- Hi, I'm Jacques Pépin.

Sometime you wanna splurge on a guest.

Perhaps surprise someone special.

Today's menu uses ingredients which cost a bit more, but are really worth it.

Endive with olive, quick and picante.

Lobster, as popular on the coast of Normandy as on the coast of Connecticut, served in artichokes bottom, a delicious combination.

Pear au gratin is our lovely dessert.

Once in a while, you deserve something special.

Please join me on "Today's Gourmet".

(bright uplifting jazzy music continues) I'm cooking a lot of my favorite food today.

Lobster, artichokes, Belgian endive.

Those are make for terrific meal, type of elegant, bit different, you know, perfect to celebrate a special occasion.

And what we're going to do is to start with the endive.

Call en-deev in France or en-dive, and as you see, those endive here are actually chicory, you know?

A bitter chicory, and those bitter chicory are green.

You plant them in the garden, they become green.

They're extremely bitter.

If you pull the root out of the ground, and this is the root that they use in New Orleans to do coffee, you know?

That bitter root that they ground and make coffee out of it, which (indistinct) coffee.

That chicory, if you take that and if you put it in the cellar, you know, you grow it into peat moss without any photosynthesis, without the sun going into it, then you will have that white, tight things coming out of it that we call a Belgian endive, you know?

And it's special time of the year.

You cut them in two or in four if they are very large here.

Three each.

And what I have out of this now, I want to put some garlic, so I have my garlic here.

So maybe two cloves of garlic should be enough for that.

Maybe even one clove, you know?

About one teaspoon, maybe one and a half.

Don't wanna put too much.

(knife chops) Chop very fine, yeah?

(knife chops) It's a bit different than the conventional recipe.

Basically there is almost enough liquid in there to go by itself.

So I'll bring that back here.

In addition, a dash of salt, a little bit of water, like, third of a cup maybe at the most, because they render juice by themself, like a tablespoon of olive oil.

A dash of red wine vinegar.

A bit of pepper.

And that's about it, you know?

It goes very fast.

The endive, you know, don't have much nutritional value.

We wanna bring that to a boil, and bring them to a strong boil.

Boil them about 10 minutes, and that's what I have here.

They are basically ready to be served now.

So the addition to that, to make it a bit fancier, I'm gonna put some black olives in it, and those black olive are pitted.

Those are olive cured, you know?

If you press on it, you see the pit comes out of it very easily.

And we want, so we call that oil-cured olive, you know?

(knife chops) Cut that coarsely.

Put that in there.

I put a little bit of soy sauce to season it.

That's about it.

We're going to pretend that right there this way.

A very kind of simple but elegant type of first course, you know?

This is often what I like to have at home.

I love the endives just warm out of this, you know what we used to do?

We used to, we used to saute them in butter now and so forth, but they are just as good if not better this way, just like that, present with our juice, you know?

Around, and a bit of the this, and maybe a little bit of chives on top of it, you know?

Just to give some color and taste.

And this is the first course for our elegant meal.

And with our lobster today, we're going to do artichokes, and I wanna show you how to do artichokes bottom.

It's not that easy to do.

You go to the market sometime and buy artichokes.

Beautiful vegetable from the thistle family, and if you wanna cook a whole one, then you buy nice, beautiful green.

Cut the end of it, because there is (indistinct) all over the place to cook it whole.

If you do artichokes bottom, however, which is just the center part here, what we call the heart or the artichoke bottom, try to get artichoke like this.

Not that they are better than that, but they're usually cheaper.

You can go, you know, at the rack at the end of the market, leftover vegetable, get five, six artichokes sometimes for a dollar, because they are all yellowish.

It's fine.

You can use that for the heart.

To get the peel out of it, to get the leaf out of it, however, one of the best way is to break it like this.

If you don't know how to use a knife, if you're not really proficient with that, one of the safest way is to do it this way.

You see what I'm doing here?

I'm breaking it and pulling out, so that ultimately this look like if I was eating the leaf of the artichoke.

So all the meat stay there.

Don't pull it like this.

If you pull it like this, you are removing that piece of meat which should be in that hole right there, you know?

So break it, pull out, again, break it, until it's about flat.

At that point, you can cut it about here.

Now, I usually get the end of it, which is not worth anything.

And that part here, which is not worth anything either.

And I keep those middle leaf, which are fairly tender here.

If I keep this, and if I keep all of this, now I have to clean it up.

You can even use a vegetable peeler.

The stem, by the way, you can cut it and again, peel it like this.

You have to take the outside because it's very tough.

And that again, you can cook, and that, now this, you can use either a vegetable peeler, you know?

To make it just pale green, that is thick, because this is a bit tough, you know?

Or with a knife, you know?

The same way, this way.

And this is what you will have, a whole artichoke bottom.

If you do that, believe me, I have nothing that I throw out here which is edible.

