- One treat that my wife Gloria showed me how to do, she learned it from her mother, with a Puerto Rican woman.

That's those little treat of guava paste with cream cheese on top.

Put that right on top of cracker, and on top of it you can put nuts.

I'm putting pistachio nuts here, any type of nut.

A couple of those.

And finally, if you want, you can embed leaves of basil in it.

(upbeat music) And that's really beautiful, a great treat.

Nice for aperitif or for buffet.

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

Happy cooking.

When I was a kid, chocolate was a dream for me.

I love chocolate and bread.

A baguette, piece of chocolate, that's what we had after school.

Now it's a bit more sophisticated.

I'm doing a kind of cake, which is like runny in the center like a kind of cake souffle, somewhere in the middle.

And this is nice, dark, rich, bittersweet chocolate.

Bittersweet, it's not bitter, it's bittersweet.

With about 70% cocoa powder in there.

So about three ounce of chocolate, couple of pieces of butter, teaspoon of vanilla.

You put everything in your bowl.

(spoon tapping) A teaspoon of corn starch and of sugar.

And all of that, the best way to melt it, either on top of the stove in a bain-marie that has water underneath or in the microwave oven is great.

(bowl clattering) (door thudding) You wanna cook that on the microwave oven about a minute, minute and a half and see how much it's melted, then stir it and cook it maybe for another minute or 30 seconds.

You don't want to cook the whole thing in one shot because it scorch, the chocolate can burn relatively easily in there.

(oven beeping) Okay, let's see.

(door thudding) Here after a minute.

A minute is basically enough.

I have it here.

See if I have all the pieces.

You want them to be totally smooth.

I think it's fine.

I'm not going to put it back in it.

As you can see, the chocolate is totally smooth.

I don't have any grain on top of it.

That's what you want.

So this is an easy recipe.

Everything is in there.

Now we put eggs, and what I have here, I'm gonna put two eggs and two egg yolk.

One egg.

Again, break your egg on something flat.

(eggs crunching) And then two egg yolk.

(eggs crunching) You do the same way.

Best way to separate your egg yolk, then grab your egg yolk.

When you separate your yolk like that, you want to get rid even of that white thing that I have here, which is so-called the chalazae.

The chalazae of the egg.

This is a sinew on each side of the yolk, which hold the yolk in suspension in the center of the shell.

Nothing to do with the germ of the egg or anything like this.

It's the chalazae.

Okay, two egg, two egg yolk.

And I put that directly in there.

Now I'm going to mix it with a whisk.

Yeah, chocolate is always messy, you know, so.

(whisk clattering) And you'll see, it will thicken because of the eggs.

It's pretty thick now, as you can see.

Now this is my mixture.

(whisk tapping) Take second to go, wanna mess up the board too much.

And this I'm going to divide into little cup like this.

So here we are.

Should have enough to really fill up those cup.

That's good.

And now what I wanna do with this, it's a sauce.

The sauce will go with the souffle when they are finished.

And it's a very simple thing done with a good apricot sauce.

I love to use jam, and even if there is pieces in it, it's okay.

I put a little bit of Armagnac, or Cognac, or something like this.

A dash of lemon juice if you want, or a dash of water, depending how acid your jam is.

And that's it.

You just mix this and this will be a very nice contrast to the chocolate.

So here we use an apricot, sometime, you know, you can also use marmalade, orange marmalade.

You know, orange, chocolate goes well.

Apricot, chocolate goes well.

So that goes into the oven.

350 degree, seven, eight minute.

(tray clattering) And now I'm going to do a chopped chicken liver and spinach salad.

And a recipe from my wife Gloria.

She showed me how to do that one.

And I use the chicken fat like that, and chicken liver that I have here.

You have your chicken liver and you have your fat, and that basically about the same size.

You can also use schmaltz, which is the world in Jewish for chicken fat, rendered chicken fat that you find in many markets in France.

We're going to use duck schmaltz, that is the fat from the duck.

And if you cook a duck, you get like two, three cup of fat, you can pack it up, you can put it into your freezer and use it this way.

But there, in our case here, I'm gonna use the real fat (knife tapping) that Gloria used to use in her recipe.

So we put that to melt.

(pan sizzling) A little bit of pyrotechnic cooking.

(pan clattering) That's how the fat melt fast.

Okay, here we are.

And Gloria told me she learned that when she was a little kid, she lived in New Jersey.

Grandma was a Puerto Rican woman.

But then Gloria had a friend in school.

She was a little Jewish girl and Gloria used to go after school to that little Jewish girl, and that's how she learned how to like the chicken liver and how to make it.

That recipe is great.

I have a heart of chicken here and that goes well with it also.

