- Hi, I'm Jacques Pépin.

You know, my wife always tells me about my open door policy.

Like if our friend feel like dropping over, I'll open my kitchen door and start cooking for them.

Today I'll show you the kind of simple, healthy food I like to make when my friends come over.

We'll have steam cod on top of a tart relish of olives, figs, and capers, and a favorite of mine from Burgundy, chicken in red wine sauce and an easy but tasty dessert of blueberry and yogurt.

It's a meal for old friend and new friend on "Today's Gourmet".

(uplifting orchestral classical music) (uplifting jazz music) (uplifting jazz music continues) (uplifting jazz music fading) Today I'm cooking for my friend.

When I cook for my friend, I do dish that I know they're going to like.

I do dish that I like myself too, so that everyone feel comfortable.

This is not the time to try various esoteric ingredient.

You want people to be familiar with the food and enjoying it.

What is more familiar than a chicken?

And this is what we're going to do today, starting cooking at what we call a coq au vin.

Sometime in France, a coq refer to an old of course chicken and this is the poulet, just a regular chicken with a red wine sauce.

And to do this, I'm going to start by cutting the wing off into two piece.

We're going to start browning this in there, both of them, and that will give me just a little bit of fat from the skin of those two piece of meat, and this is what I'm going to brown the chicken in it later on.

So we start there, and the second thing we have started here is the tiny pearl onion.

I have some pearl onion and I want to glaze them.

And to glaze them, I put a tablespoon of olive oil, half a cup of water, a dash of sugar.

So, and now we cook that covered.

What happen is that they're going to cook in the liquid.

The liquid will reduce.

Eventually, we'll take the lid off and continue cooking it until there is no more liquid.

So they will start frying in the little bit of olive oil and sugar at the end, and that's what we want.

This I want to brown around.

And during that time, let's bone out the chicken.

When you bone out a chicken, to cut the leg the best way, instead of have it on the back, put it on the side, then lift up the chicken to actually use the weight of the chicken.

So with the point of a knife, all that you have to do is to cut the skin.

Then here there is a little thing called the oyster that I have to cut.

And now I have to crack that leg up and often people do this and it doesn't come up and bring it back up, grab it at the knee, and crack it open here.

Then you cut through that sinew and you pull out, the leg will come.

Second legs again, cut the skin, the little oyster, break it open, cut at the joint, and pull it out.

In our recipe here, we want to eliminate, you know, a great deal of the fat of course, and it's in the skin especially because the chicken is going to be boiled with red wine.

So we don't need the skin, I discard the skin.

And here I will remove maybe the wishbone that I have here, which I pull out with my finger right there, those bone, this one happened to be broken.

Then cutting into the center here, on each side we want to take the two breasts of that chicken here and cutting it, and you see pulling out.

A lot of the boning out has to do with pulling out to have a nice breast of chicken.

The breast of chicken of course is going to take longer than the dark meat.

So this is really what we should start first.

I have the thigh and the drum here separated in two, removing the end of the drumstick and pulling the skin out of it.

USe a towel sometime, you know?

It's easier to put it out with the towel, as you can see.

Of course, most of your calorie goes in there.

Sometime when I fry chicken, I still leave some skin and I really press on it to remove as much of the fat as possible.

But when I'm going to cook a chicken with liquid like in that recipe, then I would rather, you know, remove all the skin.

Now, this you put in your freezer, you know, this is very good for stock or you do a stock with it.

So let's see, this has been frying very nicely, that's what I need.

So now it is time to brown the chicken.

So the idea is to brown the chicken all around here to get a bit of that crust on top of it, you see?

Even the breast.

So the first part, we brown it and the second part, we cook it with the sauce, you know?

So I don't cover it.

I'm going to leave it like that here.

Put a little bit of salt on top, and... I should really clean up my table.

So I cleaned up my table good after the chicken, it's always important to clean up the table with a bit of soap and water if you can, and rinse your knife and your hand, it's important.

Remember, especially now that people are talking a great deal about salmonella, which is going to be mostly in the skin, but it's important.

The second thing that we are going to do with that is to start our potato.

We're doing a mashed potato today with garlic and turnips.

