- Hi.

I'm Jacques Pepin.

You know, everyone is convinced that healthy cooking, that means low fat, low sodium, and low cholesterol, just can't be tasty and filling.

You wait till you see what I'm cooking today.

Our whole meal is under 700 calories per person, and full of rich flavors.

We start with steamed endives in a citrus dressing, Then a hardy Poule au Pot, that's Chicken in a Pot, with a medley of carrots, mushrooms, and butternut squash.

Plus, an elegant lime cookie cornucopia loaded with grapes and tiny raisins.

You'll never think of diet food the same way again, not after "Today's Gourmet".

(gentle music) (upbeat jazz music) (upbeat jazz music continues) (upbeat jazz music continues) Once in a while, and especially when the summer comes, I like to go on a diet.

And the diet that I do doesn't have to be, you know, cute food with a lot of decorations, small portions and so forth, a lot of raw vegetables, carrot sticks.

No, I like comforting food.

And you can really do it if you know what to do.

For me, the perfect example is what we call in French, the Poule au Pot, which started in the 16th century, with Henry IV in France, who said, "Every French man should have a chicken in the pot every Sunday."

So we do the Poule au Pot.

It's not a poule, the poule is a hen, of course.

And this is the chicken, which is fairly tender.

What we are going to do is to poach it.

And I like to poach it upside down, this way, into a fairly narrow stock pot.

Fill it up with cold water and start it with cold water so the scum comes to the top.

And I have one here, which has been boiling for a couple of minutes.

And as you can see, at that point the scum comes to the top and this is the time, with a little skimmer, you remove that scum, which is actually solidified gelatin, you know, of the bone.

So that comes in the first 10 minutes of cooking, this will come out.

If there is, if you see some fat visible at that point, you can also skim it with a ladle like this, you know?

What you do very often, you push the fat with the bowl of the ladle in one corner and then you pick it up with the front of the ladle, so you have it clean.

You do not cover your stock.

If you cover the stock, it's going to get cloudy.

Now we want to season it.

and here I have some bay leaf, I have thyme, I have black peppercorn, rosemary, and cloves, you know, all that are fairly strong scented.

And that's what we put now.

You see, you don't put those seasonings at the beginning because when you take that scrum out, you're going to remove it.

So first you scum it and then you put your seasoning.

Now, you can reduce your heat, and very slowly, without boiling it, you can cook that for like 35 minutes.

And I have one here which has been cooked for 35 minutes and at that point you let it cool off.

This one has been cooled off a little bit.

You bone it out, it's going to come out very easily because the chicken is cooked.

As you can see, break out the two legs.

I can remove the skin of the breast here and remove the wishbone, which is there.

I break out the wings.

And take out basically those two large pieces of breast on each side.

See, I remove the skin.

This is nice and moist now.

Put that down here.

This one there.

You are preparing your dish here for later on.

Don't forget the little oyster in the back.

And you see what I'm doing here, I'm cleaning up all the skin, the skin, that's where you have all your fat.

And at that point I'm going to put that back into the stock.

Theoretically, I have a stock here, that I removed the chicken and put the bones back in it, so those bone would go back into the stock to cook further and concentrate the juice and the taste, you know?

Likewise, with the leg, I clean up the bone, the thigh bone.

You see?

And this is for four.

So what you can serve, half of a breast per person and half of the leg.

But you see what I have here, the whole clean meat, the bones go back into the stock, because they still have some life in them and you can still get a lot of taste and it reduces the stock so you get a stronger taste and that's basically what you want.

The meat, you put it on the side, with a little bit of juice covering it, because this is the way you're going to reheat it to serve it at the last moment.

Now, look at the stock that I have here.

That stock where the bone I put back in it, I started with like four quarts of water.

Now I am down to like eight, nine cups of liquid left through the 35 minutes of cooking of the chicken, plus another hour that was back with the bone.

We want to strain it now.

The best way to eliminate the fat, of course, is to let it cool overnight.

If it cools overnight, the fat comes to the top, you just remove it.

Another way, which is very good too, is to strain it, and I like to strain it, so double amount of paper towel, like this, I have double here.

What you do first, you wet your paper towel, so that it will stick nicely to the skimmer here.

Then you can put it on top.

And if the stock, you put it through those two, through this.

It would really remove most of the fat, you know.

So, take it on top, and you can see the fat on top of that liquid.

Remember the fat always comes to the top.

You don't have to do the whole thing in one shot.

You do some of it.

And you can see now, in there, the fat is concentrated into a smaller volume and it's stays at the top.

