- I love fruit dessert with ice cream, and an easy one is to take some blueberry, raspberry jam, with or without seed.

A bit of lemon juice on top of that, a bit of cognac if you want, or Armagnac.

You stir it together and you can serve it by itself there, but, better than that, you put it in a beautiful bowl like this.

A little bowl of ice cream on top of it, and you can never go wrong with that.

Serve that with a cookie.

The best dessert you ever had in your life.

I'm Jacques Pepin and this is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking.

Today I am going to do a pollo tonnato, or a chicken tonnato, inspired by the Italian vitella tonnato, which is the veal with the famous tuna sauce, and very simple to make.

I have some chicken here.

I'm going to take the skin of the chicken, so we have the chicken totally de-fatted, no skin on it, and this, we're going to put that in a broth of vegetable.

And what I have here, I have water, I have all of those vegetables, I have celery, mushroom, carrot, leek.

Boil that three, four minutes, five minutes, it's cooked enough.

Now we are putting the chicken in there, and the way I'm poaching that is a very nice way of doing it.

The chicken stay extremely tender like this.

I'm going to bring that back to a boil and simmer it, just gentle, but for about 15 seconds, not more.

And then pull it on the side and let it poach in that liquid at least 10, 15 minutes, and that produce a very, very tender chicken.

Now with the chicken, of course, the sauce, which is made with the tuna, that's very easy to do.

We do that in the food processor.

So what I have is three ounces of tuna here, and I like the tuna packed in oil, preferably, if you can find it.

In my opinion, much better than the one packed in water.

We have anchovies here and I'm going to put about 1/2 of the can of anchovies.

That is, I keep four or five filet left because I need that for the decoration on top.

Put the oil, too.

I'm going to put one egg yolk in there, and some mustard, good Dijon, strong mustard.

This can be done ahead, you know.

Great.

A bit of Tabasco.

I like Tabasco, so a few drop.

Dash of salt in there and water.

You want to put a little bit of water so it's helping the emulsion.

One, two tablespoon of water.

And that's all there is to it.

We put it on.

Let it turn a few seconds.

Half a cup of oil.

You see how thick it is?

We want it a bit thinner.

A dash of water and that's it.

So we have a beautiful tonnato sauce.

This, now my chicken has been simmering for about 15 seconds.

Looks absolutely gorgeous this way.

I shut off the heat, and that's it.

Let it poach slowly in that liquid.

Actually I do a whole chicken poached in the same way.

Cook it a little longer, about 10 minutes.

I put the whole chicken in the broth, you know, different vegetable and then cover it, put it on the side 45 minutes.

And the chicken is incredible, how moist it is.

So here we are.

Let's put this out.

Make sure to take everything out.

Now one of the best way, you see here, if you want to clean up, if you want to clean off your knife, when you do that type of thing, you turn it this way, the speed of the machine will clean up the knife.

And get the rest of it.

I never leave anything in the bowl.

You know, I'm very miserly in the kitchen.

Probably my training with a mother, which was even more miserly than I am in the kitchen.

Oh, here it is.

Now we have time with the chicken.

So I'm going to do a beautiful summer salad.

And the salad is very simply done with cucumber, scallion, tomato, onion, a bit of tarragon leaves in there, lettuce, oil, vinegar, that's it.

So the first thing you do, cut the end of the cucumber.

That create a platform here, you see, and in that platform, if you have a good vegetable, you do one strip and you pivot this on your hand.

You know, the idea is to pivot it this way instead of doing it this way and then turning this way, then cutting the end of it, too.

You'll say, "the result is the same," and you're probably right, except in a kitchen we're always in a hurry.

This is more efficient and it is the right way to do it.

So here we are.

Next, cut that in half.

And this is not a seedless cucumber, so we remove the seed.

And again, when you remove the seed like this, instead of going through it, it tend to break.

Use the edge of the spoon to scrape the seed out.

