(people chattering) - Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

Today, many of us are trying to eat lighter, healthier meal and this nouvelle cuisine, as it is cold, can be beautiful, fresh and delicious.

I'll show you how to prepare elegant and modern dishes today, beginning with grilled eggplant, serve on a bed of mixed green, oyster scallop and salmon wrapped in handkerchief made of egg roll wrapped in watercress.

And for the third, prickly meringue, served with a raspberry, orange sauce.

Your cooking can be as contemporary as your lifestyle on "Today's Gourmet".

(uptempo music) You know, in nouvelle cuisine now, we do a lot of very light, elegant type of dish.

And this is what we're going to do today.

We're going to do a terrific main dish with pasta, which is very striking.

But we start with grilling.

There is a lot of grilling in nouvelle cuisine, and here, I'm grilling eggplant.

Those are the small, narrow eggplant.

What I did, I put a tiny bit of oil on top of it, a dash of salt, and this is it.

You put them on the barbecue.

It's a great thing to do in summer also.

They get soft, and after we're going to season them slightly with a dressing made of oil and soy and so forth.

So while those are cooking, I'm going to leave that here.

I'm going to show you how to make the dressing and talk to you about those eggplant.

As you can see here, I have two different type of eggplant.

Those are the long, narrow one which you cut, sometime, you have them on the market, which have that light color.

I have them white also.

They have them white, they have them that color.

They have them darker and so forth.

They have them narrow and long.

Sometimes, some are long like this.

And then the big one, rounder like this.

You want to cut them, one or the other can be used.

You want to cut them into about half-inch slice this way.

But look at that one here.

The big one is actually pretty good, especially toward the outside.

As you get toward the center, it tend to have a bit more seed and be a bit more corny, so you can choose either one.

Sometime, you don't have the choice because this is what you have at the market.

But I like the one which are firm and not too soft in the center.

Now here, well, look at them.

If they start, look at them, check them out, look at those.

They're beautiful, they brown beautifully.

So even notice also that I have left the skin.

You see those have the skin on and it's fine.

If your grill goes a bit too fast, you reduce it.

But you want them nicely marked like that around.

Ph, they are beautiful and soft.

You know, they are used sometime in famous Greek or Turkish dish we call moussaka, where you line up a dish with those slice and fill up lamb in the center.

It's very good.

Now, the dressing that we want to do for that is very simple also.

What we have here is a dark soy sauce, with a couple of tablespoon of dark soy sauce, rice vinegar.

It's a very mild vinegar, the rice vinegar is quite mild, a bit in it and a little bit of olive oil on top, not much.

And a little dash of salt go in and this is about it.

So you do that type of sauce, which is very clear and transparent and goes well with it.

And with that, we are going also, you mix it to emulsify the oil a little bit.

And with that, we are going to serve a mixture of different herbs, a mixture of different salad rather.

I have that red, so-called radicchio salad from Italy called radicchio.

It is not from Italy, but it's very well known in Italy.

Almost like a cabbage looking ,but red and very bitter.

You know, a beautiful, bitter taste.

And in the middle of this, again, another salad.

I have some arugula here.

And the arugula is, of course, a kind of garlicky type of salad, and this is terrific too.

So you can do any array of salad that you have for this to present your eggplant.

And I will check them out now.

They should be basically ready.

You see I can touch them and they are soft.

You see how soft they are.

This is what you want, soft eggplant like this, very easy recipe.

And if you don't have eggplant, use zucchini.

Zucchini will be perfectly fine.

Conventionally, we always serve or I always serve the eggplant with the skin and the zucchini also for that matter.

So what you want is to arrange them on top here.

Always show the nice side.

Check it out if one is nicer than the other one.

I like the darker side.

Outside, it's a bit hot here, but it's okay.

And very simply, on top of this, we put our dressing.

There that we put a bit all over it, going to make a Chinese, going to flavor it, and this makes a terrific first course or bring that to a picnic, you know?

And now I wanna show you something which is quite interesting.

It's working with different type of pasta or so-called pasta.

Actually, what I'm using here is wonton skin.

And you see those wonton skin, you keep them wrapped up because you don't want them to get too dry.

They are made basically with water and flour like pasta.

Those are six inches diameter.

They come larger, they come smaller.

You can pick them the way you want and they separate nicely.

You can do all kind of pasta with it.