And the garlic and turnip mashed potato, I'm lowering this, and I'm gonna put a little more water in there.

The water is evaporated already.

Okay, on low heat.

And I have here half a cup of water.

I put only a little bit of water and a dash of salt in the bottom.

Again, when I cook vegetable, I like the vegetable to cook down and by the time they are cooked, there is no liquid left over.

So I don't drain the potato, I don't drain the vegetable, I use all of the liquid, which is better for you.

So I have a pound of potato which are three potato, peel with a vegetable peeler, of course, this way.

You can peel the potato ahead as I had the other one, you see, providing that you keep it in water.

If you don't keep it in water, it is going to discolorate, you know.

So, I wash my potato in there, cut it into pieces.

I mean, the side of the pieces of your potato will kind of determine the amount of time it's going to cook.

I have that white turnips here.

Now, you know, if you do a purée of turnip, the turnips will reduce into kind of liquid.

That's why we put the potato with it.

Sometime when the turnips are young turnip in spring, I do half potato, half turnips.

When the turnips are stronger, two third potato, a third turnip.

Remember you have half of the amount of calorie in the turnip than you have in the potato.

But the turnip by themself are strong, and as I say, kind of reduced to nothing.

In addition, what I like to do in it, see the end may be tough?

What I like to do in there is to put some garlic, you know, couple of clove of garlic here.

My godmother, you know, in the south of France, always cook garlic in her mashed potato and it give a very fine, delicate taste right there.

People won't even know there is garlic.

A dash of salt in there, and we put that to cook directly here.

Cover, that will cook for about 20, 25 minutes.

That depend really on the amount of on the side that you cut your potato.

So here, (pan softly sizzling) I'm turning my chicken now, which is browning, you know, pretty nicely.

Okay, continue doing it.

And now, while the chicken is finishing browning, I can get rid of that, I can start on the first course.

And the first course today is a codfish, which is poached and it's placed on top of a mixture that we call a tapenade.

T-A-P-A-N-E-D-E, the south of France.

Actually the tapenade is the word in Provençale in the south of France for capers.

So it is a sauce made with capers and this is what we have here.

We have anchovy filet in oil, we have fig, dry fig that I put in it, that is common use in the south of France, and the caper and the black olives, you know, oil-cured.

And we are going to poach, or steam rather, that fish directly on top of water that I have here boiling, you see?

You put that directly on your plate and that will take only a couple of minute to cook.

So during that time, we can start on doing the tapenade here.

And I have some black olives that I put in there, maybe my chicken may be roasted enough.

I think I might as well start the sauce with that.

This is brown, you see, you want to get the crystallization around to have it brown.

And in the dripping of that chicken here, in the dripping, I'm going to do the sauce, the red wine sauce.

Remember also that I will re-put the dark meat to cook in it first, then the white meat only at the end because if I put it too early, that is the white meat is going to be fibrous and kind of overcooked.

So we have onion that I put back in there, in the dripping.

Finely-minced onion that I have here, right into those dripping.

(onions sizzle) Okay, sauté them for like a minute or so and I will add chopped garlic to it, again, all of that mixture.

Sauté it.

(pan softly sizzling) And with that, now we are going to put red wine in it, the chicken with red wine, about a cup, cup and a half.

Remember that a great deal of the calorie goes with the alcohol when you cook with wine or alcohol.

Not all of it but more than half of it will go through the evaporation of the alcohol.

I have some bay leaf and thyme in it, seasoning, dash of salt and into this, I'm going to put back the dark meat first.

That should reboil for a few minute in there.

And during that time, we finished the sauce and I could also actually put... Now this is, as you can see, browning now.

So that is my pearl onion.

I put the mushroom in there when they finish cooking for the garnish on top, finishing cooking nicely.

And now I can finish cooking the fish or rather making the sauce for the fish.

On those caper, there is a lot of salt in it.

So what you can do is to wash your capers to remove some of the sodium, you know?

And press them, you look for those type of capers which are tiny, small caper.

The small caper are better quality than the big one.

Those oil-cured olives, you can press out and the seed will come out.

So it's easy to to do.

The fig, as you can see, are chopped finely, and it's give a very interesting taste also.

