- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

You may think that healthy eating a bit are only a modern concern.

There is a technique for low-calorie cooking that is centuries old, going way back to ancient China.

I'm talking about steaming.

Today's menu is a complete low-calorie steamed dinner.

There is a delicious salmon patty, served with a cucumber sauce, surrounded by tangy broccoli and potatoes.

My friend, Martin Yan, will stop by to do his own steamed dinner, including Chinese broccoli and exotic sausage.

And we finish with poached orange soaked in Grand Marnier.

So, start your water boiling.

We are steaming on "Today's Gourmet."

(light jazzy music) (light jazzy music continues) I am going to cook a great meal today for you.

I'm going to cook a steamed dinner under 600 calories.

Altogether, we're going to have potato, broccoli with an olive oil sauce and a piroshki, which is a type of large dumpling of fresh salmon in a patty and a orange dessert.

Terrific.

Now, this is a great meal to do because you cook it in stack in a steamer.

Great, it's nutritious.

And what you have to do is to cook it first the potato, second the broccoli, and third the salmon.

And if you do it the right way, everything comes to the table at the same moment.

So we start with the potato.

We have those round potato here.

We call that in French very often fish potato or pomme poisson.

Why?

Because they are served usually with fish and we cut them, what I'm doing here, I peel them to make them round.

Now, this happens to be a small, round potato.

Often, we use big potato this way and just cut them in squares, and, again, trim them to get the same effect, you know?

No one knows by the time you're finished, whether they were small or big potato, all the pieces are the same size, so they cook in the same amount of time.

Usually, however, I peel the potato and use those trimmings for soup.

But this is the first thing that we do.

Potato are very good for you, high in potassium, and it's about 20 calories per ounces.

So it's not much providing, you don't cover them with butter, which we don't do.

So here we have those three steamers.

I mean, a three-decker, and we start with the potato.

We put directly on the floor of the steamer to cook so the steam can come in between.

Wash the potato for the starch, we put that to cook.

And of course this is the longest part of the meal.

This is going to take about 23, 25 minutes for the potato to cook.

And during that time, the second dish, broccoli, we're going to do.

We have broccoli here.

Nice and green, tight head, you know, and this is what I want to show you.

Those have been cut.

Often, when I get broccoli, I can cut them into little florets if you want.

You know, like this, depends on the time of the year.

Sometimes that part of the broccoli is tough, so what you do, you peel it off.

Sometime it peel off like that or you take it off because it's kind of tough here.

But if you peel it off, frankly, personally, this is the part that I like the best, the stem.

You know after you peel it off, it's like the artichoke bottom, you know?

Unless you peel it off, it's tough.

But otherwise this is very good, tender and crunchy.

Notice, also, that those are tight head.

You know, you want it very tight head like this.

The broccoli is a great vegetable for nutrition, it's very high in vitamin A and vitamin C. So sometimes, you know, do good for yourself and eat a lot of green vegetables.

So, those are about peeled enough.

So I am going to put them in the second layer of my steamer.

The potato should be cooking a bit longer now, but for the sake of our show, we're going to do it this way.

Put them around here.

Remember, the broccoli will take about 10, 11 minutes to cook this way, the potato 26.

So, you know, just calculate between about 10 minutes.

Then here goes the second layer of our dinner.

So you can see in addition to that, you save on cleaning.

I think everything is cooked in the same pot.

Everything is served on the same plate.

This is an easy meal.

So we're going to do a little sauce for it.

And the sauce is made of lemon juice that I have here with a bit of Tabasco.

I like Tabasco in it, maybe a dash of salt on top of this, and some olive oil, you know, a bit of olive oil.

You stir it together, and here you have a very simple sauce we use to serve broccoli with hollandaise, things like that.

And now we are putting a little bit of olive oil with different flavoring, and that's quite good too.

Then when the sauce is made, we can get to our main dishes, which is really the salmon patty.

You know, the piroshki of salmon.

And what we have for it is about 14 ounces of salmon.

