- Hi, I'm Jacques Pépin, I love picnics.

At the beach, in the park, it doesn't matter, as long there are great sandwiches.

You think sandwiches can get boring, but not if how to spice them up the way I will today.

Open face olive and tomato toast and savory eggplant with mozzarella.

Onion sandwiches rolled in chives.

I'll make a terrific salmon and cucumber combination and even show you sweet sandwiches for dessert.

And of course we'll bake our own bread, which is the secret to any great sandwich.

That's all coming up on "Today's Gourmet."

(upbeat music begins) (upbeat music continues) Today is sandwich day, and of course what's important for sandwich?

Bread.

I love to do bread, and it's terrific to make your own sandwich to take to work.

You can go in the park at your lunchtime and eat your own sandwich.

You know what's in it and bread making is really fun.

I wanna show you how to make bread first before we get into the sandwich.

And it's very easy when you do it in a food processor.

Not the only recipe, of course, you can do it in mixer, you can do it by hand, but this is great.

All you do here, I have two cup of tepid water here, just about 100 degree.

I have two envelope of yeast.

Actually you could use only one envelope of yeast if you let it proof long enough, the yeasts will multiply and develop.

So you sprinkle it on top of the water and put a little bit of sugar, like half a teaspoon, that feed the yeast and make it develop.

That's going to start fermenting.

In fact, it's a good way of knowing whether your yeast is good or not.

If you keep your yeast for a month, it's likely that it may be dead.

So you know it if it starts fermenting.

I mean look at this one here, which has been there for about 10 minutes.

Then it's really proofing, and that wonderful smell of yeast that you have.

This is now the time to put your flour.

And I have not only, this is a bread flour or a whole purpose flour, one or the other.

The difference is the amount of protein in it that we call gluten, and that's the stuff which makes the the flour elastic.

A bread flour is like 15% gluten, all purpose about 12%, that's fine.

So I have gluten, I mean flour, and I have rolled wheat here.

The whole wheat, the whole wheat berry, which is rolled together.

And I have cornmeal that I put on top.

I also put grain sometimes, cracked grain, I put bran, I can put any of that stuff.

So we put it into the food processor without making too much of a mess as I'm doing here with the flour.

That's why my wife don't let me in the kitchen anymore.

And the rolled wheat here, put all of that together, a bit of salt for your bread, otherwise it'll proof probably even too much.

Then we put the food processor on this side and we put it on.

Now this is going to turn for like a minute or so for the dough, and it moves so much, so strong that your food processor may start walking on your table.

So you hold it like this.

I want to put the dough back in there, and I put like half a teaspoon of oil just to oil that bowl a little bit.

And when that dough go about a minute, minute and a half it'll form into a thick texture and I can remove the whole thing directly into my bowl here.

Watch out not to cut your finger if you handle the dough this way.

It could be a bit thicker.

I could have put a little more flour here.

But in any case, your dough there will proof very nicely.

You have to cover it and at room temperature.

You cover it with a piece of plastic wrap here and room temperature, if it's humid enough, this will take like I would say an hour and a half, two hours.

Your bread is going to change a lot, whether you do it in winter, whether you do it in summer, whether it's humid where you are, that changes.

So you add a little more flour, a little less.

Sometime your flour may have up to 15% moisture, sometimes 6-7% moisture, sometimes 3% moisture if you're in an area like Colorado Springs, very dry.

So your amount of liquid will change a little bit.

Gotta get used to it.

Now this is another dough, the same amount that we have there, which has been proofing, and I can smell it.

Now you see it's all together.

I bring it from the side here, bring back that dough to break it down.

So a very simple recipe, I bring it toward the center to rework my dough like this.

Tighten it together and remove the air bubble.

What I do after, I put it in there, and as you can see it's quite elastic.

Now you could work it on the table a little bit.

I don't even work this one on the table, I just spread it into a rectangle here about equal and cut that rectangle into four pieces.

We are doing baguette here, those long bread, and roll.

So you do it directly on your plate, bring them together here about equidistant, one next to the other.

Very elastic type of dough, you know?

And then we can sprinkle that with a little bit of corn meal, that just give a special texture and color to the dough.

You can do it on both side really.

Or on one side, it's all right.

And since we need roll, we can cut those in three piece for roll.

And now it has to proof again.

Again, you want to put a piece of plastic wrap on top of it.

You want to cover it with the plastic wrap.

It's all right if the plastic wrap just touch your roll because I put a little bit of oil on top, and that will come out.

So put it to proof at room temperature.

I have some here you can see already proofed.

Lift it up gently.