Go on the edge this way, turn it around, and the edge on the other side, and that remove the whole thing without breaking your cucumber, you know.

That's it.

So now we're going to cut that into dice.

Cut it this way.

Dice again.

Gather it together, you know, gently.

Cut it into about 1/2 inch, 3/4 of an inch dice Whether it's a bit bigger or smaller, not very important.

Again here, turn it.

Okay, and I'm always on the edge of the table.

I can put my bowl this way and get it there.

Onion.

This is a lot of onion, so 1/2 an onion is going to be more than enough for this.

Cut it coarsely here.

You know, if the onion is strong, if you feel that it's too strong, what you can do is to take that onion, put it in a sieve, run it under cold water.

That removes some of the sulfuric acid.

This is what's strong in the onion.

It also the stuff which sting your eyes.

But when you wash your onion like that, it stay white and fluffy and doesn't discolor anymore.

So now the tomato, take the stem out of it, probably one, two tomato at the most.

And again, this, seed and all for that, you know, that's perfectly fine.

I may want to cut my tomatoes slightly bigger than the rest of it.

You know, that's an interesting point.

For example, you see the onion, I cut finer.

The onion is stronger.

Cucumber, I cut bigger.

Less strong.

Tomato even slightly bigger because first they get mushy, and they are mild in taste.

Any damaged skin, you know, remove.

Okay, my tomatoes are really nice, ripe tomato.

You know it makes a big difference when you use tomato, whether they are ripe.

I mean, certainly in summer in my garden, I have tomato right out of the vine, and I tell you, there I go outside with the dog, pick up a tomato, put some salt on top and that's it.

There is nothing better than that.

So here we are.

The tomato there, a bit of scallion.

Scallion, even with the onion in the same family, but it's a bit different.

Notice here, I didn't put any garlic, but you could put a bit of garlic in there if you wanted to.

I mean it's the type of salad, you know.

You use what you have, either from the store or the garden.

I have the tarragon here, and tarragon is pretty assertive in taste.

You know, it has a nice licorice taste, you know, and you may say, "I'm not crazy about tarragon."

Fine.

Put dill, put basil, put anything you you want.

The herb is immaterial.

Salt.

A fair amount of ground paper here if you want.

And then I'm going to put some red wine vinegar.

Usually, you know, 1/3 of the vinegar for 2/3 of oil.

My wife will tend to put more vinegar than I would.

She like it more acid.

I'll tend to put more oil.

And here I have a great salad, which you can marinade, or macerate it, you know, keep it a little bit.

Okay, we can serve it just as such.

But you know, make it a bit fancier.

We have a beautiful bowl here and nice lettuce leaves.

Those are, as you can see, some beautiful Boston lettuce that we put that around.

And that will go directly into there.

Let's see if I can pour it without making a mess.

Hmm, that's pretty good.

And on top of that I have some olives there.

You can have green olives, as well as black olives.

That's a great salad with a steak, a hamburger or something on the outside, you can never miss with that type of salad.

And then next it is time to work on the fish.

We're going to do a gravlax, a fish.

And this is a sea bass that I have here.

The Chinese restaurants use a lot of those sea bass.

This is a beautiful fish, very firm flesh.

This has been scaled, of course, and if I were to grill it or saute it, I would keep the skin here.

In our case we're going to do it uncooked, raw in a gravlax.

So I will take the skin out of it, and to take the skin, basically you put your knife flat on the table like this, grab the end of the skin, and you put it this way, if you're right-handed like I am, so that you can work your knife.

And you see here, I move my knife in a jigsaw fashion.

I mean my knife itself is not straight or horizontal, it's about a 45 degree angle and I can't really scrape it.

So what I do, I move it in a jigsaw fashion.

And you alternate it the other way with the skin, you know, to do the same thing.

So you have your whole skin here, and in the middle of this, I can feel there is a line of bone here, so I'm going to remove that line of bone right here.

