- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

I love the flavors of Provence in the south of France.

To me, the tomatoes, garlic, and herbs tastes like sunshine.

The same light that inspired the painter Vincent van Gogh, and today's menu is a tribute to him.

Tomatoes and zucchini are arranged in a fan and roasted with herbs and garlic.

A daube, a stew of lean beef and vegetables, is cooked in the style of Arles, the town in Provence made famous by the artist.

And strawberry and red wine and cassis is a classic dessert of French wine growing region.

Join me for an homage to Van Gogh and to the art of cooking a la Provence.

Coming up on "Today's Gourmet."

(upbeat music) (knives clink) You know, when I think of vacation, I think of the south of France, of Provence, which is an area of the south of France, was known for the color, for the smell.

It's really a special place to be.

And when I think of Provence, I think of Arles, that town where the Pope used to live in France when the Pope moved in Avignon, close to Arles, and eventually the whole area was very well known for the wine and the food of the area.

It is also very well known for a famous painter, particularly Van Gogh.

Van Gogh lived and died in Arles, did some of his best painting there.

And our menu today is dedicated to Van Gogh, and what I want to start with is a daube of beef.

That is a type of stew of beef, Arlesian, in the style of Arles.

And what we're going to do first is to start with a piece of beef, which is a shoulder blade steak.

It's very lean, and I'm cleaning it up even of any other type of sinew or fat that there is on top.

You could do a steak with that.

You know, I'm doing a stew.

It's very moist and tender.

There is a large sinew in the center of it right there.

And that sinew, I will leave it for what we are doing today.

If I were to do a steak, a regular steak, I may cut it along the sinew.

There is a bit of fat again on this side.

Not really fat as you can see, it's more what we call silver skin, which we want to remove in this way.

And we, the piece is probably a bit too big for four people here, which is the recipe that we're going to do.

I'm going to put a little bit of olive oil here, about a tablespoon.

And we cut four steak out of the steak, about six ounces this way.

This is called different, different name in different part of the country.

In some place, it's called the flat iron.

In the New York area, for example, this is going to be called the chicken steak.

And those chicken steak are a part again of the shoulder blade, a very lean, moist pieces.

So we want to make it brown to start with, the first thing, then season it with maybe a little bit of salt on top and that should brown, probably for five minutes on each side.

While this is browning, what we want to do is a vegetable which goes with it.

And I have here I'm counting two potato per person and the potato, what you would want to do is to peel them.

To have them all about the same size, you could probably also use those small potato and peel, but in that particular stew, I think that I would want to peel it.

I have a cup and a half of water here.

So what you would want to do is to bring it to a boil, starting in cold water, bring it to a bowl, and boil it approximately eight minute.

Eight minute it won't be cooked.

So you continue with the rest of the vegetable.

And I have here a little carrot.

After eight minute, you put your carrot in it, which we can peel this way.

You know, you would do this.

Trim the end of it.

And the same thing with the onion.

I have eight pearl onion, a small onion in it.

So first, you cook that for eight minute, as I say, and then you put the rest of your vegetable.

You see, you want to do that at the beginning of your, at the beginning of your stew because while this is browning and we want to cook the vegetable or par cook them, so that they're almost totally soft because we will add them to our stock at the end.

But what we want to do, which is I think is a very good idea, is actually to use the juice of those vegetable in the stock.

You're going to have a lot of nutrient, a lot of taste in the water from the vegetable, and you may as well use it as a stock directly in the stew.

So basically, that's what I have over there.

I have here, those vegetable which are totally cooked, as you can see, boiling now, and I want to use the juice in there.

So the first thing that I want to do is to turn that on the other side.

As you can see, start browning nicely now.

You really want to brown it four, five minutes on each side.

After it is brown four, five minutes on each side, chopped onion.

So I put about about a cup, cup and a quarter and a medium onion, chopped onion.

In there.

That go all over.

You want to brown that again, the onion for approximately two or three minutes, just to tell you which I'm not going to do here.

Then we add the herbes de Provence, which is that mixture of herb from Provence where you even have tiny little flowers from the lavender.

Then about half a cup of white wine, a dry white wine, again, a dash of salt.

Then you want your liquid from the vegetable in there, which I put as our cooking liquid.

