- Hi, I'm Jack Pepin.

Cooking in a light and modern style means starting with fresh ingredients and fresh ideas.

Like a pizza topped with home cured salmon, sour cream, red onion, basil and olives.

Succulent grilled chicken served with herb flavored butter, and crisp tender green beans, and a classic French salad of arugula, olives and crouton in a bright lemon dressing.

Today's fresh cooking is more than techniques and recipe.

It's a whole new state of mind.

Join me for a fresh and imaginative menu, coming up on today's gourmet, (vibrant music) (vibrant music continues) We have a fresh and imaginative menu today, which reflects the type of modern strand, modern strand that people have today.

Starting with a pizza, an unusual pizza and grilled chicken.

People love chicken.

There's almost no one who doesn't like chicken, and grilling is a big thing.

So, the first thing you would want to do with this is to remove the wish bone.

That which bone is broken in in two.

So, watch out not to puncture your finger, when you do this.

So, you have two pieces.

And I wanna remove the end of the wing here, this way.

And then, cut the leg.

Now, you cut the skin of the leg.

All you have to think is about the skin.

That's all, because it's all there is around.

And you get to the back.

Now, you cut the little holster here.

People tend to extend it and try to break it up and it doesn't work.

If you bring that up, grab it at the knee, it crack open.

Cut through the sinew, pull out.

So again, relatively simple, cut the skin, the holster, break it open, cut through the sinew, pull out.

You have your chicken.

Now, we cut it at the joint of the shoulder and we follow the central bone of the sternum here.

And again, you grab it here.

So you cut the bone and you pull the whole thing out, to give meto me, the breast.

Don't worry about the filet, we put it back on top.

The same thing on the other side here.

You get this, the filet can go with it or after I leave it after then pull it out and you see the whole thing comes out.

We have left the little filet put on top.

Now the whole carcass is used for stock.

Cut the bone here, sever it a little bit at the articulation of the thigh and the drum because that's going to help it cook.

And that's basically all we want to do.

Wanna put a bit of salt and paper on top of this and we are going to cook that on the grill and cook it mostly on the side of the skin.

Here we are.

So the two breast, the two leg, we put here.

The two breast, we put here.

And maybe a little bit of salt, a little bit of pepper on top of it here.

(sizzling) Okay.

And now, I better get rid of this.

But, I want to move on is to the first course of our meal.

Be sure to rinse your finger when you do chicken.

And the first course is going to be a pizza.

And the pizza is made with a cup of water.

I have about half a teaspoon of yeast, a little bit of honey or sugar to start the fermentation of the yeast is basically what I have it here.

And after 10 minutes, it looks this way.

You have that kind of form on top of it, it's proofing.

But, you add your flour to it, a little bit, like a tablespoon, not even a tablespoon of olive oil.

Then, in the food processor.

We put it on.

(loud grinding) The dough is done in seconds.

That dough is done in seconds.

And what you have to do now is very simply, you can remove this and put a piece of plastic wrap on top and let it proof directly on top of it.

And this is what I have.

I wanna show you, I have one which is done there.

It has been proofing, covered there.

I want to keep this, and that wonderful smell of yeast.

You know?

You see I bring back the side back on top of it to do my dough.

Here is the dough.

I need maybe, a little bit of flour with that that I have here.

And this will be for two pizzas.

So, I'll cut one, put it on the side, and the other one, start spreading it out around.

You wanna spread it out with your hand.

And what I have here is a special... a special piece of pan.

I want to press that directly on top of it.

You can use a little bit of oil to help in the pressing, in the sliding if you want.

I think that I should turn my chicken.

So, I'm going a little bit fast.

On the side here, they are going in inside very fast.

The skin is really browning.

You can always remove that after.

I'll show you how to remove it.

And we can spread this out to approximately, 10 to 12 inch diameter, you know?

And what you want to do after that is simply place your plastic bag wrap on top of it and let it proof.

It should proof for about an hour at least.

And while this is proofing, I wanna show you how to make the Gravlax that we are going to serve on top of it.

So, what we have here is a salmon and I'm slicing that into thin slices.

It's raw salmon, and you want to slice it the same way you slice smoked salmon.

And you see, we do an instant Gravlax here.

What is the Gravlax?

One of those Scandinavian dish, where you cure the salmon with salt and pepper.