So you let it go down, you let it go down, you can look at it.

And when you feel that basically all you have left in there is the fat, then you can remove it, either taking it this way and removing.

Basically what I have left in there is fat, you know.

So I can put another piece of paper towel again, double or not double.

My wife does that all the time and usually she has crystal clear stock.

What she does, actually, she strains it twice.

Now here I have those bones that I put back in it.

And lift it up this way.

If I do it a second time, then I would really have something very clear, you know?

And again, as I say, if you have the time, your best bet is really to let it cool off overnight.

For the rest of that I'll throw in my garbage can here.

The bones also.

Now they are finished.

What I'll do is take more paper towel to clean up this, you know, to have it nice.

And I put the stock back in it now.

Well, a fairly clear stock, this is for our vegetables.

So, I can put that back on the stove to cook.

And now, get rid of that.

And do the vegetables which go in it.

Very often, in those types of recipes, people put the vegetables at the beginning, but the vegetables I think end up being a bit too cooked.

You know?

By the way, as I was saying, you take a little bit of the juice from here and keep that warm.

The vegetables that I have here, I have a lot of different colors, a lot of fiber, high beta carotene, you know, which is good in carrots and other yellow vegetables like that, good for cancer.

I have leeks, I have onion, carrot, I have butternut squash, mushroom, and cabbage, you know, and this is what we are going to do.

Put all of your vegetables inside the stock.

The leek.

The carrots.

We have too much carrots here.

My onion.

And you can put the mushrooms a bit later if you want, but it's fine now also.

I put the mushroom in it.

And that's it.

Those are going to sink into the liquid really and that's going to be terrific.

They're really going to give a lot of flavor because we bring it to a boil and we cook those vegetables like only 20, 25 minutes.

And when you cook like this, you know, with a lot of vegetables, you de-fat the meat, try to use a lot of seasoning in the stock to, you know, to use less salt.

And there is other types of salt alternatives.

And that's what I want to discuss with you, different ways of cooking without salt, today.

You know, I do some painting at home and if I had to take my canvas and decide that I want a little bit of red and open a little cube of red color to put it on the palette and paint, and after I need blue, and I have to open a tube of blue, I could not paint this way, and the same way to cook, you know.

What I like to have is a lot of things in front of me.

And what I have here is dry spice and fresh seasonings.

The dry spice can stay in the cupboard.

You know, I have hot pepper, I have fennel seed, I have oregano, thyme, rosemary, I mean, all kind of, you can use hundreds of things.

On the fresh one, you keep that in a tray ready to cook.

Onion.

I have parsley chopped.

I have scallion.

I have garlic, I have the rind of lime and the rind of lemon.

I have cilantro.

I have tarragon here.

Ginger.

And there is many, many more, you know?

So what you do, very simply, you keep that covered in your refrigerator.

When you're ready to cook, you bring that on the table, and when you have to season the food, you put a bit of that taste, a bit of that taste until you bring the flavor up.

Remember, that sweet like honey maple syrup mixed with sour, like a vinegar, a tomato, a lemon, all of that will go well without salt, you know?

There is certain vegetables, like carrots and all that, tomato, mushroom, which really doesn't need salt.

And also what you can do is to crystallize the meat or fish on very high heat to give a crystallization on top.

And if you do that, you can really cook a bit better without salt.

Remember there is no panacea.

I mean there is no exact recipe which tell you, you know, you don't have to buy a cookbook which tells you each recipe you don't have to put salt.

All you have to do is take your old recipe, take the salt away, use a lot of seasoning in it, bring the flavor up and you can already reduce your salt intake.

You know, the food world has changed a great deal in the last 10 years.

And the way I used to cook 10 years ago is quite different today.

I cut down a great deal on fat, especially saturated fat.

You know, at home we cook simpler, more vegetable fiber.

And this is what we try to do in all our menus.

Today, however, it's even more so.

We have been doing a very, very specifically low salt, low fat, local cholesterol, high fiber type of menu.

And to start, before our Poule au Pot, with the soup and all the vegetables, I want to discuss with you and make a first course, which is terrific, made with endive, those endive here, often called Belgian endive, although in Belgium they don't call it endive, they call it chicon, C-H-I-C-O-N, which is the base of chicory, because it come from the bitter salad that we call the chicory.

Actually, if you have some in your garden of that bitter salad, I've tried to do it several years, you pull it out of the ground, it's a big root, almost like a horseradish.

And that big root, actually, if you let it dry and roast it in pieces in the oven, you do that there, that's a coffee that they do in New Orleans called chicory.

