- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

In France, everyone likes to eat at their corner bistro.

We know we'll get a good, simple, yet satisfying meal.

Today, I'll prepare one of those special corner cafe menu for you.

A stylish salad of fennel and pear topped with a crunchy wonton hat.

Lean pork filet in a mustard wine sauce is great with little dumpling called gnocchi.

And a nice cafe dessert, cafe au lait granite.

So join me for dinner at my corner cafe on "Today's Gourmet."

(lighthearted music) (lighthearted music continues) (knife scraping) (knife clattering) You know, I love to eat at home, but eating in a restaurant is very nice, also.

And sometime you wanna go out to have dinner because there is things which are a bit more difficult to do at home.

Not even more difficult, but sometime a bit more esoteric, or you don't even think of doing those type of dish.

And this is what we have today, a kind of corner bistro where the restaurant at the corner that you know everyone and you go and eat occasionally.

And that exists a lot in France.

And I'm going to do a fennel and pear salad.

This is fennel.

And it come with those long, beautiful hand.

It is the same family than the dill, also, but there is a big bulb in the bottom and that's what we use here.

This, of course, can be used for decoration.

It can be used in many things.

And it does grow wild, you know, in the different part of the country.

What happens very often in those wild one, like this, they dry it out, and you can buy it in pieces like wood.

And that, you use to flambe fish.

For example, there is a fish in the south of France that you grill.

And after it's grilled, you put those dry pieces of fennel underneath and burn it, you know, and it has a taste of anise, which is very good.

So here what we are going to do is really slice that in very thin slice because we wanna blanch it.

Otherwise, it's a little bit too tough.

I mean, you can use it also uncut, but it's a bit more tender if we do it this way.

So what we'll do, I have already some here blanching and we'll put that directly in boiling water.

There is nothing in that water, no salt, nothing.

And it will blanch it and also prevent it from discolorating because if you have it this way before you put it in the dressing, it will tend to discolorate, get brown a little bit.

And with this what we're going to use is dried tomato that I have here.

As you see, those are dried tomato of large tomato.

You can see the seed here, which are usually reconstitute very fast in water.

They can be used as such.

Those happen to have no salt.

Sometime they have salt, sometime they don't.

Those are plum tomato, a thicker wall cut in half and dry out in the sun, or in the oven, or in a dehydrator sometime.

Those are the same one then that reconstitute in water.

So they are soft.

And sometime they take longer than some other time, depending how long they've been dried, depending how thick they are.

And finally, here we have pumpkin seed.

And the pumpkin seed, those are fairly round.

It depend on the pumpkin.

Sometime I get them, they are flat and larger, but always green like that and shelled.

Those are very good addition to different salad, the crunchiness, the taste of it.

It's high in iron and fiber.

It's very good.

Then we have pear.

And that's what I'm going to do now, peel a pear.

As you can see, I have a Bartlett, a Red Bartlett here, and that's going to be part of our salad.

An interesting mixture of pear and fennel.

Remember that sometime you say, "Look at that beautiful Red Bartlett."

By the time you peel it, it's white.

Then you look at a Bosc, you look at different pear.

Ultimately, you have to think in term of that when you do fruit salad or you use fruit, that by the time they are peeled, they may be all exactly the same color, you know?

So here, this is a fairly firm pear.

I'm sure you can hear it.

And we wanna take the core of it and cut it into little dice.

There is a certain sweetness to this, which is going to go well with the salad.

It's a bit of an unusual salad, pear and fennel.

But again, you can use another type of fruit and the fennel can also be replaced with something else in addition of dill.

Now, if I were not going to use that right away, then I would put lemon juice on top of it because it would discolorate.

But we are going to use it pretty soon.

So I have a bit of cherry vinegar here and a bit of oil, peanut oil in there, dash of salt and pepper.

And that basically the extent of our dressing.

We put that in there.

That won't discolorate like this.

And I can put my dry tomato in it, also.

Those have been reconstitute in water.

And the pumpkin seed.

Now another thing that we want to serve them to make it maybe a bit more interesting is to use wonton wrapper like this.

Of course, I've used that several time.

I use them at home to do pasta or do different type of thing.

The Chinese, of course, use this a lot, all kind of different dumpling.

And my friend, Martin Yan, use it, but I don't know how to fold it to do those little thing like the Chinese do.