Yeah, you would need to buy about a pound of salmon because you want to trim it completely.

And, you know, if you chop your salmon in the food processor, it's fine, but I tell you it is much better when you coarsely chop it this way by hand, so that it is not mushy, you know?

It is still in pieces like this.

Much better texture for your piroshki.

This can be done ahead a little bit.

What you do next, I have mushroom, I have onion here, I have some parsley, I have some chive, I have an egg and I have some chicken stock.

So what you do, you want to cook this.

You put your onion in a little skillet with a little bit of water and a dash of oil.

What happens is that if you put that directly into oil, you fry your onion, and for that recipe, I'd like to have the onion transparent, but really not brown.

And this is a technique, a classic technique that you use, you put a little bit of oil or butter, in our case we put oil, in the skillet, and in addition, a little bit of water.

You don't even have to look at it, you put it on the stove, you let it cook three, four, five minutes, and within three, four, five minutes you're going to hear it, the onions are sizzling in the skillet.

If the onion are sizzling, it means the water has evaporated.

So you use the water strictly as a vehicle along the way.

It evaporates and then you are down again to the onion and oil, but at that point the onions are transparent, beautiful without browning.

It's a very good technique which is used very often in professional kitchens and at home.

What I do here now, I have some of those onions and mushroom ready.

So I will add that directly to my salmon patty here.

And we put an egg white in there.

This way.

The egg white is a protein of course, give you a bit of binding agent.

Remember that the salmon itself has a lot of protein, also.

When the salmon's cooked, you know, that white juice which comes out of it coagulating, it is like egg white.

It's basically the protein in the salmon.

So it has some by itself, but we add a bit more.

We put some chives in it for color and a little bit of chicken stock.

Not much, about two, three tablespoons to extend it and give it moisture.

And we will bind that lightly with bread, fresh bread crumbs, you know?

It is important to use fresh bread crumbs.

Remember that your onion is very high, or your salmon is very high in Omega-3.

It's one of those fatty fish, you know, that is recommended by doctors now to lower your cholesterol, so it's good.

We put fresh bread crumbs in it.

I have two slices of bread here, which I put in there.

Now, the fresh bread crumbs is nice.

I like to use it much better than the dry bread crumbs.

It's fluffy, it's nice.

You see, two slice of bread like that will give me like a cup of bread crumbs.

If I take those two slices of bread and make croutons with it, put it in the oven, they will dry, then I do bread crumbs with it.

I'll have about four, five tablespoons.

So fresh bread crumbs and dried bread crumbs is like day and night, quite different.

(grinder whirring) And of course with those small miracle machine there, it's done in seconds, you know?

So there, oh, yes, two slices I can put together.

And that's going to be to bind our salmon mixture.

Hmm, looks good.

You know, the salmon very often is used raw like this, also when you do different type of gravlax and so forth.

But I like to do that steamed salmon.

It's a good recipe.

So, what we are going to do now is to mold it into a patty.

This way, about four patties.

I mean our recipe is for four, so that's quite large as you can see.

You present it right in there.

It has a nice color, the red of the salmon of course and some of the herb in it.

If you do that ahead and you can do that ahead, there is no problem at all, but if you do it more than a day ahead, don't put mushroom in it.

The mushroom may bleed in your salmon a little bit, you know?

And so it's better to put it at the end, mix it at the end.

We have four large patties here.

You know that could be sauteed of course, but the technique of sauteing in a skillet, of course you have to use some fat and it's going to be different than your steamed fish here.

And now we want to do a sauce for this, and I have to rinse my hands.

And we want to do a sauce that often my wife does at home, which is done with cucumber.

And it is really a very easy sauce to make and it's very flavorful.

And it has garlic in it, a bit of chive.

I have cucumber here, chopped cucumber, you know, that we put in there.

Nicely chopped.

A bit of chives, have a second to chop the chives.

I mean, those are scallions rather, but sometimes I put chive or onion.

Remember it's all basically the same family.

We put it so it's crunchy, it has nice color.

Green vegetable, you know, raw like this, it's good for you.