I have all the meat here, and inside of this, I have the thistle, you know?

The thistle, those, and that can be removed after it's cooked or even before with a spoon, you know?

You may want to go directly like this and remove those center, you know?

Which are not edible, like that type of thing.

That, your artichokes bottom, finish.

This is what we're going to put, to cook right here, you know?

Now, if you wanna do it in a better way, or I mean faster way, you know, then you cut it with the knife this way, all around, as you can see, it goes much faster.

And what I have here is like a cone, again.

I remove the center of it that I don't use.

That piece here, most of it again, I use this.

And now I can clean up the end of it right there, and all around, maybe with a smaller knife here.

This is it.

If I want to keep the tail, sometime I keep the tail and clean that up, you know?

That's it.

And as you see here, I have a beautiful artichokes bottom.

This is where you cook, you put lemon juice in it, you put a little bit of water, you put a dash of olive oil, all of that in there.

You cover it, you bring it to a boil, and cook it for about 15, 20 minute.

And that's what you get right here that I have.

I have some of those, which I clean inside, as you can see.

And some with this, when this is cooked, you know, that will slide very, very easily, you know, out of it, that center.

And that, you can keep that with a little bit of juice to keep it warm for our recipe.

I'm going to take two, put that on top, and you wanna keep it in its own juice.

We are going to serve that with the lobster.

We're gonna put the lobster inside, right here.

So I have two lobster here.

Those are about a pound and a half lobster.

And if you look very closely when you want to choose your lobster, you can have the male, and this is a male lobster because the two last appendage right here, it's like a bone, and it goes in between the ribcage, and the ribcage is very narrow.

This is a female lobster.

The ribcage is going to be, the thorax is going to be wider.

And the last two appendage are those two very thin things, you know?

So you can see, the male and the lobster, the male and the female are going to be different.

It is of course in the female that you have the roe, and considered, you know, usually more tender.

Two leg are different also, you see?

This is the crusher, larger leg, and this is the pincher, you know?

Where they cut, and this is where they break.

Usually you would want to remove, of course, the piece of rubber here, and the best way to cook them is actually to cook them in water, As we have here.

I have boiling water, you put them directly into it, and they're instantly killed, you know?

So you bring that back to a boil, and cook them about 10 minutes, then let it cool off in the liquid.

That's one of the best way of cooking it.

And I have one here, which of course is cooked, that we took out.

And the way to take the meat out of it is relatively simple.

I'm going to show you.

One of the best way, you break the tail this way.

This is a female, I can already see the roe here.

Then I break the back, the tail, to remove the flesh right here.

You wanna keep it in one piece.

My wife is a specialist of that.

When we go eat lobster, gonna take her an hour and a half to eat a lobster.

You see, I have the tail here, which we cut in half, and you can still see the roe here.

We'll serve half a tail per person for four people.

All of those, I keep usually to put back in my stock, which we've done here.

Now I have the two leg, you know?

And the center carcass.

It is in the center carcass that you have all of the roe, see the female have that beautiful bright red roe.

And I have some of it here, which I put in the oven to dry to use later on.

In any case, all of this, all the carcass this, we put back into the stock with a reduction of the stock to reduce it and give a lot of taste to it.

This we want to clean.

First we separate those two parts.

And in order to crush it, not to make too much of a mess, you know, one of the best way is to use a towel (tool thumps) and crush it underneath.

Otherwise it splatter a lot, you know?

Then you want to break that piece here.

Usually you have the little bone attached to it here.

And there is still a little piece of meat.

See this one now is totally clean, huh?

I have a little piece of meat here which didn't come out.

She's at the end of that here, you know?

So we're going to have one leg here.

This is the pincher, again.

You see this way, the bone came out, and that stay, that the way it should be.

Take it out, it's just cooked right.

So this is totally bone out, my two leg.

And now those two parts here.

You see, I cut, where is the other one?

Here.

I cut that part here, and that first knuckle here is considered the best, the best part of the lobster, by the aficionado.

That muscle here, you can break that with a nut cracker, you know, sometime it's just as easy.

That piece of lobster here is considered like the oyster in the chicken, you know?

So that would be this.

And again, here in there, we have another little piece of lobster which can be clean.

Now you know, even in the small leg, there is still a little bit to be taken out if you want to chew around and take those piece and take the time and the patience.

I usually don't have much patience for that.

I usually, here it is, make something else with it, like a soup, a stock, and all that.

And you can really do something quite good with it.

My wife will go through all of it, you know?

So here we are.

This, as I say, makes a terrific stock here.

So I put that in there.

We do a reduction.

And actually, you know, what you want to do, is to take a little bit of that reduced stock to put on top here, of your meat.

Because you want to cover that now and keep it warm, you know?

To serve it.

That the way to really, without boiling it too much, because it's going to get tough.