When you do that liver here, there is two parts to the liver.

So separate both parts and if there is any sinew in between, you remove that little piece too.

Now look at your liver.

I don't have it here, but sometime you may see a greenish tint, and this is the gall bladder which break and run on the liver, and that very bitter.

So if you see that, of course remove it.

So here I have about double, at least double the amount of liver than the amount of fat.

(pan sizzling) So when this is basically melted, you still have a little bit of the crackling here.

(utensil tapping) We're going to put liver and the onion, and we put a lot of onion, like a cup and a half of onion in there.

(knife tapping) Coarsely cut, you know?

And start with this.

(pan sizzling) More onion.

(knife tapping) When I work at the Russian tea room in New York, even Russian we used to do the zakuski, which are the small hors d'oeuvres so-called in Russian.

But we did the chicken liver for the classic part of the zakuski.

(pan sizzling) The liver.

We want to put salt, pepper in it.

And you can even add garlic if you want.

(pepper mill crunching) Well those have to cook for a little while, (pan clattering) 15, 20 minutes.

So I'm starting here, cover them and cook them gently.

And now I'm going to do the main course, which is a beautiful piece of salmon.

I'm going to do salmon steak in mirin.

So what I have here is a piece of salmon big enough to do four steak.

Those are about five ounces, four or five ounces.

And what you can do, you can do your mixture directly in there.

I have mirin here, which is a sweet type of vinegary cooking wine.

And then a little bit of brown sugar, light brown sugar.

Soy sauce.

About two tablespoon of soy sauce.

Tabasco.

And that's a nice mixture.

Now if you have to use it right away, you could use it right away.

But I like to marinate it for at least an hour, although, you know, you can keep it overnight.

So what I do, I close it here, I let the air out, close the end of it like that, you can fold it.

(bag rustling) Good.

So let me check on those.

Ooh-la-la, getting there.

(pan sizzling) (utensil tapping) They still need to be cooked about 10 minutes.

I think the chocolate cake are ready now.

(tray clattering) You can see that they kind of blow a little bit out, but they are still soft.

And if I go with the point of a knife inside, this is still wet in the center.

And I want it wet in the center, I don't want it to be set like a cake.

So they have to rest about 5, 10 minutes before you can unmold them.

And now the chicken liver is ready, okay.

So what I wanna do first with this is to drain out the fat, you know, a little bit, it makes it easier to separate.

That's it.

And I'm going to let it drain a few second here before I chop it.

And on top of this, we're going to put bread.

I do that all the time for leftover bread.

I have pieces of bread leftover, I put some herbs de Provence on top, a fair amount of pepper, a bit of olive oil, mix it and dry them out into the oven.

I serve those directly into a salad, or very often I do breadcrumbs with this.

I mean that kind of coarse breadcrumbs.

(utensil tapping) And, you know, I do a salad, I put breadcrumbs in it, I do soup, I put the breadcrumbs in it.

I do a sauteed piece of fish or some vegetable, tomato, I put the breadcrumbs on top.

I use that a lot, and it's great.

You don't have to spend money to buy your own breadcrumbs.

So this now we're gonna shop it coarsely.

(utensil tapping) That's how Gloria told me to do it, so.

(knife tapping) Just coarsely like this.

I do my own chicken liver, but I saute it less than that.

I put a lot of garlic in it.

This one doesn't have garlic, although you can put garlic too.

But she like it fairly coarse like this.

(knife tapping) And I also put much more fat in mine, because we put almost the same amount of fat than liver, and in this one, it's like half.

Okay.

This.

(knife tapping) It's a bit messy, but that's it.

And into this we're gonna put our cooked eggs.

You know this is a classic way of finishing up with the eggs.

And again that little cutter for me is always the best to cut eggs.

I cut it in slice, turn it, cut it on the other side and I have diced egg.

This is a nice one, this one.

And this way.

You can see that those eggs are well cooked.

The center of it is perfectly yellow and there is no green at the edge.

That's what's important.

And that's when you refresh your eggs the right way.

That is as soon as they are cooked enough, about 8, 10 minutes, you put them in ice cold water and you have to leave it long enough so that the sulfur, which is the green tinge you have around the yolk, feel the cold and it cools the egg yolk and dissipate in the water.

So often people put them in cold water but don't leave them long enough.

So here is the chicken liver, which will look a little better in a while.

That is better in the sense that the fat will get harder and it won't look as soft as this.

Maybe a dash of pepper.

And maybe a little more.

(pepper mill crunching) A little more pepper.

That's it.

So with this, I'd like to serve that on a salad.

And I have a beautiful salad here, those are tiny spinach, and I like the tiny spinach.

