- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

When the days are long and the nights are warm, it's great to cook a special meal that's not too heavy.

Today's recipe are both sophisticated and light, a perfect combination of classic and modern cuisine.

Evanche Le is a classic dish in French bourgeois cooking.

An egg is surrounded by peppery aspic made from a clear, deep flavored stock.

I use fresh tuna instead of beef for a new twist on pepper steak, calling it with four different type of peppercorn, with gratin of tomato and bread.

So popular in the south of France, mixes garlic, olive oil and Parmesan cheese.

Our fruit dessert pineapple dish is tart, sweet, and easy to make.

Join me for this classic and modern mix of dishes on today's gourmet.

(bright jazz music) I am always fixing my favorite food.

I always say it's my favorite food.

Of course, the dish that I do are dish that I like to do.

I speak, however, what we are doing today is really something that I adore, especially in summer, and it's confusing to people.

I speak of meat aspic, as we are doing today, is made with a stock.

The stock, a very strong stock, made with chicken bone, beef bone, different mixture.

And we clarify that stock, that is, we make it crystal clear, eliminating most of the fat, basically all of the fat in it, and that process of clarification is confusing.

And this is what I'm going to do now.

And what I have here is a lot of leftover things, you know, that I have on the table here.

And as you can see, I have the stem of parsley, I have pieces of grain of celery, some thyme, and the green of leek, and a bit of tarragon here.

Any leftover stem of herb and all that, this is what we use for clarification.

This is what works the best.

So what we do, we cut that coarsely and this is used because it cook very fast.

It's used basically like an infusion if you want, like when you do tea, then it's cooked a few minutes and it give you the taste, now.

To hold this together and with this, we have cracked pepper and the coagulating element, which is going to clarify, is egg white.

In all French cooking, we used to use blood, you know.

At the floater out, they used to do this, but now more conventionally, egg white are the coagulant and it's used in the making of wine.

Also in great wine, you know, are clarified with egg white.

So we have this, that we mix together.

I put a little bit of water in there, just plain water, a dash of salt because there is no seasoning in my stock, and the crack pepper I have, and we put some plain gelatin in there, you know?

Now this has no taste, gelatin.

You have to realize that each packet of gelatin, usually about a tablespoon, tell you that you can gel to cup with it, and you can.

If you don't cook the gelatin, then the more you cook the gelatin, the weaker it's going to be.

I can do a clarification, or a consomme, so called, and cook it for an hour.

Then I will use maybe four time what you would put in yours with the same result at the end.

So that has to be taken into consideration.

So this is the mixture of my clarification.

What I have here is boiling stock, and I'm going to put that boiling stock directly on top of it, here, right here.

First I put a little bit, remember I put a little bit of water so that this doesn't cook too fast, mix it a little bit, a bit more, and finally I can put the rest of it.

Now the principle that I say is to clarify, because of the egg white, a crust will be formed and through that crust, the liquid will filter and become crystal clear.

Sometime when the stock is not strong because my stock was very strong here, we intensify the stock by putting ground meat in it.

Ground beef, for example, very lean.

If you put the ground beef, of course it has to cook for an hour to get the taste out of it.

Otherwise, there is no point.

We don't need that here.

Just a strong bowl will be enough.

Now you know, people are surprised by this because as you see, this cook and it has to come to a strong boil, it get murkier and murkier looking, you know, eventually like an egg drop soup, you know, with all the white coagulating.

And often, I have known people at that point say, "There must be a mistake there, it look like a mess."

And then they throw it out.

You don't throw it out.

This is the way it should look until the moment it come to a boil.

And as I say, you stir it occasionally because it may stick to the bottom.

While this is finishing cooking, I'm going to show you the egg that we're going to do for that recipe.

To start with, I have small eggs that I want to use.

Those are about 65 calorie, with six gram of fat in a small egg.

And on the round part of the egg, which is the air chamber, I'm making a tiny hole here.

And that tiny hole will relieve the pressure in the eggs because there is an air space full of air and when you put it in the water, the air try to, you know, come through the shell and very often crack.

Look at my consomme, now.

It's coming here to a strong boil and it's coagulating on top, and that's what I want.

As soon as it come to a strong boil, I stop it, and I should leave it three or four minutes, just so that it's steep, like a tea, you know?

In the meantime, I have one more of those to do and as I say, the air will be released and you will see all of the pressure coming through it.

I'm going to stop the heat.