So, look at what I'm doing here.

Salt and paper.

I think my grill is going a bit too fast.

I'm shutting it, half of it.

I have salt and paper there.

You put your Gravlax directly on top of it.

That is the salmon.

I have some which is cured here.

This is a great way of doing a Gravlax.

You can have individual plate, You know?

You can prepare your plate for your guest.

Put a bit of salt and pepper on your plate and arrange your salmon directly on top of it.

And after you have arranged layer on top of it, all you have to do is to let it cure and it will cure in like 30, 30 minute, 20 minute, not even.

A little bit of salt on top.

A little bit of pepper.

And basically, that's all there is to it.

You cover that back with your plastic, and within 15, 20 minutes, that would be ready to be served.

What we want to do now, I wanna show you how to serve that grvalax.

I mean, yeah, that Gravlax and that pizza.

And the pizza here that I have, you see, has been not only cooked, but cool offed a little bit.

It has to cool off.

Let me check on my chicken again.

Now, that's better now.

It's going fast here.

(sizzling) And this way, again, maybe I'll put that part on top of it.

See, the part of the wing here has to cook longer, so I may put it right on top of it so that it continues cooking here and not too much on the breast.

And what we want to do now, my pizza.

Nice and brown, beautiful color.

And I have an interesting mixture on top of it.

I put some sour cream, that's a sour cream pizza.

So, a couple of tablespoon of sour cream, depending our lavish you want to be.

And on top of this, we are putting red onion.

We have beautiful red onion.

Cut very, very thin.

You know, as thin as you can.

I'm putting some black olive leaves on top of it.

Give me color.

I mean you could have it just like this without anything else on top, frankly.

Some basil.

Look at the basil on top right there you have beautiful color.

You could have couple of slice of tomato, you have another type of pizza.

And then, we put our Gravlax on top of this.

It is not cured completely.

With 10 15 minutes it would be cured around that on top, you know, serving one, two slice per person.

This is an original way of of course doing a pizza.

And here it is.

Maybe I'll put another slice right there.

And you see on top of that you could put again, more red onion, more olive.

Please think of term of color in term of taste, balance of all of this.

And of course, more basilic, more basil on top.

I love basil with all over the place.

And if you want to be slightly more lavish, maybe a tiny bit of olive oil on top, ishness, you know, and that's it.

Just cut it into slice and enjoy it.

And now with our grilled chicken, we're going to do a classic haricot vert.

And the aligot vert often call those tiny string beans, we refer to as aligot vert in French.

When you pick them young are so tender and delicious.

When I was a kid, we used to pick up the end where you have the stem here and break it.

And pull out the string.

There was a string at the end of that.

We will break the other side, pull out the other side, there with a string on the other side.

If you did not string your beans, you couldn't eat it.

It's not necessarily nowadays those variety of no string, you just cut the end, which is tough, where the stem is, those have been washed.

And I put that in water.

It used to be that we cook it in a lot of water too.

Here I have a pound of string beans.

I have only a cup, and a quarter cup and a half of string of water.

And the reason for that, I want to do it this way so that I retain not only the greenness, the flavor and more of the nutrient because by the time I finish cooking, there'll be basically no liquid left.

I cover it also, we use not to cover it, but I want to cover it because I don't have too much water.

Now, look at my chicken here.

you see the breast of chicken that I can show you are still quite moist, barely cooked inside, but the end of it, you know, which cook longer.

I keep it on the grill.

As well as the dark meat, which is underneath.

I place it there.

This grill is really terrific.

It's really hot.

So, I lower it to the lowest setting on one side.

And at that point, you could put it in the oven to continue or put a bowl or something upside down.

There is just a little bit of it.

It going to continue gently to rows to finish cooking.

And during that time, I wanna show you how to make a compound butter to put on top of the chicken.

And the compound butter in modern cooking is not modern because it existed many years ago.

What we do to replace like hollandaise or bearnaise or munch richer sauce.

And I wanna show you how to do it with butter and how to do it with oil.

I have tarragon here and we're going to use a tarragon oil and the tarragon butter.

As you can see there is a difference between those two.

This one has been blanched.

That is, I dropped those leave in boiling water for about 10, 15 seconds.

You know, you can use a seed, leave them out, run them under cold water, and they will be wilted like this.