Fresh fish for me is of the essence, and anytime you cook fish, but more so even when you do raw fish like this, it's very, very important.

So this, we cut it into, you know, there is different way of doing gravlax, or in the last two years we've had gravlax, carpaccio of fish, tartare of fish, all of this are raw fish, you know, and sometime you slice it very thin and sometime I start slicing thin, like in that case, I'm cutting it into dice.

In that recipe, for 4 people, I need about 12 ounce.

I have about six ounce here and I've got the same thing on this side.

I tell you, if you cannot find that particular black sea bass, you know, use whatever fish is very fresh there.

You know, salmon as well as, I wouldn't use oily fish for that, you know, if you have, it depend on the oily fish, but certainly not catfish or something strong like this.

Okay, so I have all my fish there.

This is going to be seasoned with a bit of onion.

Cut very thin.

I have some hot pepper as you can see here.

Those they are serrano, and whether you use serrano or jalapeno, which is usually a bit less strong than serrano, or habanero, which is really strong, you may or may not want to remove the seed depending on your tolerance for it.

And you know, I always tell people when I use this, I'll take a little piece of that and I'll taste it, because I've had sometime, I've had sometime... Like this one, there's almost no taste, you know, or a little hot but not very hot.

The next time you do the same thing and it blows your mind.

So you know, depending on your tolerance of course, but test it a little bit.

So you put as much as you want.

This one doesn't really have much taste.

So I think I'm going to put the whole, the whole thing in there.

And remember also that I took some of the seed, I have some of the seed left because I'm not too careful at that point because they are, that particular pepper is not strong.

If it's very strong, remove the seed, the seed and the ribs inside.

It's about like 50, 60% of the hotness, you know.

So cilantro, I love cilantro.

Cilantro which is called Chinese parsley or Japanese parsley or cilantro in Italian or cilantro in English or corian or coriander.

People love it or they hate it, you know.

So one or the other.

I happen to love it and I put a bit of chive in there, too.

Actually the chive I'm going to keep to put with those tomato right here.

So here I have my mixture and it's salt in there, freshly ground pepper.

A lot of it.

I like pepper.

And in this we are putting a good, deep olive oil, and you can at that point put some lemon juice if you want.

But remember, if you put any type of acid there, it's going to eat the protein in the fish.

Like when you do very often in a ceviche, for example.

And you will not have the fish get, instead of being transparent and all that, tend to change color because any type of acid, lemon juice, vinegar, and so forth will do that.

So in this one here, we'll keep it just without the acid.

And you need a fair amount of salt here.

So taste it.

And now this could marinate for an hour or two, you know, but it's perfectly fine this way.

Put that on the side to marinate and I'm going to do a cucumber to go with it.

So in that case here, what I do, again, cut the end of your cucumber and cut long strip on this.

Notice here that I'm not peeling the cucumber so that each time that I do strip of the cucumber, long strip of cucumber, this way I have an edge here, which is quite nice.

So you do four, five strip until you reach close to the place where you have the the seed, you know, and you continue doing this.

Okay, this we're going to use as a garnish, so I can leave it here.

I have a bit of the cucumber left.

I'm going to peel the rest of it and cut whatever cucumber that I have from around the seed, you know.

Remember that here what I have left here is basically the seed so that, I'm not going to use that.

So this, I might as well use it.

I put little dice of this and put them in my fish.

Okay, here we are.

Cut them in half and it's nice, you have a nice crunch, a nice crunch to the cucumber, and when the cucumber gets seasoned, even with the salt, it get even crunchier, you know, it doesn't get soft or anything like this.

So it's nice.

So here I add to my salad.

I think that... Oh salt is fine, maybe a dash more of oil.

Good.

Okay, so now I can finish my tomato, which will be used as a garnish around, too.

I have two different color there.

And into this I'm going to put a little bit of rice vinegar.

The rice vinegar is very mild in taste, which is what I want there.

And a little bit of truffle oil.