So what we do here is simply use that as a wrapper.

And I can cut it this way.

I can cut it in triangle this way.

And any of those you can put in the oven.

And what you do, you brush it with a little bit of oil on top, turn it on the other side the same way.

Not much, just a touch.

And we put that in the oven, and that make a terrific wrapper for hors d'oeuvres or thing like this.

Now we're not going to do hors d'oeuvres with that, but gonna put it in the oven.

(tray clattering) I have some here which are dried.

And as I say, if you do a puree of chickpeas or thing like that, the hummus of chickpea and you use that, this is terrific.

Now our fennel is basically cooked enough.

I'm gonna drain it.

(strainer clattering) (water splashes) Drain it well.

(strainer clanging) Put it in there.

(strainer clangs) (pot clattering) And stir it to finish the salad.

Yeah, it's an interesting combination mixture, unusual taste, you know?

And that we will arrange on our plate.

You can put one of those underneath if you want to do like a little sandwich.

Some of that on top and around, you know?

Don't forget the seed.

The seed are beautiful, those grain seed.

Be sure you have enough pear in it.

Put another one on that on top.

And even if you have those piece, you could put some of those piece on the outside.

Very often you get those fennel bulb at the market without the top.

If you can get it with the top, it's beautiful to decorate with it.

And this is our first course for the corner bistro food.

(lighthearted music) As a main course, we are going to do a filet of pork charcutiere, we call.

A charcutier in France is the place where you buy pate, terrine, all that type of thing.

It's someone who deal almost mostly with pork and do all kind of thing with it.

We call that charcutiere, which is the wife of the charcutier, you know?

And for that, with that, we're going to serve gnocchi as an accompaniment.

And to do the gnocchi, what I do here is 1/2 a cup of water, like one teaspoon, 1 1/2 teaspoon maybe of salt.

And we wanna bring that to a boil and add flour here.

The flour that I have here, of course, is straight flour.

That is all-purpose flour.

And this is basically what I use most of the time.

In addition to this, we're going to put potato later on in it.

There is three different type of gnocchi.

The first one, as I do here, with that mixture is what we call gnocchi Parisienne, Parisian style, which is done.

That mixture is almost like what you do for pate a choux.

We call the choux paste where you do little choux, or eclair, or Napoli, Paris-Brest, and so forth.

So I put that in there now.

And you stir it.

It has to come to a boil.

And you'll see the mixture is going to form into a lump.

What I do here, I use a wood spatula flat in the bottom, you know?

Because I have a little bit of oil in there.

Usually, we put butter.

And as you can see, this form into a lump, which it's almost like modeling clay.

So you cook it for a few seconds so it dries out the moisture.

If I were to do that with butter and add more eggs in it, it would be the mixture for profiterole and so forth, as I say.

So what we do now, I bring that here, and we put that directly, that little lump, into the processor here.

Now what I have here is a potato, almost as much potato as I have here.

I'm gonna put the potato with it right here.

I have two eggs.

I have some Parmesan cheese.

So we're gonna process this first.

(processor whirring) Make a paste out of it.

And then add one egg.

(processor continues whirring) A little bit of Parmesan cheese.

I wanna keep some to put on top.

And the second egg.

(processor continues whirring) Sometime we put herb in it, also.

I have some sage here.

I could put some sage, or basil, and so forth.

Now, the gnocchi, what we call gnocchi, are little dumpling.

So as I say, we do it with the pate a choux.

Other people do it only with the potato.

And it is done in different part of the world, particularly in Italy and in France.

So there is the one with the potato, then there is a mixture, and there is another one that we call the gnocchi Roman, Roman style, and this is done with wheat.

This is done like a semolina, which is a wheat type of mixture.

And it is cooked with milk and it's placed on a tray to cool off.

And after, cut into pieces.

So what we do here, again, we have our pastry bag, we're gonna put that inside.

This is a plain tube, as you can see, which I'm going to press so that it goes to the end.

And this is a large opening, as you can see here.

I don't really have to push that in because nothing will come out of this.

That mixture is quite thick.

But I turn this around so it doesn't get smeared all over.

I forget whether I put salt in there.

You should put a little bit of salt.

Clean that up good.

Okay, it's a fairly thick mixture, as you can see.

And again, I put it in there and use the side to clean up my spatula here.