If you want to, if you want to take this now and chop it very fine, put a bit of salt and put it in little package in your freezer, it'll stay bright green if you do it this way, if you don't do it, if you don't blanch it and if you don't put that dash of salt, it's not going to work.

It turned black.

So what I do that, I put that in a little, you can call it a coffee grinder or a spice grinder, that small thing.

And that turned very fast.

And this is what we need here to chop.

Put a little bit of oil.

That's it, to emulsify it into a puree, you know?

(loud blending) If you do that in a food processor, it won't turn fast enough.

But, those spice grinders turn very, very fast.

You can actually do a puree, you know?

A green puree out of it.

And those are very useful.

In modern cooking, there were a lot of people, a lot of chef used those compound butter to flavor sauces, to flavor beans, to flavor meat, to flavor anything.

So you ground it in this, of course, it won't have the bright green color that it should have at that point.

The reason is that the little bit of oil that I put in it kind of emulsify at that point.

But, it's all right.

You put more oil on top.

You know, you can divide actually, your oil.

You can have olive oil as well as canola or whatever oil.

This is a canola oil.

And that type of mixture here, green, you can put it in a fancy bottle here that I had.

And that will last for a week or more.

And this is what I use to flavor, to flavor chicken as I did, or fish, goes very well with fish.

Now, the classic way otherwise of doing it is to do it with the fresh herbs that you chopped.

And the butter, of course.

So, that you have to chop it by hand or with a machine.

Here, I'm shopping it by hand.

But then, it's not blanched.

This one is not blanched.

The most classic of the whole of the compound butter is going to be what we call, la beurre met d'hotel.

You know, the m'aitre d'butter.

And it's a mixture of chopped parsley.

Chopped parsley, a dash of salt, a dash of pepper.

You put a bit of lemon juice, and your butter in it.

Fresh, sweet, unsalted butter.

The lemon juice, you put in it only if you're going to serve it pretty soon because if you do it too much ahead, the lemon juice, the acidic acid will tend to, will tend to get it yellow.

You know, the green will get yellow.

So, there you make that thing together, you see?

That way you can do that also in a food processor, a dash of salt again on that, maybe a little dash of of butter.

And you see, there is another thing too, that I should tell you is that that mixture here, I can add a little bit of oil in it to make it less rich.

And what happen after when I have it in there, we put it in package like this.

And you can see this is a tarragon butter just as I have the other one.

You can keep that in your freezer.

And when you need it, cut a little bit out of it.

This one's got actually some oil in it.

So, you slice it in pieces like this and put it in ice and, ice and water.

I have one done with hot pepper, with red paper, and hot paper.

Another one with wild mushroom.

And all of those are really terrific to use, as I say, for many different seasonings.

So, what we want to do here is to check our string beans.

Our spring beans are beautiful and green.

They can cook a little bit longer.

Mm.

They're about fine here.

And as you can see or not see, I have basically, most of the water is gone.

So, I don't really lose munch in terms of nutrients.

I put that back on top.

A little piece of butter.

We put a dash of oil in it.

And we want a saute shallot.

This is the classic, the classic string beans is saute with shallot, you know?

Those red onion that we call shallots.

So, I saute this.

I have even a little more here.

So, we put in there, my shallots.

And the string beans like this, you see, if I had to keep them, I would spread them out a little bit so they don't get green.

But I would not, again, I would not refresh them as we used to.

That is, run under cold water.

It takes, again, some of the nutrientsout of it.

I don't think it is necessary.

Any case, we have our platter here.

As soon as you're let your shallot saute for a few seconds, I'm gonna check my chicken, which now, is completely cooked.

(sizzling) Beautiful.

Place my string beans in there.

A dash of salt on top of it, freshly ground pepper.

And we toss it.

Remember, that the string beans are hot just being cooked.

They don't really need to saute, just need to be seasoned with the butter, which is what we have here.

And now, I want to arrange that right in the middle of my plate.

You know?

Outside, beautiful green of the stringed beans.

And bring my chicken here.

I can put it in there to help.

And look at the spring beans, the dark meat, the white meat.

Again, the dark meat here.

At home, I would probably cut that chicken into two piece that is separate the thigh, and the drum.

The reason is that everyone fight for dark meat at my house.

In other place people fight for white meat.

So like that, you got each of those in two piece and you can have a piece of each.