And this is reduced, you know?

We've reduced that, but I wanna reduce it even more to make the sauce, you know?

You know, I do a sauce here, but sometime I reboil that a lot and I put pasta in it.

Strain it, of course, and put pasta, and you do like a lobster consomme with pasta.

That's terrific.

And what we're going to do here is to reduce that with a little bit of butter and chive to do a chive sauce, which is very good.

Another thing that we do that I haven't shown you, is with the end of the lobster, here with the tail, you know, the end of the tail of the lobster, if you have time and one of the leg, I have the leg of the lobster here and a piece of the antenna.

We push it here, and then through the first joint here, you can put a tooth pick here, and put the two part of the tail to do an horrible monster, you know?

With a furry mouth, which is a trachydactyl or a (indistinct) or whatever.

Trachydactyl.

Fly, you can put that as a decoration on salad, you know?

If you do a lobster salad, it's kind of fanciful and nice.

So we have this.

I wanna show you also the roe, the inside of the roe, you know?

What we took, we take them out, and I put them in the oven.

So that they dry a bit.

And then we can do a powder out of it.

I could chop them by hand, but it's very easy in that little machine to do it this way.

And you can use that, our decoration for salad, you know, or other thing.

(machine whirs) See?

Within second, I'm going to have beautiful red, and which is great on salad or in soup or whatever.

Beautiful.

People never know what that is.

I tend to say it's red dye number eight.

No, this is not what I said.

I say it's just the roe of the lobster that you have, it's very flavorful and it's good on the salad, you know?

So let's see now.

My stock is cooking.

What we do in there, we are putting two tablespoon of butter.

We're using a bit of butter today, two tablespoon of butter for four people, so it's not much, to reduce it, and we're going to put some chives in it.

I could actually put one tablespoon of butter and a little bit of oil.

You know that a lot of people think that lobster has a lot of cholesterol in it.

Actually, three ounces of lobster meat, you know, is about 65 milligram of cholesterol.

Relatively low, because shrimp is about 140.

Remember also that one pound lobster give you four ounces of meat.

It's one to four.

You know, usually that the way it works.

We're going to do broccoli with this, also, another vegetable.

Broccoli is very good for you, high in potassium and so forth.

And what we do is to cut the head of it and to divide the front into tiny little flowerette.

Like this, that we cook.

The biggest mistake, a lot of people discard this.

This is one of the best part of it, you know?

And because you can peel this, or even pull it like this, as you see, there is a long fiber, and that will come out.

Now this is like the artichoke's bottom.

You know?

This is the best part of the broccoli, providing, again, that you peel that, because otherwise this is very tough and fibrous, you know?

So that's what we do with it.

You can cut it, you know, into long, thin piece like this, which lend itself to nice decoration.

The way we cook that, it's very easy.

I put that much water, you know?

In the bottom of a skillet, put that on it, bring it to a strong boil, cover it so that by the time it's cooked, five, six minute, there is no liquid left.

I have no salt in it, no liquid left, so I keep all of the nutrient, all of the vitamin in the vegetable itself.

Then at the end, a little bit of butter I put on top, I brush, this one is still hot.

I brush a little bit of butter on top of it, you know?

Just to serve it this way.

You can put a bit of lemon juice, but if you put lemon juice, don't put it now.

Put lemon juice, the citric acid will discolor it, and you have nice, beautiful, green broccoli, and you turn around all of a sudden, they're all yellow.

They're all yellow because there is lemon juice on it.

So what we want to have for our chive sauce is a lot of chives.

I have beautiful chives here.

And we're going to chop them also, very fine.

As you see, always use your knife.

I use a large knife here, and the technique, it go down and forward, to have the motion of cutting.

Never just crushing, it's always cutting this way or this way.

There is a certain motion.

And of course, the only way you can be absolutely sure you're not going to cut your finger is by having your finger glued to the knife.

That is, if my finger touch the knife here, wherever that knife goes, and the finger are always this way, never this way, always this way.

It's glue against it, and wherever my hand go, the knife follows.

If the finger are far away from the knife, I never know what's going to happen.

So here we had the chive sauce, and as you can see here, even with the little bit of butter that I put in there, it came to a strong boil, and the boiling itself emulsify the mixture, and now it's creamy, you know?

Because the butter has been incorporated.

This is what we call an emulsion, to bind it together.

So this is about fine.

And we are going to serve it now.

You have to realize that very often, people think it's exactly the opposite.

They think that if you do a butter sauce, if you get it too hot, it's going to break down.

Yes, for a beurre blanc, because you have very little liquid and a lot of butter, the proportion of fat to liquid is such that if it get hot, it break down.

In our sauce here, you have one cup of liquid with two tablespoon of butter, so you have much more liquid than butter.

And that what make the difference.

So here we have the artichokes bottom here.

We could use even the stem of the artichokes, remember?