I put a little bit of flour on top to give it, to give it a special look by the time it's cooking, banging it like this.

And now you use a razor blade, be sure to use that one side, one sided rather blade.

We can make slash on top.

You can do the slash this way across or a long one this way.

You can do a cross on top, Whatever you feel like doing.

That make the bread open.

And then we go to the oven.

Remember, the gluten is important here.

Look in this oven, I'm doing that on a stone, which give me a lot of heat, and this is what I want.

If you don't have a stone, it's fine, it'll work perfectly fine too.

In addition to that, professional ovens have an injection of steam, which make the bread proof.

So to imitate that I put a little bit of water, (water sizzles) throw it in there, like one or two tablespoon to start with.

Then you close it as fast as you can and you repeat that a couple of minutes later.

Do that twice, by then the bread is set.

And here I have some of the bread that we have already cooked, and I love to make bread.

And basically there is nothing like fresh bread that you make for your own sandwich or eating at home.

(upbeat music begins) One of my favorite open sandwich is a toast with tomato on it and different type of seasoning, black olive.

And when you do those toast, regardless of whether you do it for that sandwich or not, or for soup, you brown it with a little bit of oil.

If you were to fry those in a skillet with oil, you'll use about five times the amount of oil that I will use when I do that technique.

Take a little bit of oil, spread it on the cookie sheet like this, and put your slice of bread directly into it.

Then press it just to cover it slightly with oil on each side, and then you put them in the oven.

There is enough oil here so it's going to be nice and crispy and crunchy without soaking too much oil that you would do if you do it in the conventional way.

So what we do with those, I have some which are cooked here.

And again, this is the bread that we made before, and we do a mixture there on top of that of tomato, I have those diced tomato here.

Remember we've done tomato many time, cutting them in half, pressing the seed out of it, and cutting it in a little half inch dice.

We have coarsely chopped olive there and those black olive are the oil cured olive, which are American style of olive.

We have some cilantro here, which is called cilantro, or Chinese parsley, or Japanese parsley, or coriander in English, or coriandre in French, it's called different way when you go to the market.

But I would say most of the time now cilantro probably.

It's a very pungent type of herb that you like or you don't like.

If you don't like it you can change and put another one.

I love it, personally.

So we put that on top.

And finally a bit of Parmesan cheese.

You can use another cheese that you grate right on top of this, and this is why, because of that cheese in there, you can use this as is, or you can warm it up.

I put a little bit of olive oil in this, then we stir it.

I have a beautiful mixture there and we arrange that on our toast here.

And at I say, you can serve that hot.

I mean hot, not really, I mean lukewarm like, or cold, it's perfectly fine.

I mean when I say cold, also it's not really ice cold, it's going to be more like room temperature.

That's how you really enjoy food.

I don't like food when it's ice cold, especially vegetable and fruit, because you take all the taste out of it.

So I have arrange a few here just to give you the idea.

And as I said before, if you want to put basil instead of cilantro, it's perfectly fine.

We can start arranging those here like this.

You can do a whole array of different open sandwich.

So this is an open sandwich which is served lukewarm, room temperature, or warm.

If you put it in the oven, you put it a few minutes in the oven just to warm up the whole thing, the cheese, and serve it this way.

And now the next sandwich that we're going to do, for that next sandwich, we need sun dried tomato, and I want to talk to you a little bit about the sun dried tomato.

This is a new thing which came out a few years ago and it has a strong, concentrated taste.

Some people think it's prune sometime when they taste this.

You have those sun dried tomato, and very often they come in oil, and usually cost a small fortune, and sometime they cost a lot of money, so you don't use them often, they end up getting rancid.

So you may as well buy the one like this which are just dry and you can keep them basically forever.

They are usually made of those plum tomato because the wall is quite thick.

You can empty the center of that and dry them yourself in a dryer, if you have a dehydrator rather.

You can put them in the sun, you can put them in your oven, any of those will be fine.

In any case, when you're ready to reuse those sun dried tomato, which are, as you see, very, very dry here, you have to rehydrate them.

What you do, you drop them into hot water.

I put this maybe a minute, minute and a half in hot water and now it's all soft and nice.

So that just rehydrate it.

And what I do at home sometimes, which is really terrific, I even give it for a gift, I rehydrate tomato sometimes just enough for what I need and I do a mixture, in this I put some walnut that I cracked in there, and you can put pinoli nut, walnut, whatever you want.

I have beautiful rosemary here, so I can put some little rosemary or thyme.

I have thyme here, one or the other usually.

If you like things hot, we have some jalapeno paper.