If you take that same root and if you grow it in the cellar with a canvas on top, that it's away from the sun, so there is no photosynthesis, no development of green, then this is what comes out of the ground, that white Belgian endive, you know, which is very good.

It is a little bit sweet and at the same time a little bit bitter.

And we cook it in a very simple way.

I have six endives here and one which is a bit bigger.

So what you do, usually you can trim the end of it.

If it's big you can cut it in half.

Those we have left whole, you know.

And what we do, very simply, we cook it into a a sauce pan like that, preferably not aluminum for this, because the aluminum will tend to discolor with the acidity.

And we put that in the bottom of your saucepan.

And the seasoning on top, here we are putting a tablespoon of butter.

As you can see, even though that will be 50 calories per portion on this, we still use butter in a small quantity.

If you have to cut even more so, because of of physiological requirement, then you can even cut your butter, put a little bit, a dash of oil, you know?

A dash of sugar on top of it and a little bit of water.

You may think that there is not enough water here, because it just cover the bottom of the pan, and it's fine, because a lot of liquid will come out of my endive as it cooks, and not only with the liquid comes out of it, but it will reduce and intensify the taste.

Remember, what I try to do when I cook vegetables is that at the end of the cooking period there is no more liquid leftover, so I have no loss of vitamins and I have no loss of nutrients and fiber, and so forth, in the water.

So I don't drain the vegetables, of refresh them as we used to do.

So I calculate my water to have basically just a little bit of juice at the end.

We flavor that with lemon.

And the best way is to do little strips of lemon like this on top, that you can have.

It gives you the flavor.

And a bit of lemon juice.

And very simply, you know, you can crush your lemon and just run it through your fingers.

You want the lemon juice so those endives stay nice and white, and also for the acidity that it gives, but you don't want too much of it, and they'll get too acid.

You see, the classic way of cooking endive is this, but what we used to do, we used to take those endives out of the cooking liquid, 'cause we used to keep them like that in a restaurant in the cooking liquid for like four or five days.

You can take them out, then we sauteed them in a skillet with butter and so forth.

I like to serve it just with the stock as they are now, which is of course much less calories.

Another thing that we do, I put a plate upside down on top of it, of course a plate, Pyrex type, which can withstand the cooking, and that's to give weight to it, so that as the endives cook and release juice, they sink into the liquid.

So that's pretty important to do that.

So what we do, very simply, we bring that, bring them to a boil on top of the stove here, cover them and cook them about 15, 20 minute, depending on the size.

And I have some cooked right here in front of you.

They changed color a little bit.

I remove my plate again and I have those endives with practically you have, you see no juice left.

And I love them.

And there is a very special smell to the endive, you know, which I love.

It reminds me of Belgium.

In France, also, we do grow a lot of endive, in France.

Actually, we do grow some in this country also now.

But still, the Belgium endive are considered the best.

You know?

The whitest.

And I agree with that.

So we arrange our endive very simply on a plate like this, a bit of the juice on top left, we can put it on top.

And maybe a little sprig of green in the center.

I have some basil here.

That's it.

And a very simple first course dish with a very low calorie, about 50 calories per portion here.

And now we have to do a dessert.

And I wanna prepare a terrific dessert for you.

Actually we're doing a cookie that we are going to mold into a cornucopia type of mold.

It can be molded in different ways.

And the cookie can be filled up with ice cream of course, but I mean, in our type of menu we'll omit the ice cream.

Although you could use a frozen yogurt, it would be perfectly fine too.

For us, we're going to do fruit in it.

So I have my cookie mixture right here.

Very simple.

I have two, I have a little bit of flour here.

I have one egg white we put in there.

Again, for us, we just omit the yolk, you know?

And put that away.

A bit of sugar in there.

I have a little bit of butter melted.

A dash of oil.

Grated rind of lime, because it's a lime cookie.

And a little dash of vanilla.

So, as you can see, this is a very simple recipe.

I'm gonna mix it together with a whisk.

And spread it.

That's it.

Use a whisk, you know?

A whisk is really the best way to really get things together, smooth and nice, as I have it here.

And now I'm gonna put that on the nonstick type of thing, you know?

Here.

I do another one here.

I'm doing them about three, about one good tablespoon.

Then you spread it around, you know?

You want them to be about five inches in diameter, so they're almost transparent when they are there.

And then you put them in the oven, about 350 degrees.

I have some in the oven now.

I hope they are not burning while I'm stirring this around.

But it takes, as I say, about seven, eight minutes.

Put that in the oven, see, like this.