After that, you cover it, and you cook it for an hour.

While this is cooking, what you want to do is the thickening agent and that thickening agent is what we call the Arlesian mixture from Arles.

And this is done with hazelnut.

I have bread, I have garlic, and I have parsley.

So I put the hazelnut in there, and I wanna roast them in the oven.

They will take about 10 minutes at 400 degree to roast.

I have another one already here.

And the roasting of the hazelnut is going to develop a lot of taste.

You can use this whole nut, you know.

You can rub them with, in a towel like this after they've been into the oven.

And that will tend to remove, you see, the skin if they've been into the oven.

For our case, we don't really need to remove the skin, but what I'm going to do is to put it directly into the food processor here.

And this is the type of blender attachment to it, which is very good for that.

The parsley, that pieces of bread which have been roasted also.

So you can see it's pretty dry.

You see the country type of bread, you know, and so you want a strong blender to ground all of that together.

And garlic.

We close all of this and make a puree out of it.

(food processor whirs) Perfect.

(food processor whirs) Beautiful mixture that I have in there.

And what I want to do now is to add that to my stew.

I have a stew which has been cooking here for an hour.

So in that stew, I want to put that mixture of bread and garlic, other thickening agent, you see we didn't have any starch in it.

So that you do that at the end.

Your vegetable, which have been cooking, as you know here.

So those vegetable goes in there also.

And the last addition to our stew is actually tomato, which I have here.

So you can put about a cup of tomato or so, in little dice.

And that of course we'll have to recook about a minute, a minute or so, give you some color.

And with the tomato, we are putting black olives and capers, and this is the finishing of our stew.

And this, as I said again, is going to serve family style.

You would want to do that on a big table.

It's the type of Sunday meal.

You know, casual, casual with friend that you want to enjoy.

And this, putting the beef, the beef daube on top of it here.

It has a lot of color as you can see.

All the different type of vegetable.

And maybe on top of it, a little sprig of rosemary.

And this is our homage to Van Gogh.

Daube, the beef Arlesian.

You know, one of the most extraordinary thing in Provence are the market.

Beautiful market, colorful product, and all that.

In summer, I mean, you have all of those different type of tomato and many more than this.

I wish I had half many in my garden.

Well I have some in my garden, but not as many.

And what we want to do is that fan here, which is really classic with the ingredient of Provence, the zucchini, the garlic, herbes de Provence, the parsley, mixture in it, everything.

And what you do first is to take one of those small zucchini.

You can trim the end of it if you want, and cut this into a very thin type of fan like that, about four or five cut, depending on the size of your zucchini.

Of course, then you spread it out like this to put the tomato in between.

If you have a larger zucchini like that one, and you want to do a smaller one, what you can do is to cut it in half on a bias like this and use half of it, and again, cut it into those type of fan.

I missed this one.

Two, three, four, five or six, depend on the thickness of it.

And you want to spread it out right there.

You see this way?

Then I'm using a plum tomato here, again, cut into thin strip, thinly sliced rather.

And we want to insert it in between the, in between the zucchini like this inside.

And of course, I have the green one, but you know, with a yellow one you have a different color and it's good to do a variation like this.

The vegetable are so flavorful in Provence, and the fruit also, maybe because of the sun.

You know, the sun which have painted by Van Gogh and the light of Provence is really special.

So you put that in between, a little bit of herbes de Provence on top, and again, it's a mixture of different type of herb, from rosemary to thyme to savory and all that, that there is in Provence.

And on top of that we put garlic.

I have garlic here, and we have sliced, very thinly sliced garlic like this, you see.

And we insert that in between a couple of slice like this, a couple of slice of garlic in between each layer.

Then, we put a bit of salt.

All we have to put on top of this is a little bit of oil that you want to brush here and maybe around on this and this.

Remember a great deal of that oil will also be left on the, will also be left right on the cooking sheet by the time it cooked.

Now I wanna talk to you about garlic.

Garlic is a magic food.

You know, part of the lily family, part of the allium.

The garlic, chives, onion are all from the same family.

The garlic is great.

It tend to lower blood pressure.

In Europe many, many years ago, they had the pill to lower blood pressure made of garlic.

It smelled a lot, but it was good.

It tend to lower the cholesterol as well.