It's not classical in the tapenade but it give a terrific taste, a kind of sweetness, you know, which counterbalance the anchovy filet as well as the olives, you know?

I put the olive oil from this.

Remember that the tapenade is actually a spread, if you want.

I mean, you go in the south of France and you have tapenade with croutons, whatever that you eat around.

This is what we use it for.

I put a little bit of water into this.

You know, some olive oil, monounsaturated oil, you know, that make a great sauce, and of course you can always cut down, crack pepper in this.

And basically this is my tapenade, you know?

Actually, you know, very often I chop the little capers.

You know, I did not here but you can do it one way or the other.

So now the fish should be practically cooked.

What I wanna do first, the chicken is boiling nicely here, and you see that fish will cook very fast, couple of minutes in this.

And I'm not even going to remove the plate, you know?

I'm just going to keep it right on top of it, stop my heat.

And before I finish the fish, which I have here, I'm going to put the chicken in pretty soon.

I will arrange the tapenade as the sauce, you know, in the bottom of this, that beautiful, not only color but a very strong taste, you know, that mixture, and that goes so well with a poached fish, you know?

Here, and on top of this, I'm putting the fish, I still do a little bit of garnish.

See, this is just barely flaking and cooked on top of it.

That's good, another piece here.

Maybe a bit more of the garnish around.

And before I put the garnish on top, I'm going to add to my coq au vin here the two breasts of chicken.

We should cook a few minutes, but only at the end.

Lower my heat, and now on top of that just for decoration, I can put maybe a little piece of tomato here just so that it looks better.

Give some color because the fish is kind of pale on top.

I have some basil on top.

We can do a julienne of basil that is putting it together again for taste as well as for color, of course.

And on top of our fish now we'll put little pieces of basil, plus the coloring of the tomato here.

And here it is, our codfish poached with the tapenade.

You know, we use croutons in our cooking a lot.

I mean, croutons for salad, for different type of things.

And I want to talk about you, I mean with you about croutons.

We do them with the different type of bread.

Of course, the white bread like this, this is your conventional croutons like this which is done just by trimming the bread and cutting it into little square.

You know, this way the bread is better if it's stale like one day, not fresh, fresh.

So those little croutons should be done fresh.

That's really when they are good.

We used to fry that in a skillet and of course use a great amount of oil.

Now, you know what is done is to put a little bit of oil like this, and I put the croutons in there and moisten croutons so that they are just coated with a little bit of oil.

And then I put them directly onto a roasting pan to put in the oven this way.

You use much less oil this way.

Now again with this, the same way, you know, conventionally, we do those croutons with little baguette, this way, and again fry them in a skillet.

What we are doing now is to pour a little bit of oil directly onto the cookie sheet and spread it with your finger so you have maybe one or two teaspoon and press the bread into it a little bit on each side.

Then you put it in the oven.

Much less oil used this way, you know, it's much better.

The croutons we are going to do today for the coq au vin, I mean the chicken with red wine sauce, is done, we call that lion teeth or lion tooth.

It is done by cutting piece of bread in half like this.

Then after with that half piece of bread, so this, you cut the corner here, and trim it all around to do like a triangle, a lion teeth here.

And sometime we mark that mark right here.

And this is basically again the way it's done.

You dip those again in oil on each side and put them in the oven in the same way.

And now you may not know how toast Melba are done, and a toast Melba that Escoffier developed for the famous Australian singer, Melba, is done with a toast.

You put it flat and now you cut right through the toast to have it very, very, very thin, which is the way she liked it, very thin.

See, you cannot toast a piece of bread as thin as that, otherwise it'll just curl up and burn.

But this is your real toast Melba.

And don't forget to put your croutons on top of the salad when they are nice and fresh.

And I think now we're going to finish our meal.

And first, let's check the mashed potato here.

And the potato are boiling nicely with the turnip, they are cooked.

So we're going to put them through the food processor.

If I had only potato, I would not put the potato into the food processor because they tend to get corny.

But with the turnips, it's fine, you know?

Realize that I'm putting all of the water of my potato in there plus two tablespoon of butter.

We don't use much butter in our show, but occasionally it is worth it, you know?

(food processor purring) But we put it at the last moment, a small quantity unsalted butter to have the best possible quality.