So that stopped boiling.

So you can really see that.

Here it comes.

You can see the air right there, coming out of it, you know, and this, now we bring back to a boil or a gentle simmer and that will cook three minutes.

During that time, you see my consomme is finished.

I am stopping that right here.

Those eggs will then cook four minute, I'm cooking them four minute to get them the temperature that I want them inside.

And this is what I have here.

It is like doing a poached egg, you know?

And it's going to be nice and soft.

I will show you the inside, just like a poached egg, you know?

Runny, just like this.

And this is about beautiful, just the way I want it for the egg in aspic.

Remember that after four minute, I took the temperature inside, it goes up to 140 degree and stay there for a while, which is needed because of the salmonella.

If you're more afraid of that, you can bring it even to a higher temperature.

This should probably rest a bit longer than that.

But I will show you here, on top of this, I take wet paper towel.

It's one of the best filtering, you know, finer filtering, and we're going to strain that right through heat, you know, and you will see how clear that stock is going to be.

You don't want to disturb that crust too much.

But me of course, for the sake of going a bit faster, I will show you this.

And, you know, in those aspic, if you see those old classic French recipe, there is a great deal of things done in aspic.

You know, chicken, duck, galantine, pate, what we call the shou foie, you know, which are the old.

And as you can see here, how clear it is, it is beautifully clear.

Now this will take a few minutes to filter through, and I don't have enough time, I'm going to put it back on top of it, just to show you what I'm going to do with this now.

Now this of course, when it's absolutely crystal clear, you take the mold for the eggs as we have here.

And what we want to do is to put a little bit inside, approximately a quarter of an inch, you know, to the bottom of it.

Here we are, and this actually, you know, if you really wanna be classic, you wanna cool off your aspic first, cool it off on ice and when you start getting syrupy, you put it in there, as crystal clear.

When you have it in there, place it in the refrigerator so it get really hard.

And I have one here, some which are ready right here, and I'm going to show you what we do with that, now.

As you can see, those are hard now and it makes a tiny shell, you know, and on that shell, you can do decoration.

So the decoration that I have here, I have tarragon leaves, great flavor and a little Julienne of ham, you know?

Now the tarragon leaves that I have here, I drop them in boiling water for like, seconds, so that they get soft and cool them off in water, and we put a couple of those in the bottom, you know?

You can arrange them the way you want.

If you have more time, you know, you can put other type of decoration.

But remember that we have a lot of tarragon and usually, the stem of the tarragon, what we use in the clarification.

So we can use now, the leaf of the tarragon and be sure you have the right tarragon, the so-called French tarragon because if you use the so-called Russian tarragon, it look exactly the same, but it has no taste at all.

So if you buy tarragon, break a little piece of the plant and taste it.

Okay, the eggs.

Now I have my soft eggs.

We want to drain them out in paper towel, be careful not to break it.

And I have some extra aspic here that we put in ice, again here.

And you know, I put some ham in the bottom too.

You can do other type of herb.

But basically, this is classic with the tarragon and the ham.

But the small eggs, you see, is good for that because it's not too big and it's less caloric and so forth.

So around the eggs, now we put a little bit of Julienne of ham, you know?

This is a very lean ham and you put like a good tablespoon or so.

Now this, you stir occasionally.

As it starts setting on the outside, you can see the way it starts setting now.

Now it's ready.

So you have to hurry up.

Don't worry too much.

However, if the thing set up on you, then you remelt it and you try again, you know?

Sometimes working in decoration, I worked many time remelting the same thing six, seven time.

See, now it's almost ready, you see how syrupy it is?

This is when really, it's absolutely crystal clear that we fill that up and that, of course, has to go back in the refrigerator to set up for a couple of hours at least, you know.

But it can stay overnight.

You can see how fast it's setting because you can see this one now on the outside, it's already big lump, ready to set, no?

So this, again, should go back in the refrigerator.

And I have some here that I have which are unmolded.

You see how stunningly beautiful they are.

I have though there, when I keep them, usually put a little piece of plastic wrap on top or something, because they will have a tendency to get dry on top.

Now to unmold it, use a straight knife.

Be sure to plant your knife straight against the side and move not the knife, but the mold and keep your knife straight.

And now you have to push to unmold it.

Now what you want, a little bit of hair to go there.

So if it doesn't un-mold when you do that, you pull it out a little bit to get some air going through, you know?

Here we are, very delicate.