We could even cut pieces of the artichoke this way to make it flatter, and use only the ring here and put those around, you know?

Doing different type of decoration.

Remember that I have a couple of broccoli there.

I could put the head of the broccoli here, and maybe the stem, you know, of the broccoli, in between, which would be nice, also, and a bit different this way.

So I have quite a lot of vegetables, then my lobster.

Here, remember that I want my half then.

Then one, we serving one lobster for two here, which is not that much, but as you see, it is plenty, because I still have a couple of those piece.

Finally the chive sauce on top, which of course is going to give you that strong intensity of taste here.

All around, a little bit of butter.

And if you want, your roe here.

You know, you can even put it on the side here for decoration to really get a stunning effect on your lobster.

Main course for our elegant meal today.

(bright piano music) You know, one of the easiest dessert that I do are gratin of fruit, and pear, anything that you have.

And often, you know, you have some fruit which start getting a bit dark or old, and this is the time to use them.

I'm using pear this time, and of course I should have pear very ripe.

This one is not too ripe, and if it's not too ripe, of course, it's going to change the amount of cooking.

It has to stay in the oven until it's nice and soft.

Anyway, we want to peel that pear.

You cut the bottom, and as you see, the pear is round now.

You can cut it with a knife or a vegetable peeler.

One way or the other, I want to go around, in a round way, because the pear is round here, as you can see.

Now, the pear is not round anymore.

So you stop here, and then you go the long way, is the proper way of peeling a pear.

Okay.

So you can use Comice, Bartlett, of course, but you, when you get to the type of pear like the Seckel pear, the tiny one, or even the Bosc, those are going to have to cook much longer, you know?

So you want to cut that in half, and you can cut them in a wedge, depending the size of it, you know?

Let's say in wedge of three here.

And we take the core out of it, you know, this way.

That's one way of doing it.

Actually, you know, I serve just wedge of pear like this with a little bit of lemon juice on top and sometimes some cracked pepper, you know, and that's very good with cheese.

Is one of the favorites at our house.

So what we are going to do here is just arrange those pear in a gratin dish and put a topping on top.

A topping on top.

Of course the topping goes on top each time.

So what we have here, it's a six cup gratin dish, and then you just line up your fruit, and as I say again, you could do the same thing with already, even frozen fruit, you know?

Or fruit that you have, berry or other things.

So you wanna go a nice layer of it.

Which would be of course more than enough for four people here.

Now the coating that we put on top here is going to be done with a food processor, and leftover bread.

I have leftover bread here.

That we put on top.

I put a couple of tablespoon of butter in there.

A bit of sugar.

And some pecan or walnut or whatever nut you want.

We make a topping out of this.

You know, that topping is great, because you can use cookie.

If you don't have bread, you use cookie.

If you use cookie, or if you use cake leftover, then you don't have to put any butter or any sugar.

It's perfectly fine.

So you want that fairly fine.

(machine whirs) You can leave it even a bit chunky if you want.

My bread is pretty tough here, because it's been, it's been drying out for a few days, but I mean, this is the idea of putting your topping on top here.

That's it.

And eventually, I have my butter, which didn't even mix completely.

I put it on top, and this is it.

When you're ready, this goes to the oven, about 350, 375 degree.

It will take a while to cook depending what I say, on the ripeness of the fruit.

And that's it.

You have a nice gratin, and this can be served with a bit of sour cream, yogurt, or just by itself.

We have quite an interesting menu today with a lot of mixture, and a lot of interesting taste, you know?

Mixed together.

I mean this is very elegant, kind of esoteric, and expensive, maybe you can think, but remember, I cut down.

I felt very thrifty today, and I gave you only a little bit of lobster.

Half a pound, pound and a half lobster, it's about three ounces of meat, and it's a lobster for two.

Of course, if you feel a bit more generous, serve the whole lobster as we do it at home.

But you have to realize that there we have broccoli, we have artichokes, we have pear.

I mean, we have endive.

We have a great amount of vegetable and fruit, and so this is a very well-balanced, I think, and very good menu that we do in summer, and remember, there is always the extra, which is the stock that you do with the lobster.

You freeze it, a month later you come out and serve a beautiful lobster bisque or lobster consomme or lobster broth with pasta, and that's a plus, and it cost you nothing.

So it is very good.

We have our endive, and the endive, as you see, with a strong taste of the olive on top and the color, the bitterness of the endive will go well.

Got the artichokes bottom with the lobster broccoli.

That chive sauce will make it on top, and the roe, of course, which make it look absolutely beautiful.

And the pear dessert in a gratin.

We wanna serve that with a real Chablis.

You know, people think Chablis is just a name for white wine.

Chablis, the town between Champagne and Burgundy.

A very crisp, rich, delicious wine.

I hope you enjoy our menu today.

Happy cooking.