And remember in there, we did not put any cream or milk or anything like that, just the cooking water that if you calculate right at the beginning, you just have the right amount, meaning that you keep all of the nutrient of the potato and of the turnips.

Potato are high in potassium and all this.

So that dish doesn't really have that much calorie.

It's about 150 calorie per portion.

And we have four portion in there.

So you can see we have pretty hefty portion in this.

And nicely done fresh this way.

Then, the rest of my mashed potato here.

I have that wonderful smell of garlic, you know?

Those two clove of garlic that I put at the beginning in it.

And I thank my aunt for that in Valence, the south of France.

And here it is, a mashed potato with a little bit of juice sometime, you know, that's terrific.

I love those mashed potato.

We're going to leave it here now and do a very simple dessert again today.

A dessert made of blueberry and brown sugar.

This is my wife's favorite, she loves blueberry.

So we'll do it with yogurt and with brown sugar.

I like to use the light brown sugar.

And the answer of putting the brown sugar directly into the blueberry, you know, I spread the blueberry around for each portion of course, and put the yogurt in the center.

You know, if you wanna splurge with sour cream, of course it is richer with more calorie, but that's very good.

You see what happened is that that brown sugar here within a couple of minutes is going to melt.

It's starting melting now.

And it will form a beautiful design into the yogurt, you know?

We can put a couple of eatable flowers for decoration to make it a bit more festive around and that really make a beautifully simple dessert.

And now it's time to finish our chicken.

And the chicken, we're going to present it on that beautiful platter here.

Here I have, so the chicken there have been cooking long enough and I want to remove it to a slotted spoon with those onion and mushroom that we had there.

So I will arrange that on the plate because I want to thicken the sauce a little bit.

Sometime I discard and sometime I leave the thyme or bay leaf here, it's fine, you know?

We arrange that on the plate.

Remember, we have the two breast and the two legs.

So the breast, you can cut those breasts in two piece so that you have a piece of white meat and a piece of dark meat for everyone.

Here it is here.

I put that to cook because I want to thicken it.

Should come to a boil.

And on top of it, we get those beautiful onion and mushroom here, which are glazed, you know?

This is the classic... Well, in that recipe actually years ago, we would put little piece of unsmoked bacon, you know.

We call lardo in France, which are sautéed and added to it and it is fine, but of course it is very caloric so I kind of tend to omit them.

Then that dark juice, we're going to add it to the sauce and the sauce will be thickened lightly with a little bit of potato starch.

I put a little bit of potato starch, which I dilute with a dash of water.

Actually you could use red wine here, you know, because actually it's part of the dish.

And when that come to a boil, also when that starch will touch the liquid, it will thicken on contact.

So what you do, you put a little bit and you look at it, you put a bit more, you look at it, you know exactly where you are.

And now we put this on top.

Beautiful sauce as you can see.

And all you have to do now is to arrange your croutons here.

And you see the croutons that we showed you before, what you do, you dip them, you dip the end of it in the sauce, then in chopped parsley and put them here.

Or you can arrange them all around, of course, this way, at least one per person, you know?

Now that you can serve more at the table, maybe a little bit of herbals on top.

And here is our modern coq au vin.

And now it's time to move to the dining room with our stew of red wine, the poulet vin rouge from Burgundy.

That's where I come from, a specialty of the area.

We have a great meal for you today and the whole meal is in the area of 1,000 calorie, which is not too much.

And of course the dish start with that poached codfish.

And if you don't have codfish, of course, you can use another type of thick white filet on top of that tapenade mixture of capers, fig, and olive and so forth.

And with that, the chicken in red wine sauce with the boiled onion there, you know, glazed there and the whole mushroom, the croutons with that rich red wine sauce, it's terrific.

You have that with the mashed potato, with garlic in it, remember, and turnips, a salad all the time, I enjoy a salad.

And finally, your blueberry with the yogurt and the brown sugar.

Look how beautiful the brown sugar has melt on the blueberry.

And with that, a wine from upper Burgundy again, a Gevrey-Chambertin to go with the meal.

I enjoyed cooking that meal for you.

Cook it for your friend and enjoy it.

Happy cooking to you.

(gentle piano music)