Look at that, I put a bit of flour on top, so they don't stick.

Then I can roll it together like this.

And I make pasta.

Now, if I make pasta that size here, I have a type of noodle, you see?

Now, if I make it bigger, I have basically what is called tagliatelle, the large noodle, and so forth.

Or very, very fine.

If I do them very, very fine, I have a kind of vermicelli, the small, tiny vermicelli that you do in soup.

So look at that, you say you want to do fresh pasta, no problem.

Takes two minutes with that.

So here I have this, and that other thing that you can do with it is stuffing.

Here, if I wanna do a stuffing, I can use, let's say a cutter like this to do ring.

Up.

I make this one.

You do two ring and we do what we call a ravioli, and the ravioli is really a sandwich.

So what you do, you brush that with a little bit of water, use your finger, or one at least of them so that they stick in the center.

I have a stuffing here of herb and meat.

But we do a lot of ravioli with vegetable.

You press that in, use a smaller thing than that, use the back of it to press in the center of it, and they glue together because of the water.

Drop that into water to poach it.

Beautiful ravioli.

What else do you do with it?

You do pelmini, what the Russian call pelmini.

And, again, you can cut it round or with a decorated pattern like this.

And, again, brush it with water or with your finger.

Just wet it, a little bit of stuffing.

This is classic in a soup.

You know, the Russian serve, and you fold it this way to press it around.

Again, you can use the side of this if you want.

It's like a half moon, and that half moon, you poach that with a strong stock, chicken stock.

Terrific, that the pelmini.

Actually in there, they also put a bit of dill and that's great.

Now, if you don't want to lose any, you can cut square, like this little square and do the same thing with it.

I brush a square.

Again, wet it with water with my finger.

A little bit of a dressing.

And do it in a triangle this time.

This way here.

This way here.

And that you poached.

Of course, you know there is all of the type of wonton skin that Chinese do where they fold with a little edge here.

But I'm not good enough to do that.

So I'm leaving that here.

What we are doing today, however, is slightly different.

What we're going to do is to brush the counter with a little bit of oil, so that it slide nicely.

Take one of those long six-inch thing, and inside, I put watercress here.

You can put watercress leaves.

You can put cilantro.

You can put parsley.

You can put whatever you want.

And we put the first one, actually one of the two has to be wet again, so it sticks.

We'll take that second one and wet it with water on this side.

Put it there, and that's it.

And now we want to roll this.

I'll put this out of the way.

And you see it's going to slide because I have some oil and it will extend.

And this will not double in size, but get at least a third bigger so that the leaves that I have in the center, the watercress in that case is starting breaking down, and extend it.

And I have a double sheet and this is what we are going to use in our anchor sheet of fish today.

And I'm going to bring that back with me.

Okay, put it here.

And what I want to start is the fish, which are going to do fish and shellfish that we are going to use today.

And as you can see here, I have yellow pepper.

I have scallion.

I have salmon.

I have oyster, some open, some not open.

And scallop.

Now, to open the oyster, you have to use a towel.

An oyster open here and go in here and just crack it open.

And with this, you have to slide underneath to break that open, carry it at the joint here.

And this is the way, basically, you separate the second part of it.

It should be very clean, no shell in it.

And this is the way you use them, keeping them into the liquid like this as I've done here.

Now, that liquid, now we're going to use that liquid right here to do the sauce for our dish here.

Now, what I want here is to use a little bit of yellow pepper.

I have beautiful yellow pepper and what we do often, I peel it, or the red one, it makes it a bit more delicate for that type of dish.

Now, I peel whatever I can reach in the pleat here.

What I cannot reach, see what happen.

You cut it this way and the part that you cannot reach before here, now you can reach at the edge of it.

A little piece left, You don't have to peel it.

If you don't want to peel it, it's fine.

That is, you won't go to jail or anything like this.

It's not that bad.

But it makes it better if you peel it, it doesn't come back to you.

And we do a fine julienne with that.

Give a lot of color to the sauce.

Of course, we can use red pepper, green pepper, a mixture of different type of pepper.

I put that in there.

I'm gonna put this on to cook it because that has to cook for a couple of minutes with the scallion.

We're going to put scallion, finely chopped here.

Finely mean I want it very finely minced about three or four tablespoon of it.

Won't take very long.

