuffing.

For the time being, I leave that here and talk to you a little bit about the stuffing that we are going to do here.

And I have a stuffing with leek, onion, I have hot pepper, jalapeno pepper, some garlic.

A whole apple, we're going to keep the skin or some cherries if you want.

And finally, the binding agent is going to be bulgur wheat, which I have here.

The bulgur is a pre-cooked wheat, which is broken into pieces and it's steamed.

So it's cooked and it's dried out again.

All we have to do is to put it with cold water for a couple of hours.

Then, it inflates again.

With boiling water, it goes a bit faster.

So that third of a cup, by the way, will give you this, so it blew up quite a lot, you know?

So what we will do is to put a little bit of oil in there and start by sauteing the onion.

So we have an onion here (cutlery clinking) about for our stuffing.

(knife cutting) See this is a whole nice vegetable and fruit stuffing to about half a cup, 3/4 of a cup of onion.

We'll have enough here.

(knife cutting) And a little bit of leek in the same way.

If you don't have onion, you wanna do only leek or vice versa if you wanna do only onion, it's fine.

You know, they're the same family.

(knife cutting) We want to give you color, texture, you know, and it goes well with it.

I love the taste of leek in soup as well as in stuffing.

I have about enough here.

I'll put that there.

And this, we'll start sauteing that.

Okay, now, this has to saute a couple of minutes.

(oil crackling) (pan clunking) And during that time, I prepare a bit of jalapeno pepper.

You better taste it.

You know, with some I use those hot pepper, I can taste it lightly to see how hot they are.

Because sometimes, they are very, very hot and sometimes they are quite mild.

So it's a question of tolerance, you know?

You want more, you put more.

You really want to be very hot, you can put a whole one.

But this will be enough for us.

(oil crackling) A bit of garlic.

I have a head of garlic here.

Hit it on the side to separate the clove.

Two cloves are going to be enough.

All the time, the garlic, again, cut the stem of the garlic.

(cutlery clinking) And now, you can crush it.

That will release the skin.

(knife thumping) Again, and now we wanna chop it fine.

Go on the side here.

(knife thumping) Here we are.

(knife chopping) Bit of garlic.

The garlic, you never put it at the beginning with the onion because it will have a tendency to burn, and you don't want to burn the garlic.

The onion is okay.

So this is most (oil crackling) of our seasoning, put a pinch of salt in it.

Then, we wanna put apple.

And I keep the apple, I just washed this apple.

This is a Granny Smith.

One of the best way of cutting it, we can cut it like that in about half-inch slice.

Just leaving the core in the center and cutting that into dice about that size.

(knife cutting) And you know, I love apple, the crunchiness, sweet, a bit of acid.

All of that is going to go very well with the richness of the Cornish hen, you know?

Here we are, we put that with it.

And that should cook for a couple of minutes to soften.

And you can also put cherries if you want.

You know, cherries is terrific in there.

Now, if you wanna put cherries, those are really nice and ripe, what you do to take the pit out of it, press it with your hand like that just to soften the flesh around the pit.

Then, with the point of your knife, you go into that tiny hole and just pull out the pit.

It will come out very easily.

Can cut it in half or whatever and put it in your dressing.

(oil crackling) You see, it's a very easy way to pit cherries.

Of course, it mess up your hand, but it's all right.

As long as it's good, okay to mess up your hand.

So that's what I have here.

(paper ripping) Piece of paper towel.

It's worth when you go bits, you know.

The cherry is okay.

So I saute this, and finally, inside, we now are going to put the bulgur wheat as the binding agent.

And what you would wanna do here is to cook it a couple of minutes, maybe to remove some of the moisture that you have left in it.

I'm not going to cook it longer because I need to stuff it, so I will put it directly on top of this.

(bowl thumping) You know, if you have too much stuffing, remember that you can always put a little bit of that underneath because actually the stuffing is cooked there.

Everything is cooked, so it's fine.

So what we are going to do now is to stuff our bird.

Remember, the way I bone them out, one of the easiest way to stuff them is to put a container like this.

So you can take a bird and sit it directly in there, you know?

So that you have the cavity open and you can go.

This actually, you know, is still hot and should really be cooled off.

You know, it would be easier, but it's a nice way of stuffing it.

So what I do here, close to a cup of stuffing, okay?

And I can lift it up and put it right.

We will reform it, so it looks eventually the way Mother Nature intended it to look.

Now, let's see the second one here.

Remember that we have the filet here that we removed.

You can add your filet back to it, you know?