This is a nonstick pan.

And see what our cookie looks like there.

And you have to handle them right away, you know, as soon as they come out of the oven.

And what I'm going to put them in, on this and that, and you have to go fast here, because they are going to dry out, otherwise.

Whoop.

See, they are drying out already.

They should come out much easier than that.

What I could do is to put them back in the oven a little bit or sometimes loosen them up on top of the stove, this way, to see whether the heat.

See those cookies are relatively easy to do, providing that you do them at the last moment.

And as I say, look at this one is loosening up now.

This one a little bit also.

So I can take one of those, as can see, and roll it around a kind of cornucopia this way, you know?

That's it.

If you have your oven very hot, you know, then you put them back in the oven.

They should slide up easily, which they do, usually, of course, except when you need them to.

In any case, one, to give you an idea, because the other ones can be molded also, you know, onto container this way, with another one on top when they are very hot and they will take the shape of the container so you can fill them up with ice cream or something like this.

But this one works out pretty good.

I have some which are ready here.

And in our recipe, as I was saying, it's a very simple type of dessert.

We have fruit here.

I have those seedless, red Flame grapes.

Orange juice in there.

And those tiny, tiny dry raisins that we call currants, you know, which goes with it.

And this is what we are going to prepare very simply for our dessert.

I think it's an original dessert, I think it's beautiful.

I'm going to use the one that I did for you here.

What you could do is to have the cornucopia actually coming out of the plate this way.

So it looks, that's what it is, cornucopia.

And you arrange all your fruit around.

Or maybe this way.

And maybe a little bit of edible flowers next to it.

And you have a beautiful simple dessert.

(gentle nostalgic music) There is nothing smelling like the soup, you know, with chicken, all the vegetables in the house.

And on our menu today, as we have said, I mean the whole menu is like under 700 calories.

With those beautiful colors, I can see that the soup is well done now.

We're going to arrange it on the plate with the chicken, which has been keeping warm here.

We don't need that on top now.

And all of the vegetables are there that we arrange together with, of course, the chicken in the center of it.

But look at all of the color.

You have so much fiber.

And you know what I do sometimes, also, I put dry mushrooms in it.

Remember in that type of cooking, you know, you love to improvise a little bit, but you want to be very careful about the amount of fat that you put in it.

The chicken, of course, de-fatted as it was, without the skin, without anything, is your ideal companion for that type of diet, you know?

Not only is it tasty, but it's economical also.

Remember that the Surgeon General will recommend about a third or 30% of your calories through fat.

And here I have much less, I have about 22%, you know?

So here is the breast of chicken, which are nice and smooth, I mean, soft and juicy, you know, put them, you can mix a little bit of the dark meat and the white meat, maybe a bit of that juice on top.

And with this, of course, it's like a one pot meal.

Remember, we are serving that stock.

And look at the beautiful color of the stock.

It is nice and rich here.

And as defatted as you can have it, you know, and this is the way we like it at home.

And now we're going to go to the dining room with this and bring that here and recap our menu today.

This is really a terrific menu for me.

Something that I always like to do at home.

We start with our endives here.

And again, you know, in that type of menu, if you don't want to start with the endive, it's fine, you can have it by itself.

And then the soup, which is clear and beautiful.

And we put some cheese in there, I put some Swiss cheese, you know, in there, and some croutons.

The croutons will add even more carbohydrates that you have in there and it's fine.

There is no fat in those croutons.

Remember that under 700 calories for the whole meal, and it includes the cheese and the croutons.

And finally, the main course.

All that area, vegetables.

The meat, you see I've given most of its taste also to the stock and the vegetables.

It's moist.

So to prep up the meat in that type of dish, we serve it with a strong French mustard type of thing.

And those that we call cornichons, you know?

The cornichons are sour gherkins, which are preserved in vinegar, that we do in the summer.

My wife always puts a few jars in the cellar for the winter.

And that really goes well with this.

And of course, our dessert, our beautiful elegant dessert here, about 120 calories, actually more than half of it from the fruit, you know.

So we really have a beautiful menu, under 700 calories today, like 22% fat, much less than what is recommended by the Surgeon General.

It is attractive, it has a lot of color, a lot of flavor.

It is homey, I mean, comforting type of food.

And with that of course I will have a glass of, in that case, Gewurztraminer.

Gewurz means spice in German.

Traminer is a type of grapes.

And this is from the Napa Valley, a spicy wine which will really complement that meal well.

I hope you're going to do it.

And I am sure you're going to enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it for you.

Happy cooking.

(gentle music)