So the scallion and the pepper, the juice of the oyster, that what goes in first.

Actually, I could put a little bit of white wine in there also.

Now, I have those scallop here and there is a muscle on the scallop that's sinewy, which is a bit tougher.

So I'm removing this to put that here.

That, we're going to cut into pieces, maybe in two if they are too big.

You can leave them whole.

You can use sea scallop.

You can use what we call bass scallop, and so forth.

But those are beautiful.

They smell good, sometime touch them with your finger.

You may feel a little bit of grit.

And, at that time, it would be that they need to be washed or there is some sand.

So I have my scallop here.

And salmon, I have a pound of salmon here, which I'm going to cut into like one-inch pieces.

So I have a nice, different array.

And you can change that.

If you don't have scallop, you can put shrimp instead of scallop, you can put other thing.

We have those three different type of shellfish here.

Now, let's see what happened in that case here.

In the dish that I want to do, I'm gonna put two tablespoon of olive oil.

That what goes in the recipe because this is creating the sauce in the same time.

And a tablespoon of butter, unsalted butter.

I'm gonna put now the scallop and the salmon in there.

And that is not really going to take that long to cook.

And cracked pepper.

Cracked pepper.

I will taste the juice because I may put a tiny dash of salt, but not much because of the saltiness of the juice from the oyster.

The oyster, we'll put at the end because it will take no time to cook.

Now, what we want to cook are those, here it is, the handkerchief we call there.

So that are going to go into water right here.

Here again, maybe we'll put three and they're going to cook.

This should come back to a boil pretty fast.

You know, it basically cooked, huh?

What we wanna do is to put the oyster at the end and maybe I put a cover until it comes back to a boil.

The oyster, I leave it in the center.

It really won't take much long to cook.

And now, let's see if this came back to a boil.

Basically, this cooks extremely fast.

After that it comes back to a boil.

It is basically ready because remember how thin it is, you know?

So I want to take them out.

This is fine.

If you think you're going to have any problem with those, you could dip them into cold water.

They will open in the cold water as they have here.

But if you're going to use them right away, as I'm going to use them right away, you could oil them, so they don't stick together.

So this is what we are going to do.

Now, we put them there, they are boiling hot.

I want to present this.

This is now cooked enough, I don't want to over cook it.

So I have it there, serving right in the middle.

A little bit of the oyster, the salmon, the scallop, maybe a couple more oyster.

And the juice, of course, which has a beautiful color there.

And, finally, I want to put my handkerchief on top of it here, which they are quite hot.

And as I say, (speaking in foreign language) it will wrap around here, you see.

And on top of this, a little bit of scallion.

And here is our beautiful nouvelle cuisine dish in our menu.

(uptempo music) And now for our nouvelle cuisine menu, we're going to do a dessert.

And the dessert we're going to do a meringue.

A meringue is egg white beaten with sugar.

Conventionally, you put one cup of sugar for four egg white.

Here, we are putting about half a cup of sugar.

So less sugar and we're going to pipe them.

You can do it with a spoon or with a, yes, with a spoon.

But we're going to pipe it into a pastry bag.

When you use a pastry bag, first you turn the outside so that you don't smear things all around.

Then you put, usually, you have two type of tip.

You have so-called star tip and the plain one, smaller, bigger and so forth.

Those are large ones.

So you put that down this way, you press it so that it come really at the end, and if you put something in there which is very runny, then you will twist this and push that inside.

So that when you fill up your pastry bag, the thing are not falling all over the place.

For the meringue is not that important because the meringue is not very runny.

So we are ready now.

You have to be ready by the time you beat your egg white.

So I have my egg white here.

And, again, in a copper bowl, I start very fast, very fast to break the egg white so that they are liquid.

Then I go slowly to lift it up.

And, again, here we're doing that.

I am doing it in a copper bowl.

Stainless steel bowl would be very fine too providing the bowl is clean.

If the bowl is not clean, and if it's slightly fatty, not cleaned properly, then it won't form.

It won't be, because we do it in a copper bowl because the copper itself will acidify the egg white and acidification of egg white will tend to make it form.

If you don't have egg white, if you don't have a copper bowl rather, you put a couple of drop of lemon juice, citric acid, a couple of drop of vinegar even, acidic acid, or a pinch of cream of tartar, tartaric acid, any of this.

If you have copper, you don't have to put anything.