It is good for vampire.

It is good for everything.

So we use a lot of garlic.

If you take a whole head of garlic like that and you smell it, you'll notice that basically you don't smell anything.

You need to crush the garlic.

And there is two essential oil which get together and really give you the taste of what we call garlic.

So unless you crush it, if you leave it whole like this, it's going to be very mild.

To separate your head of garlic, you hit it on the side like that.

That separate your clove.

Many dish we do in France like a chicken with 40 clove of garlic.

It's an arbitrary number.

You can have 80 clove of garlic.

We put them unpeeled, all around the chicken and you suck the flesh out of it when it comes or press it.

Very, very mild.

If you want to peel that garlic, however, you cut the end of the stem right here because the end of the stem, you see, will hold the end of that stem here, will hold the skin together.

After you've done that, if you crush it a little bit like this, that will release the skin.

See it will come out.

Again, crush it a little bit, and the skin will come out.

The garlic can be used at that point it'll already be stronger than the other.

If you use it as I have done before, very thinly sliced like this, the garlic will be stronger than with the shell, but still mild.

By the time you crush it, then you release the essential oil, and it get really strong.

And to crush it, you bring it to the side of the table because you, when you use that knife here, it clear your finger.

If you want to use it flat, you have to clear the table.

So you put it here, the palm of your hand, you go down and forward, down and forward again, to really make a puree of that garlic.

Now that garlic will be very strong.

Then if you wanna chop it further, again on a rocking motion like this, then you clean your knife on top of this, and continue in the same way to really have a puree of garlic.

Now the puree of garlic we do also in the south of France, in a mortar and pestle.

You make a puree like this.

This is where the garlic is the strongest in puree.

The least you cook it, the strongest it is.

If you mix that into a beef burgundy, a stew, by the time it cook, it kind of oxidize, and you have a faint taste of garlic.

But like in escargot, in the snail in France, you just mix that with butter, salt, pepper, and so forth, and mix it or put it on shrimp or whatever you want at the end.

That will be very, very strong at that point.

So the least you cook it, the stronger it is.

The more you cook it, the fainter it gets.

Another thing too, when the garlic is in that position, very, very in puree like this, if you burn it, everything will taste strong and acrid.

So be careful not to burn it.

I wanna show you that there is those, I don't really use those normally the garlic press, but it works perfectly fine.

But I'll show you the way my mother does it when she does a salad.

She put her fork directly into the bottom of the bowl for her salad and she rub that at the end of the, at the end of her fork like this and make a puree of garlic directly into the bottom of the thing this way, crushing it, you see, into a puree of garlic.

And that's a neat trick that people would do.

My aunt does that also.

Another way that my mother also cut it is to cut it into thin slice like this and then after in stick and then cutting it into tiny square.

And believe me or not, the tiny square of garlic like that don't have the same taste than the crushed garlic at all.

Quite different.

So there is all of those different way of cutting garlic, greater quantity taste, smaller quantity, if you cook it more, if you cook it less, if you serve it raw.

Garlic is a fascinating, fascinating vegetable or seasoning to use because it has so, it can be used in so many different way.

I put garlic in everything except dessert practically.

And again, sometime I may even put it in dessert.

What we want to do now is to cook this.

So I'm gonna put this, you put that into a, about 400 degree oven.

Whoop.

I have one cooking here, which is ready.

Beautiful, you want that nice and soft as this one here is, and you want to serve it flat this way.

Maybe I'll dare to turn this one upside down to look at the other side.

Here this one is nice too, but I would probably prefer to put the first side, where I had more of the herbes de Provence showing.

So maybe I remove that one, and put this one which look good here.

I like it well done, you know, as it is now soft and very fragrant.

I can smell it.

What you want to do, if you want, if you can afford it, a little more calorie, put a tiny bit of olive oil on top if you want.

It's optional.

And that would be a beautiful, really Provencal type of first course.

And now let's move to our dessert.

I have a nice dessert from Provence also.

I'm going to do a dessert with cream de cassis.

The cassis, I have it here.

This one I made.

I do it sometime at home and this is black currant syrup and we do a drink in different part of France.

I have some cassis in it.

Very known in Dijon, named after the bishop of Dijon, which is called a Kir.