You wanna pick up everything.

You ready?

Now, to form those dumpling here, you fold this here on the pastry bag and you start turning it this way until it goes to the end.

At that point, you pick up that hand here and press with that part of the hand and keep turning as you go in.

Now this is the conventional way.

For this, since I need both hand, I'm going to use the left hand.

And that I put directly on top of boiling water here, wet my knife, start pressing and cut my dumpling so they can fall into the water.

So this is a nice technique.

You know, we use the same technique, actually, with a mixture of pate a choux and potato close to this, and that's what we call pommes dauphine.

Nothing to do with the gratin dauphinois.

And the pommes dauphine are put into hot oil, so they puff up, you know?

So here I want to use everything.

Push it inside here.

And this, you want this to come gently to a boil and doesn't boil too fast.

A couple of minute, they're going to come to the top and finish poaching, two, three minutes.

So what we are going to do (burner clicking) while this is cooking, we are going to start the meat.

And what I have here is my tray with all the meat.

And what we have is the filet of pork.

Now a lot of people shy away from pork when in fact the filet of pork, if it's totally clean like this, have about the same amount of fat and cholesterol that chicken have.

Again, providing that it's clean.

This is the filet and there is a kind of skin on top, as you can see here, which is easily removed.

This is available all over market.

Then in addition, what you have is what we call the silverskin here, which is a bit tough.

It's not fat, really.

And you can remove it also.

So those, we can roast all.

It's a beautiful piece of meat, and as I say, quite, quite lean.

Or we can cut them into medallion-like, you know?

If I wanna cook them, (palm thudding) I can palm them a little bit, or even butterfly them, if you want them to cook a bit faster, like this.

So depending how long you wanna cook them, they're gonna cook for about two, three minutes on each side to more than that if you decide to cook it whole or leave it thicker, you know?

So here.

So I do it this way.

We're gonna put a little bit of salt and pepper on top of it.

I use kosher-type salt here.

That is the granulated salt, which for me, I like the feel of it, you know?

But remember that this is a much lighter salt than the other.

What I'm saying is that a teaspoon of kosher-type salt this way is going to be much less than a teaspoon of regular salt.

So we put that to cook here.

(oil sizzling) And this should cook in a couple of minutes on each side.

And during that time, we are going to do the garnish.

Have some white wine to put in there.

But I have some scallion, as you can see here.

We're going to cut the end of it here.

And a bit of scallion is going to go into our dish later on.

(knife tapping) I have tomato, and those tomato have been soaking.

The dried tomato have been soaking in water.

I'm going to remove them.

And now they are soft enough to be used either whole like this or cut into piece.

I think I'm going to leave them in fairly coarse pieces.

But keep this because that's going to go into the juice.

Then red onion.

(knife tapping) Not only it adds texture but it had a beautiful different color, also.

(knife tapping) Here we are.

I have a bit of garlic here.

And I can use maybe two clove of garlic.

This is not peel.

I can peel this one.

Crush it to release the skin this way.

(palm thudding) (knife thudding) And now I think that I can turn my filet on the other side.

(oil sizzling) Mm-hmm.

I could cover it at that point or continue cooking it.

This is fairly thin, so it's going to cook fast.

So I have the garlic, which is going to go with the onion.

And finally, here at the end, I'm going to use cornichon.

And those are French gherkin.

We do them, actually, my wife, I plant them, but my wife pick them up.

It is tiny cucumber of a certain type that we pick up almost every day out of the flowers in the garden.

And that, we brush it with salt, put them in salt for a couple of hours, brush them, put them in jar with vinegar, and that's all.

So it's a very sour type of thing.

So this is all of the garnish for my pork.

(tray clanging) But what I wanna do now is look.

Those are finished.

You see my dumpling are basically cooked here.

What you do conventionally, if you're not going to use them, see, they are fairly firm here, you wanna cool them up in water and leave them in water if you're not going to use them.

If you use them right away, you can take them out of the hot water.

You know?

And directly season them.

Here, we're doing a very simple seasoning of cracked pepper on top of it.

A bit of salt.

A little bit of Parmesan cheese, plain like that.

And a little bit of olive oil we wanna place on top.

Just serve them this way.

And maybe some parsley, you know, that you can have on top that I can cut very coarsely just for the color of it.