And you wanna dress that at the last moment, I dress it directly in there with good olive oil and vinegar, about three times the amount of olive oil for your vinegar.

Dash of salt, dash of pepper also.

(pepper mill crunching) And that's it.

We always have a salad at the house, to finish the meal or sometimes to start the meal.

You know, in Lyon where I come from, we often start the meal with a salad.

But in classic dinner, you usually follow the main course with the salad and cheese.

Okay, here we are.

Nice bunch of salad here.

You wanna put your chicken liver on top right here.

And of course, don't forget the meat pan, they are crunchy, this is really nice, goes with it.

And that's it.

I think Gloria would be proud of me with my chicken liver.

So next, we're going to cook our main course, which is our marinated salmon which has been marinating here for a while.

So I have a large skillet here, and that type of skillet can be used as a grill, for directly top of this.

So grab that directly out of this.

(pan sizzling) What happened here is that you only cook them we call (speaks in French) you can turn them if you want, but if I cook them this way and cover them, there will be enough steam to come around, and that steam will eventually cook the top.

I don't want them to be too cooked in the center.

I'm going to do a dressing for that, and we're gonna use lemon juice.

I can even use some of the zest here.

Sometimes I use a vegetable peeler, you know, to cut the top part of the skin.

And cut them into a very thin julienne like this.

And that gives some texture and some taste to the sauce.

And I strain the lemon juice right through my finger.

And there we put a dash of salt.

And those.

I have that very dark sesame seed oil.

Those are the ones that you use in oriental cooking.

The sesame seeds are roasted and it's quite strong, so I put maybe a third of it, the third on the olive oil because the other one is too strong by itself.

A little bit of Tabasco.

I have the lemon juice in it, pepper, and that's it.

I can put some sesame seed inside and on top of the fish.

And this is it for my sauce.

So it's quite easy.

That's it.

And now let me check on that salmon.

(pan sizzling) As you can see the salmon is not quite cooked, because you can see the center is still raw.

But it's not that far away.

Another couple of minutes.

And what I want to do to serve with the salmon, is a great mixture that we do in France of chestnuts, and I like to use those roasted chestnuts here.

They are actually not roasted, they are boiled chestnuts.

Sometimes they call it roasted chestnut.

The skin remove and all that.

I use them for pastry as well as cook.

And this has been cooked in there with apple.

Apple and chestnut.

And it's quite easy to do.

What you do, you dice the apple, put the chopped onion in it, your chicken stock, salt and pepper, all of that in the pot.

You boil it with the chestnut of course, cover it for about 20 minutes.

And then basically, you know, that's cooked.

And there is a little bit of liquid left and you want that into your puree.

So what I'm going to do here, so put it directly in the food processor to do the puree here.

(food processor whirring) And in there, a piece of butter.

(food processor whirring continues) Nice and smooth.

Yeah, that's good.

A little dash of salt.

Little bit.

And that's fine.

You can see that that mixture is going to be nice and creamy.

So clean as much as you can.

Those chestnuts are expensive.

You can see it's quite creamy.

Beautiful.

This is very classic in France to serve that with game, you know, with venison, anything like that, we serve a puree of chestnut.

And it's really good with the actually the apple in it.

So let me check on my salmon.

The salmon is cooked, I can see that.

You can see the larger piece is still a bit.

We'll turn it.

And it will be nicely brown on the other side, especially because of the mirin, there is some sweetener in it, and that will do the trick.

So a little bit of the sauce around, even a little bit on top to glaze it.

Maybe a few sesame seed.

And here we have the beautiful salmon barely cooked.

And now with that salmon, a pinot noir, you know, it's a classic combination.

Even though it's red wine with fish, we do it because of the richness of the fish and the light Pinot noir with this, you know, a varietal from Burgundy is going to work quite well with it.

And it smells wonderful.

But now it is time to unmold the dessert.

And I have it here, and you can see that those, grab them right out of the pan if you can.

And what I do here, see, when you have the paper like this, it will come out pretty well.

They are still warm, you know.

And it's fine, I like them warm.

Serve this way.

They should still be slightly wet in the center.

So here, and I'm going to do that with the other one.

Okay, so you can unmold all of them this way or serve them individually, you know, one way or the other, doesn't really matter.

But they are great with the apricot or orange sauce, whether you put it on top or around, or you can serve it without it, maybe just with a little bit of powdered sugar if you want on top of it.

But you see those here should be, I'm gonna cut a piece and show you that the inside of it should still be quite soft.

See, you can see, here in the center, it's still running a little bit, and that's what you want.

And this is great.

Be sure to choose high-quality chocolate because this is really important for that particular dish.

And if you do that, people will love you, like I do.

Happy cooking and happy eating.