Absolutely stunning.

And with this, we can put a couple of crouton.

You know, the crouton will go well with the egg.

And as I told you that this is my favorite, I'm not kidding here.

This is really my favorite.

I think we put those on this side.

As the first course for summer, it's absolutely stunning, you know?

We put another two here, and here's our egg in aspic.

You know, in our way of cooking, one of the best things, sometime it's replacement or reinterpretation of old recipe.

That's what we're going to do here with a tuna.

We're doing it just the same way we do a pepper steak, with a mixture of different type of peppercorn, you know?

And as you see, I have a beautiful piece of tuna here.

This is a ahi tuna, very similar to a blue fish tuna.

You know, for those steak, very often the center is used.

I mean, I can use the outside, but often we use the heart, and the outside is used for, we take the skin out of it and use that for tartar or other thing like this.

Another thing too that you should remove is that black flesh here.

You know, the black flesh here first is much stronger in taste, and it is the fatty tissue.

And of course, you've been told that the fatty fish are very good for you, and it is true, because the oil in fish may tend to reduce cholesterol and be very good for heart disease, protection against heart disease.

However, in the really fatty tissue, the black one, this is usually where the pollutant congregate, you know?

So it is recommended like, if you use blue fish or any of those fish, very fatty, the black flesh which is very strong in taste anyway should be removed.

I mean, that's how I like it.

So here, I have a little steak, about five to six ounces.

Maybe I'll do two out of those.

But those really look like a piece of beef.

You know, we used to cook those way too much and it makes a difference if you cook it less, you want it moist in the center.

Let me put that here and tell you about the pepper that we're going to use.

I have black peppercorn here, which of all pepper, are my favorite, especially the cherry pepper.

This is the white peppercorn, which is basically the same than that, except it doesn't have the shell on the outside.

So it is harder because it's the center of the berry.

Not as much flavor because it doesn't have the shell on the outside.

This is what we call Jamaica pepper, or old spice.

It's the same thing.

And finally here, I have a red peppercorn.

The red peppercorn is not part of the piper nigrum, the family of pepper.

It is something else entirely different.

I mean, there is many other type of pepper that we can use also, such as szechuan peppercorn or, you know, other type of pepper that you can find on the market.

But basically red, I mean white and black peppercorn, and sometimes the green peppercorn are the one that we use, or a mixture, or only one of them.

For example here, I put a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of those here, and even a few of the white, which are the red, which are very soft and you can crush that with a crusher like this, you know?

But very often what we do, which is in a sense even easier, we use a false pan like this.

You put all of your pepper, layered like this and you rub that on top of it.

You can hear it crack, you know?

You know, the essential oil in pepper is very volatile.

What I'm saying is that when you go to the restaurant, you know, this is the time when the metro D come and he take the paper mill, and I have a paper mill here and he crush fresh paper.

Why do you think he does that?

Because the essential oil, the oil in paper is very volatile and it disappeared.

If you don't do it this way, the taste disappeared.

Then if you have oil, I mean pepper which has been crushed or ground for a month, it doesn't have any taste.

It burn your mouth, but doesn't really have any taste.

So what we do at the last moment, when you crush the paper, a little bit of salt on it, and then we dip it in it, like we do with the (indistinct), you know, the real (indistinct).

Pick up all of your pepper.

And now we put that in a dry skillet, like I have here, dry iron skillet, very hard.

We wanna cook this like if you were cooking that on a barbecue.

You wanna cook it a couple of minutes on each side, because you want the center to be slightly rare.

This is the new modern way of cooking, and it is very good this way.

And now with this, we're going to do a terrific gratin mixture of tomato, bread, Parmesan cheese, garlic, and so forth.

So bread, you can use your leftover bread and cut it into little cube, or a one inch cube, you know?

There is many recipe that I use with leftover bread.

So here, everyone loves that recipe.

You know, it has all the taste that you like, from the bread from the tomato, of course, the tomato, try to do that in full summer when the tomato are chipped, you know, and very good.

And here, as you can see, I have different type of tomato, the red and the yellow, you know, the pear shape and so forth.

So you put all of that together, you put some Parmesan cheese, garlic.

I have all the sliced garlic, couple more that I slice.

And even in that, you know, I can put some pepper.

You know, that pepper is very good.

It stimulates your gastric juice and it helps you digest.

Okay, so we have our garlic and parsley.