So you see, it has a way of falling out naturally.

Food, for me, often fall in a natural manner which is very attractive.

So this can be served just the way it is.

What we are going to do now to finish the pork... You see, it's nice and brown on the other side, also.

And believe me, when you have pork like this and if it's cooked at that temperature, high, and if it doesn't have any fat or anything in it, it will cook very fast.

And pork does not have to cook to 180-degree internal temperature.

The (indistinct) is pork is cooked, it's killed, rather, at 139 degrees.

So very often, we cook it way too much.

So here it is here.

I have my garnish.

What we wanna do is we glaze with like 1/3 of a cup of white wine.

This is not going to cook very long, you know?

I want the juice, of course, of the tomato that I add to it to create a sauce.

That would cook a couple of minute theoretically.

And in this I would wanna put a bit of Tabasco.

I would wanna finish it up with the gherkin, those cornichons that we call which are sour and so forth.

And mustard.

After you add the mustard, you don't want to cook it longer, you know?

Here, it should cook probably a minute or so more, but I'm going to shut it off at this.

(pot thudding) And the mustard is used also as a kind of thickening agent at the end, you know?

Ooh, and it's nice and strong.

So what we wanna do here is to present the filet pork charcutiere, you know?

A couple of them like this, which are beautiful.

I have three.

Should be enough here.

That on top.

As you can see, this is a very acidic type of sauce.

I could decorate that with pieces of sage, for example.

We haven't used much sage.

Sage is beautiful time of the year.

I have a lot in my garden.

It's free.

And I have here... And of course, if you want to serve it with your gnocchi, which goes very well with it, by the way, then you would wanna take a little plate, putting a filet or maybe putting some of the gnocchi first that you can spread out, you know, this way.

It goes so well with it.

And a little piece of the filet of pork in the center.

Your sauce that we have here.

And maybe a leaf of that.

And this is the main course for our bistro food.

(lighthearted music) And for our bistro corner food, we're going to have a great dessert today.

And this is very easy done.

It is a frozen granite, we say in France.

Be granita in Italian, granite in France.

It indicate a texture, granulated texture.

What I have here is a cup and a half of strong coffee, about three tablespoon of sugar.

We put, pour this.

And stir it.

And that's about all it amount to.

We freeze this now in a block, you know?

Now, on one of them, we do a cafe au lait granite.

And we put two tablespoon of half-and-half in it.

And you freeze it, so it's slightly different.

So you put whole thing directly into the freezer.

And I have some, of course, frozen here.

What you do after they've been frozen like this, that's why I look in the refrigerator because at the end when they are frozen into a block, I left them in the refrigerator for maybe an hour, an hour and a half, until they start getting soft enough so they can be divided, broken down into those type of granulated texture that we say.

And this is the one with the cafe au lait, you know?

And I'll put the other one here.

This is the other one, just plain coffee that you can serve in a demitasse like this.

It's really refreshing.

Throw in all that for summer dessert.

With that you can put some coffee beans in it.

You can put a little bit of Kahlua if you want on top of it.

And you can even put some swirl of lemon on top, which would look good right here.

If you wanna do a swirl of lemon, you take a strip with a vegetable peeler.

I cut the center.

And you fold it back in this way to do that type of twirl to put right on top here.

And this is a refreshing, delicious dessert for our corner bistro food.

It's always nice to have a place to go for dinner at the corner of your house, corner bistro, the little cafe where you know everyone, where you have your friend coming or you can meet your family, and it's nice.

Usually, you go to those place and have the type of food that you don't do at home, maybe a bit more esoteric or combination of ingredient that you wouldn't think of.

And this is what we had today with that interesting fennel and pear salad with that crackling things on top, which is made with wonton wrapper.

This is terrific for cocktail party.

Then we have the stew pork, very low calorie, with the gnocchi with it.

And finally, the great dessert, which is about 50 calorie, of the frozen cafe au lait without the half-and-half.

If you put the half-and-half, it put another 10 calorie per person.

So it's still a very, very low dessert.

We have a salad with that.

A nice piece of bread in a bistro.

And with that, a Pinot Noir from the Carneros part of Napa Valley.

Very earthy and fruity.

It's going to go great with our meal.

I love cooking it for you.

Cook it for your friend.

They're going to love it.

Happy cooking.