That would be good for a big jar, or a small jar like that maybe you put a piece of it there.

We can put some garlic, and I have whole cloves of garlic which are peeled.

So all you do is to slice to have a thinly sliced garlic that you mix again with your stuff.

Maybe a few more tomato on top.

This give you a lot of color and a lot of taste.

And then you cover it with a good olive oil.

I tell you that if you do this, you can keep that in your refrigerator for like a month.

You can use those to put in pasta or in different type of salad, and a little jar, beautiful jar like that would cost you a fraction of what it would cost you normally if you buy it all done, and I have done it here.

So think about it, and there is a lot of use for that.

So we are going now to do our eggplant sandwich, and our eggplant sandwich is made, of course, of the roll that we've done before.

You remember those nice roll that we can cut, keep your hand flat like that when you cut bread.

We open it, and we want to do a mixture here of those slice of eggplant.

As you can see, those slice of eggplant have already been cooked, and all you do is to slice your eggplant, a little dash of salt on top of it, and we put that directly into a skillet with a little bit of corn oil or puritan oil and cook it without too much oil so that it brown on each side this way.

That one is nicer, I'll put this one.

So you have, depending on the thickness of your slice, I'll do a large sandwich here.

In the middle of this we'll put a couple of piece of mozzarella cheese.

You can put another cheese if you want, and if you want you can omit the cheese altogether.

Then our sun dried tomato here, two or three pieces, especially as I say, if you do them this way, it's much less expensive.

I would probably put a bit of cracked pepper on top of this, which is nice, and maybe some basil leaves.

Look at the color.

I mean you could even use that actually as an open sandwich.

This way we put the other half on top and this is a big sandwich.

You may want to serve that whole thing by itself or actually slice it before you put it in the oven.

I'm going to put it in the oven here.

This is the oven that I put the bread before.

And actually I wanted to show you that bread.

As you can see that bread is now white, a bit crusty, but still soft.

It is not cooked.

Very often I pick up that bread this way, this is like brown and serve.

You take it out, let it cool off, wrap it, and put it in the freezer.

Next time you need it, you unwrapped it frozen and go directly from that frozen bread in your oven and it is like fresh bread again.

So it's nice way of doing it.

I have a couple of those sandwich that we've done here hot, and the cheese now has melted inside, and if you lift it up, you would want to cut it.

I like to cut it in a bias like that.

You can hear the bread is very crunchy now and we're going to put those sandwich right here for the time being.

Probably easier to cut it in half or even in three or four pieces if you want, rather than trying to eat it whole, which makes it difficult.

Now I have another sandwich here, which is really a recipe by a very old friend of mine, and probably a very old friend of you too, by the name of James Beard.

James Beard was known for his onion sandwich.

And as you can see here, what we have is slice of white bread, I hit it with a little bit, this is a mixture of half mayonnaise and half hot mustard.

And you really put just a tiny bit here.

I have like half a teaspoon of mayonnaise on top.

Actually what we could do also is to put some pepper on top of this.

Now you see I have a red onion here.

You can have, depending, one of those mild onion, Vidalia or Maui onion would go very well with it.

But for me, here it is, again crushed pepper here, black pepper.

Then I put the other one on top.

I love that sandwich, and my wife too.

Occasionally we do that at home.

It's quite different than the other one, more delicate in a sense.

And the trick that he used to do with parsley, I have chives there, basically it is the same thing, is to roll the edge into that chives to give it not only taste but a beautiful color.

Now of course the first thing that you do, hmm, where did I put my mayonnaise?

Here.

You cover the side with a little bit of mayonnaise, just enough to make it wet, so that it is going to stick to it.

That is, the herb that you're putting is going to stick to it.

But you see, even when I use it like this, I really use a minimal amount of mayonnaise.

Then you roll it in there like this so that the whole side is green, and not only does it make a beautiful sandwich, but the taste is great.

You can mix if you want.

You can mix your different herbs with it.

As I said, James Beard usually put parsley, I put chives here, but you could have a mixture of whatever herb you like.

So I'm doing another one here, because I have fun doing it, rolling it this way.

Okay, so this is our James Beard sandwich, which is really terrific.

And now maybe the biggest sandwich of what we wanted to do is a sandwich, again, from the south of France.

A sandwich from the south of France is what we call a pan bagnet.

And pan bagnet means bathed bread, that is bathed, I dunno if you understand my accent.

BATH, that is the bathed bread.

It's wet with liquid and vegetable, and it is quite common there in small individual sandwich or large one.

I'm going to do a large one here.