Now look at the color in there, you know, beautiful color.

A bit of salt we want to put here.

And a couple of tablespoon of olive oil.

I mean, you could eat that just as is, you know?

But what we do here, we toss it together to moisten the bread.

We put that in a gratin dish.

the bread would be slightly moistened.

And remember that the juice of the tomato will also do the same thing, you know?

And here we are here, very colorful dish, put it right there.

And that goes into the oven, around 375 degree.

Before that, I'm going to turn my stack on the other side, as you can see here, and that goes into the oven.

Bring this one out.

It's already that great treat in summer, that type of dish that we do at the house, you know?

Sometime we put dice of zucchini in it, or whatever is in the garden.

You know, this is always easy to do and inexpensive, and that, we can serve with our steak.

You know, you can put that right in the center here and make a little bit of a crown.

You know, if you want all around of different color with the bread and all this.

Don't forget the cheese inside that you have.

And just stick right in the center of it.

Here, it should be slightly rare in the center.

And we can even decorate that with one of our, well, this happened to be curry, you know, curry plant.

And that goes well.

It should always be eatable, what you put on it.

And now with that, I'm going to show you how to do the dessert for today.

And the dessert for today is going to be a pineapple.

And believe me, pineapple can be absolutely terrific, providing one important point.

It should be ripe.

If it's not ripe, then it's there at night.

I have a beautiful ripe pineapple here.

I have some cherries for garnish and so forth.

The first thing that I wanted to show you is what to do with the pineapple.

First we cook the head.

You know, some people say that you know where the pineapple is dead, is very ripe by pulling this out.

And if it comes out very easily, then it's ripe.

I have been in Hawaii and all that, and I have asked and they told me that it's not true.

So I really don't know.

In any case, more than anything else, I smell it and this one smells good.

I think it's ripe.

I can use that for decoration, anyway.

So what we do here is really cut the outside with a sharp knife like this, all around, you know?

I'm not going to do all of it.

You could even, with the point of your knife, remove a little bit of the black dots, if you want.

And then after, basically, we cut it into strip like this, and I can go into the core, you know, at the advantage of doing it this way because I turn it all around and eventually go to up the core and stop at the core.

And those here, we will cut them into strips.

Long way or the short way, bottom, we don't need.

This way, in a type of stick, you know, we call Julienne.

Okay, this is what you would want to do.

Be sure to have a nice, clean board here.

I may smell garlic a little bit with what I did before.

Then I want to put some lime in it and I want to use a vegetable pillar to take, as you can see, the surface of this and the juice, you know?

But the juice goes in there.

And this, we're going to do a little bit of a Julienne again with this, you know?

That has a lot of taste.

So fine Julienne to put on top.

Here we are.

We put a little bit of Kirchwasser.

Kirchwasser is actually a brandy of cherry, you know?

Very, very delicious and strong.

A bit of honey, there.

A bit of the lemon juice, or lime juice, rather.

More lime juice.

I have a whole bowl ready here, actually.

But that's basically the same mixture that I wanted to show you how to do.

You know, this is really very flagrant feel, especially with the Kirchwasser.

If you don't wanna put alcohol in it, you don't put alcohol in it, it's fine.

You know, you can decorate this a little bit on the outside with the long, leave it, make it festive, you know?

And maybe with some cherry, I have some cherry or other fruit of another color.

I have different colored cherries.

Those are pitted, you know?

You can put this around, a bit of color, and you have a delightful, fresh, delicious dessert.

I think today, we have a real summer meal, you know?

All those flavor, all that richness, all those color in.

But we have, I mean, even our egg in aspic, which is really a very classic dish, but small eggs and all of that aspic, which is pure, crystal clear, without any fat in it and strong taste of tarragon, that's really one of my favorite, already as I say.

But this one is, really.

And of course, the tuna steak, an interpretation, you know, a new way of doing it, similar to what we used to do with the beef, with very lean, nice.

And that stew, colorful stew with the tomato, the bread, the garlic, and so forth.

And finally, the pineapple, the little bit of Kirchwasser, a bit of honey.

This is a terrific summer meal, which we are going to, and of course a salad, we always have a salad.

But with that, we're going to enjoy a deep, rich, you know, a romantic Chardonnay from the Napa Valley again.

And I hope you're going to do that meal in summer or even in winter for your friend.

I'm sure you're going to enjoy it with your friend and your family.

I love to cook it for you.

Happy cooking.