You don't have to use truffle oil, you know, you can use your olive oil there, also.

A dash of salt, of course.

And again, a bit of freshly ground pepper.

That's it.

So I have the whole making of my fish here.

You can do it a different way, finishing it, but what I wanted to do here is to use one of those ring mold, and this is a can of tunas.

You can see that you can use directly as a mold.

There is different one.

Those are a series of cuts used to cut bread or to cut different type of things.

I think we use one of those, one or the other.

It's fine.

So you put that in the middle of it, and I'll garnish my fish here.

You know, if you don't want to put one of those rings, you just pile up your fish in the center of it.

There is nothing wrong with that, you know, it's perfectly fine.

But this makes it maybe a bit easier, you know?

Yeah, we are here.

Like that, you can pile it up a little bit.

And... So, I'm putting those ring of cucumber around, you know.

You can marinate your cucumber if you want, even with a little bit of sugar, a dash of salt, a dash of vinegar, all of that will work well, you know, but you can arrange them in one way or the other around and maybe put your tomato in the center of it here.

There is enough seasoning in your tomato here.

And here we have a beautiful, beautiful gravlax of sea bass.

And now I'm going to check on my chicken.

Remember, it's been steaming for a while.

Let me see the way it is.

I'm just going to let it cook for another couple of minutes.

Now to finish my beautiful chicken there.

It's really moist.

I mean it cooked, poached gently.

You arrange your slice there, lukewarm.

And I had four slice, and you can even make sandwich with this.

And, of course, on top of this we have that beautiful tuna.

So the tuna, remember with the anchovy filet on top.

So that goes directly on top of it.

It's quite assertive in taste, you know, but you want to put enough.

That's it.

And on top of that I will arrange some anchovy filet, maybe a bunch of it all around.

I love anchovies, and my wife, too.

And then capers, you know.

Give it some contrast, some taste.

And this, of course, we put on a bed of arugula.

You can have another type of salad, but the arugula is particularly nice with this.

Maybe a bit of chives, you know.

And here you have our chicken tonnato.

Pollo tonnato.

And then of course as I say, you can use that, you know, if you have any leftover the day after, you make the greatest sandwich, I love it.

There, I would put tomato into this and you know my chicken, a little more of this, maybe an anchovy filet on top of this.

And here we are, you know you have a great, great sandwich.

I'm a sucker for sandwich.

That's my best part of the meal.

That's what I would enjoy more.

With a glass of Riesling here, would be great.

But don't forget that with our chicken, we have our stock and we can make a soup out of this.

And this is what you want to serve with your chicken tonnato.

A nice bowl of that stock soup.

That completes your meal.

You can put a little bit of Parmesan cheese, if you want, on top of it.

(gentle instrumental music) And to finish my menu, I have a great chocolate dessert.

Couldn't be easier to do the chocolate dessert.

What you do first, you oil a loaf pan, you cut a strip of parchment paper.

Again, that will help in the un-molding.

Then you take your chestnut spread, mix it with the rum, soft butter, melted chocolate.

Then you pour it into the pan, you cover it with the plastic wrap, and you refrigerate it at least three, four hours, and now it's just nice and firm the way it should be.

Be sure to cover it because chocolate pick up tastes in the refrigerator.

What you want to do there is to run your knife on the side here, one side and the other side.

That's it.

And now, with my parchment paper, if you pull on it, it should un-mold quite easily.

But what we have here, you can also serve that in your terrine, directly into the terrine.

What you want to do there is to get a nice slice.

Because it's a terrine.

You may want to use another knife, you know, so that it doesn't stick too much.

And that slice here, a bit of sour cream.

We garnish that with a crystallized rose petal, you know, and this is a great dessert.

Now, with most dessert, chocolate dessert, that is, people say no wine.

I like wine.

Particularly port wine with a chocolate dessert is great.

I hope you'll do that dessert.

I enjoy making it for you.

Happy cooking!