So I have all of the garnish that I put in it and that big bread.

You see if we had done big bread with our dough this morning, we would get about maybe two bread like that, one and a half of that size.

So we cut the bread in half, keep against your hand flat on top of it.

With a sturdy knife you can cut around to cut your bread.

That sandwich is terrific for picnic, and I like to do it ahead.

And done ahead, of course that's where it developed this.

So what do we do there?

Very simply, a mixture of all of those.

I have tomato, I have red onion, I have green pepper, I have basil, I have slightly chopped olives, again, garlic.

And this is a can of anchovy filet in its own juice.

So what we do is to mix really the anchovy filet with the garlic, keeping the oil, and some of that olive.

You mix that very pungent, very strong mixture.

In the south of France, you live on the Mediterranean, so you do those type of of sandwich here, and we spread that out in the bread, as I'm doing here.

You can use a flatter bread.

This one has a big cap, so it's a bit more difficult to put it together.

And spread it even a bit better than what I do.

Here again, maybe some cracked pepper.

Now on top of this I'm gonna put some onion.

And I forget to mention that I have cucumber, too.

Now look at that cucumber.

I peel the cucumber.

When I peel it, I cut the end of it so I have a flat platform.

Then I peel it this way with a vegetable peeler.

But you see, notice I can continue peeling it this way until I reach cutting little strip until I get to the seed in the middle.

And when I start seeing the seed, as I see now, then I turn and continue this way and so forth.

And doing that, I have very thin strip of cucumber like that, which are ideal to put in the middle of those sandwich.

Remember the bathed sandwich, the pan bagnet, and this is not even in French, it's in Provençal language, the language from the south of France, means bathed bread.

So the bread is bathed with the juice of the vegetable.

Filled all with vegetable.

In the pan bagnet, you have a lot of variation.

Sometimes people put other type of vegetables, sometimes they put, what do you call, tuna for example, and so forth.

Okay, here, I have this, maybe cracked pepper.

I have a little bit of those on top, maybe more tomato just because of the juice, and because I love tomato.

And finally that on top.

Now what you do with this, after doing all of it, you wrap it very tightly into two pieces of thing, then you put it in the refrigerator with large weight on top.

I'm gonna put this one in the refrigerator.

And all that for the juice to come out of it and bathe the bread.

I have one here, which have been pressed and bathing.

I put a couple of bricks on top of it.

You can put a few six packs of soda or thing like this.

And I have this now done here, which I unwrapped.

You do it the day before, this is terrific to take to a large picnic.

And I can cut it.

Now, not only it is better after you have done it overnight, but it's going to be munch easier to slice it because all of the vegetable are together, and you have that beautiful color, and the bread itself is soaked with all the juice of the vegetable.

And this is terrific for a picnic.

There are two more sandwich that I want to show you before we go to the picnic.

This one is a very easy cucumber, marinated cucumber with vinegar, a bit of sugar, hot pepper.

We always keep that at hand at home, because it's terrific in sandwich, even in the pan bagnet, with smoked salmon in the middle, cilantro, put it together in a sandwich, trim it on toast.

And here even, as a dessert, I have a jam sandwich.

As you can see here, you take a nice pound cake, you can do it open, as I did this one, that is, without doing the sandwich, just an open sandwich.

We trim the side of it.

And at that point, this one I cut in little triangle.

You see?

This one I'm going to cut in little square.

The next one you can have a cookie cutter and do it round and so forth, so you can have all kind of shape, and in the same time, lozenges and so forth.

And this the kids absolutely adore.

You can put even a few mint, having mint leaves around for color.

And this is it, I mean, we have our dessert sandwich, if you can call it a dessert sandwich.

And that we are going to put that here.

To recap, remember, the important part is to do your bread.

And we've done beautiful bread, we've done those toast, open toast with tomato and olive and so forth.

This is our sandwich.

Remember, in the oven with the cheese, the eggplant sandwich.

We have here our pan bagnet, which has been pressed together overnight with all the juice of the vegetable in it.

Then our friend James Beard is with us with his onion sandwich.

And finally the smoked salmon sandwich with the cucumber, our jam sandwich.

I think it's terrific.

If you can make your own bread, it's really going to make a difference.

And of course, don't forget, when you go to a picnic, take a bottle of a nice cold Sauvignon blanc for you, or a Chardonnay, and if you want, of course, take some soda, apple juice for the kid.

I mean, sandwich are great to make.

Whether you make them with that beautiful dried tomato that we have, or all of the diversity that we have here.

I'm sure you're going to enjoy them if you do them as we did today.

Happy cooking.