And it's a little bit of cassis.

We do it with a blackberry, also syrup, or the black currant.

And I'm using here a Swiss wine, a Fendant de Valais which is very astringent and all this.

So in the Dijon, they call that a Kir.

In Leon where I come from, mm, the proportion is good,.

Don't put any ice and no lemon peel in it.

That the way it should be.

In Leon where I come from, we call it a blanc cassis, a cassis with, and there's another drink with red wine also, and with red wine, we call it a communere.

Like Communist, it's red on red, so we do it with a Beaujolais.

So what I do here, I cut the end of my strawberry and I want strawberry in there and cut them into dice.

We want to put some creme de cassis in there, a little bit of sugar.

You know, you want to maybe two tablespoon of sugar, maybe a little more creme de cassis.

And we are into wine here.

I'm using another wine from the south of France.

This one is actually from around here.

It's from the Contra Costa.

So from California, except that it's a mourvedre.

It's a type of grape which is very particular to the south of France or to their own valley.

In Bordeaux for example, which is just above Toulon, the greatest wine there are the mouvedre, which is a grape, which was unknown in this country a few years ago.

And now people are starting to use those very interesting grape from their own valley, from viognier, mourvedre, siran, marsanne, sirat, sancerre, grenache, all of those are different grape that are not used that much or were not used that much in this country, and now are getting to be used.

What you would want to do with that is to let that marinate a little bit, maybe an hour, an hour and a half.

And before you serve it in goblet, I would like to serve it in goblet like this.

You can actually use the top of your berry to do a little bit of decoration around.

Here, you know, always use the fruit that you're using.

We have another type of, different type of berry here from blueberry to raspberry.

So you could use those around also.

You can put a couple of those for black dots.

Actually, it is hard to find on the market here, but if you've had the black currant, it looks this way.

You could use that.

Of course since we are putting the cassis, so it'd be good to put the black currant in it.

There is many other type of fruit, any other type of berry that you could do with the same red wine type of mixture.

Try to use a wine which correspond to your dinner, as we have done here, except from the Swiss wine that we are serving as an aperitif here.

And I'm using it because it is very astringent and it looks very well on it.

So what I'm going to put maybe is a little piece of mint on top of that for color.

And this will be an absolutely perfect finish for our homage to Van Gogh and our dinner from Provence, the south of France.

We had a real relaxing menu today, and when I relax in the kitchen, I like to have a little aperitif.

what we call the blanc cassis in Leon or the Kir in Dijon.

So in our menu of Provence, we are coming with that desert of fruit, you know, with the strong taste of the cassis.

And today the menu that we did, that homage to Von Gogh, south of France, Arles with the daube, is really a classic menu which exemplify what we do in "Today's Gourmet."

You see, we started with the zucchini and those zucchini here with the, with the tomato in it and the garlic, a little bit of olive oil.

Those are very good roughage zucchini.

The garlic, a lot of it, I talked about garlic, it lower blood pressure, it lower cholesterol, part of the lily family.

Then we move to that daube of beef Arlesian, named after that town of Arles in Provence.

Now this is quite low in saturated fat.

In fact in that recipe, we have a third of the daily limit of your cholesterol, which is 300 milligrams.

So we have about a hundred milligram of cholesterol in it, which is quite low, and it's a very flavorful type of stew.

There is a lot of vegetable in it, and you should enjoy it without any guilt.

And with this, we have a salad.

We always have a salad in the kitchen with beautiful bread all the time.

And finally, that dessert where we are, remember, we have the creme de cassis as well as the mourvedre.

And of course to go with that, we have the real classic wine of the court Dijon, with Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and the Châteauneuf-du-Pape, this one, the Vieux Telegraphe, so called as mostly mourvedre in (indistinct) and sirat and grenache and sometimes up to 10 different type of grapes in there.

This is a very full wine, which come right there from the south of France.

I'm sure you're going to enjoy it with the food that we're going to do today.

You can have it as an aperitif, or you can have it with your meal.

We had had several type of wine today and very often, I like to mix my wine in my menu.

I really enjoyed doing that menu for you.

So relax, open a bottle of wine in the kitchen, have your friend come over, and enjoy cooking with them.

I love to do it for you.

Happy cooking.