And even if you do it in stainless steel and don't put anything, it's fine also.

It doesn't make that much difference.

But then you cannot beat it in aluminum.

In aluminum, it wouldn't work.

Now, look at that here.

This is holding a peak, a beautiful peak.

Nice.

This is the way I want it.

This is when you put the sugar in it.

Now, the sugar, you don't have to put it that slowly.

Here, I put the sugar almost all of it now.

And now, I stir it.

To work it, make it tight.

You see when you do a meringue like this, if I put the sugar very fast in it, I will do a very, very, very dry meringue.

Even though my mixture now is still slightly grainy, I can feel the sugar.

Yet, however, the meringue is going be dry.

If, however, many recipe tells you put the sugar in it and beat it for a while with the sugar, you're going to make a mixture like marshmallow that you can keep much longer.

But that mixture is going to be like marshmallow, kind of a chewy and elastic, not brittle and dry like the meringue that I will do.

So here we are, you turn this, that you're at the end.

And now, we want to bring our tray, line that up with parchment paper and we want to do just a plain, straight meringue this way.

And what we want to do is to pull it out, to make little pricky thing just for decoration.

If you want a straight one, you put another one on top like this and it will come out straight.

And, again, you can pull those this way after if you want to.

It's not that important.

So, again, the meringue is quite easy to do and we cook them at low temperature, about 200 degree.

It takes two, three, sometime four hours depending on the humidity and all that.

I tell you, when I was a kid, we used to do this, we used to actually put them in, (speaking in foreign language) we called it, this was the place where we warm up the plate about a 150 degree.

Left it overnight, 24 hours.

I have some which are cooked here.

It's not even just warm because, and they pick up a little bit of color as you can see, but they are dry, that's what you want.

And those cook for a number of hours, about four hours, and I'm going to do a raspberry sauce with it.

I have frozen raspberry, which is defrosted here without any sugar in it, plain.

To sweeten it, I'm putting unsweetened raspberry jam instead of sugar.

And then you push the whole thing through.

Now, I could do that in a food processor without any question, but in the food processor, I would have to strain it.

Now here, I strain it to the end.

And the seed that I have here, you see the seed that I have here, I can even put them in vinegar.

You know, people like vinegar, raspberry vinegar or thing like this.

Now, look at them here.

Sometime, it need to be strained again because sometime even through the hole, but this is a very fine one.

There is no hole.

I'm not going to restrain it, but I want to put some orange in it.

And what we want to do here is to peel an orange totally, skin and all, the two part.

I could actually use some of the skin of that orange, use some of the skin of the orange to make a julienne to put it on top.

But this is going to be fine this way.

And what we do here is to cut, actually dice of this, see, to mix in our sauce, a bit different.

And there is a certain acidity to the orange, and also a beautiful color with the raspberry.

It work well together.

So cut it into half-inch dice here.

And now I make that with my raspberry and we are ready to put it together now, a raspberry orange sauce.

What you want to do is to put that in the bottom of your plate.

You're going to have, and after a while, the pieces of orange are going to come out and the color of the orange is going to be visible again.

I have one more here.

Then we take one meringue.

I think I like that one to put in the center of it.

It's very crunchy.

We can put a couple of fresh raspberry because the color is very close to it.

Maybe a couple of decorating flowers, maybe even shredded mint, that we put in there that you can cut with a knife.

You can mix that in your sauce, shredding the mint all over the place.

And that make a delicious and very flavorful dessert.

In that nouvelle cuisine menu, we did emphasize the aesthetic of food presentation a little bit and it's fine, but you have to realize that the food, the aesthetic of the food has absolutely no value unless it's good to eat.

So first, the only important things in food is taste, whether it's good or not, that's what's important.

If it happen to be good and you can make it look good too, then terrific.

But it is not really the most important.

Yet, however, we have beautiful dish today, very tasty.

The eggplant just grill in a modern way with a little bit of dressing on top.

And, of course, that seafood on a handkerchief, a pasta, which is very versatile and very striking.

And, of course, that beautiful dessert with meringue and fruit.

We're going to serve a (speaking in foreign language) and this is about 20 mile from where I was born in lower Burgundy, food that bring pleasant memory.

I enjoy cooking that dish for you and that whole meal for you.

And I hope you're going to do it for your friend and enjoy it as well.

Happy cooking.