And on top of that, of course we could add, now, if you want a bit of richness, you could also at that point, if you wanna go the other way and remove the, you could remove the skin of your chicken.

You could do it.

Although, most of the fat of the skin have been melted out.

But if you insist, remove it.

The skin will keep it very moist during cooking.

You remove it after.

And again, in that particular case, I put a little piece of compound butter.

This one with tarragon, this one with hot pepper, and red pepper.

And that will be terrific this way.

(classical music) And after our grilled chicken, what better than a fresh salad from the garden?

Actually, I have salad every day with my menu, but sometime we do them a little bit special.

And this one we're going to put crouton in a different type of thing.

The one nice way of doing crouton is just to cut little, little dice like that of bread.

And you can do it with any type of bread, of course.

And if you want, conventionally, to put those crouton into a skillet with oil, it will absorb probably, like a third of a cup of oil, something like that or more, which is too much for more than lifestyle now.

So what we do, you put them in there, and you put like, one or two teaspoon of oil on top of it.

And just toss it into that oil.

What will happen is that you will just toss enough of the bread so that it's going to brown beautifully in the oven.

It's like, and you put it onto a cookie sheet like that.

You can line it up with paper, so that you won't even dirty your, you won't even dirty your cookie sheet.

So, it's easier to do.

You put that into a 400 degree oven.

It will take a good 10 minutes to do this.

And I have some, which is done right here.

So, I have in the back, as you can see right here.

What you can do actually, is even use this, makes it easier to take your whole thing out.

That's it.

And then, we wanna do a light dressing with that.

And the dressing we're going to do is done with lemon juice.

Lemon juice goes well with our salad, salt, pepper, and a little bit of olive oil.

Now, the salad that we are doing today is a rocket salad, rocket or arugula.

It's a very garlicy, pungent type of green, which I love to have in the garden.

And we have it here today.

You would want to toss it at the last moment because you don't want to put too much.

You don't want it to get wilted too much.

So, toss it at the last moment.

You know, I like to toss in a large bowl like that so I don't get it too messy all over the table.

Toss it in the kitchen, so that you can always clean it up when it comes to the dining room.

So, you have it this way.

On top of it, we can arrange our crouton, which is really beautiful.

And on top of that, we have some olive, black olive.

And I have those black cured olive that you can press and the pit will pop out of it.

You know?

We can leave them all or press them in two.

Those are olive cured, or oil cured olive, you know?

And they are very concentrated on taste.

And that on top of that will be absolutely beautiful also.

So, you can vary your salad, you can put tomato, you have tomato in there.

You can put with the fresh taste of the arugula, with the strong garlicy dressing, the strong garlicy taste of the salad with the lemon dressing goes so well together.

And it's going to be a perfect finish for our meal.

We have a fresh imaginative menu today.

And especially the pizza.

You know, everyone loves pizza, but this is a twist.

A pizza with salmon on top.

The salmon, of course, you can serve it by itself.

It's a beautiful gravlax, a tray of it.

You put some onion, you put the same leaf too.

Without the pizza underneath, you serve it with the sour cream if you want or without.

And you have a great first course.

The menu is kept diversified today.

And it's difficult to know, what do you start with that type of menu?

Probably the pizza.

The pizza can be served before you eat, practically, quote.

That is, you're having a peri piece, you decide to eat your pizza at that point.

In fact, you can have the whole meal with a pizza and a salad.

But, try it this way, that pizza with the smoke, not the smoked salmon, but the Gravlax rather, is really delicious.

And then after that, our grilled chicken.

Remember, we grill it very high on the grill.

And the tiny string beans we call the haricots verts, with the shallots in it.

This is classic.

And then our great salad with the croutons in it, the arugula salad.

And we finish that meal with beautiful bowl of fresh fruit.

And we have here.

Try to get to a form if you are close to it, to get the real nice fresh fruit.

Follow the season that when the fruit are at the best, the most nutrient, the cheapest, and of course the best to it.

And with that, we're going to have a Sierra Unite from the Santa Maria Valley of California again.

And the Sierra is of course, in the style of the wine of the Kuduro in France or the great wine.

And I'm sure that type of spicy, full body berry type of wine is going to be terrific with our meal today.

Do it for your friend.

I love to do it for you.

Happy cooking.