Stuffing, again, here.

This one and this one.

Maybe I'll keep that stuffing if I wanna put some underneath.

Here, now, I'm pulling this one out.

So it's a nice way of stuffing it this way.

It's not too messy.

Now, press it into your chicken, you know, or your little chicken, little hen here.

Bring the leg back here to cross your leg.

I mean, you wanna reform it, and you turn it so that the leg are facing this way to cross it this way.

Then, we take a little piece of string, kitchen twine.

You go underneath, you cross above, and you go all around here.

I wanna finish, I'll turn it to show it to you here, just behind the wing.

You know, you don't wanna squeeze it too much because there is no bone to hold it, but a little bit so it get plumb, you know?

Here you are, so I have a nice, reformed, little chicken here.

It's not too complicated.

Same thing with the other one.

And remember that it should be easier, a little bit easier for you if you do it when your stuffing is cold.

But when the stuffing is hot, it's already a bit more difficult to do that.

And remember that up, put it this way and around.

This is ready to be cooked now.

So what I wanna do is to bring that in.

I wanna put a tiny bit of oil just in the bottom to rub it with my fingers so it doesn't stick.

I rub a little bit of oil on top.

This is a regular, just canola oil.

I could season that gently.

You see how gently I handle this here.

And that will go into an oven, about 400 degree.

It's gotta cook too close to an hour.

And then, occasionally, you lift it up and baste it with the fat, which comes out of it.

So I'm going to put that in the oven.

(oven door squeaks) (pan clanks) I have two which are cooked here and cooking them at high temperature, it really tend to melt a lot of the fat away.

When you use poultry, you should really clean your hand.

Of course, here, I put it directly on the table.

I should have had a special little board to put it on because it is important to wash your hand.

What I'll do here, I work on this way, I'm going to bring those right here, so it doesn't touch the place where I put it in.

So lift it up out of there.

We're going to cut them and remove the string.

But the first thing we wanna do is to remove the fat inside here.

There is a lot of fat.

And I have a bowl here and remove all of that fat to really only have the crystallized juice on top.

With the crystallized juice, especially because of the apple and all that, you have some sugar, we wanna do a little bit, just some water to melt those solidified juice and create a natural gravy, if you want.

During that time, I can cut the end of the (scissors snipping) the end of the drum here, and the string you can see will come out nicely.

And we'll bring my plate to present it here.

(bowl clinking) The juice, remember to use a flat wood spatula, you know, to melt all those solidified juice.

Not metal on metal, preferably wood on metal, you know, to melt all of this.

So I can strain it, remember there is no fat left in there.

(pan clattering) Okay, we are cooking.

If there is any fat left, you can even remove it if you really wanna have it totally clean.

It's pretty good this way.

So what I have here, I'm going to cut it on this side.

(knife clanking) I'll cut this one in half.

It's very easy to cut.

Of course, you can see the center.

It's totally stuffed, you know, it's beautiful.

So we can present it down.

We would serve one half per person here.

Or you can present it all, you know, for another presentation.

A little bit of your natural gravy on top.

Deep, rich, dark, natural gravy.

You could even have a couple of your dressing on the side if you feel that you wanna serve more.

(spoon clattering) And maybe decoration with a few chives like this, a bit on top.

And this is our rich main course for today.

This is a menu where we really contrast this style here because the elegance of the nori, you know, is matched to a certain extent with the stuffed Cornish hen, which is much more earthy, much more country.

But I like those type of things.

It kind of balance your menu.

Remember that the nori here, you can do the salmon without the nori around, just poaching it.

It's interesting also to serve that crackling of skin, which you can serve by itself.

I mean, if you go to the butcher or to the fishmonger, he's going to give you skin for free, you know, and it's a nice, you can put little thing like tartar of salmon or tartar of thing on top of that little kind of cracker, you know, and it's very good.

And a light dressing on top, the little thing of lemon are good.

Now, of course, the stuffed Cornish hen, remember, it's stuffed with bulgur.

It's another way of doing it instead of using sausage meat, all kind of thing that we used to, which are much richer.

And with that, we want a nice salad.

It will go well with the juice in the stuffing there and in the little bird.

And finally, a big bowl of cherries that we have here.

It's really one of my favorite dessert.

With that, a piece of bread and a nice glass of chardonnay from the Napa Valley, from the oldest premium winery in Napa Valley.

I'm sure that if you do that dish and that menu, you're going to enjoy it as much I enjoy making it for you.

Happy cooking.

(soft music)