Garlic, we'll put a clove of garlic in there, crush it, get the juice out of it.

(knife chopping) Chop it very fine.

(knife chopping) Chopped garlic.

We have some red pepper.

You can even have some hot one.

I'm going to put a little bit of Tabasco in there.

I like it nice and, you know, peppery.

A bit of sugar.

My wife always put sugar in it with water, simple water and vinegar.

A dash of salt, you know, also.

Put a dash of salt and vinegar, white distilled vinegar, you can put another type of vinegar, actually rice vinegar, you know, it's very mild and quite good for that.

But here I have a colorful sauce.

That is going to go on top of our patty later on and really flavor... Hmm, it's nice and acid, and sweet, you know?

Now we put our fish in the steamer.

Whoop!

You see this is our second layer fully cooking well.

So third layer, steaming that.

And even though that plate go almost to the edge, providing you have about half-inch, which I have around here, the steam will go and cook it perfectly fine is the way we do it at home.

So the whole menu is there that I have done.

I have done a sauce for the salmon, a sauce for the broccoli, and now the dessert.

We have to do the dessert now.

And we have a very simple dessert of poached orange.

You know that it's a refreshing type of thing.

Your orange are very high in vitamin C and that dessert is about 125 calorie with the sugar and so forth.

So, it is a relatively simple dessert.

Try to use big navel orange like this.

And what you do, you do a strip with a vegetable peeler around it like this.

You see a strip like that, what you do, and try to do, is to get as much as possibly you can from the essential oil that is the surface of the skin.

That's where all the smell and the aroma of the orange, or a great deal of it, rather than use that white pith underneath which tend to be bitter.

So we do this, and that we do a julienne with it.

And julienne of course refers to a technique of cutting things in little strip.

So you put two or three things together this way, pile them up, and with a long knife, you cut it into a julienne.

(knife chopping) You know, even if you don't go as fast as I go, it really doesn't matter whether you go slowly or fast.

The result is the result, you know?

In a kitchen, of course, in a professional kitchen, we do have to go fast because there is a lot of people to serve for lunch.

I cannot really serve that by itself now because that would get bitter.

So what you do out of the two oranges, you put that in two cups of water, bring it to a boil, boil it strong, pour it into a colander, and wash it under cold water.

That will blanche it, take the bitterness out of it.

Then you continue the recipe.

Just let's pretend that those have been blanched already.

So now that same orange, I am cutting the second part of the skin, and notice that I move my hand again in a jigsaw fashion, cutting around the orange without crushing it, you know, without extracting the juice, to get the long... Now my orange here are seedless.

I'll cut it in half.

This, we put directly in there.

We put about half a cup of water with our two oranges, a bit of sugar in there, and we cook that for about five minutes.

And I have some which are cooked right here.

You know, it doesn't really take long.

And I'm going to present them for you on that plate.

The four halves of the orange, they are soft like this.

They are barely poached, you know, they're still a bit firm.

And on top of it I will have the julienne of orange, which is partially caramelized.

I love to put on top of it if you want, a little bit of Grand Marnier, which is a orange liquer, maybe a little sprig of mint in it.

And here is a beautiful, light dessert for our steamed dinner.

(light piano music) My steamed dinner was real quick today, a few minutes and it's over, so I have plenty of time.

I decided I'm going to invite a friend for dinner.

In fact, I invited Martin Yan.

Every time I use a bamboo steamer, I think of it.

He knows more about bamboo than anyone in the world.

How are you, Martin?

- You invite me for dinner, I bring my own dinner.

We're gonna share the dinner today.

So what you been cooking?

- Look what I did with my steamer.

Okay, I have a piroshki of salmon here.

- That looks marvelous.

- I have broccoli and I have potato.

Whole thing is ready to eat.

- Very light, very delicious.

- Yes.

What are you going to do with your bamboo?

- Let me check.

I have this for the past two days.

I gotta check and figure out exactly what I have here.

Here I have some chicken, mushroom, shiitake mushroom, the Chinese call xianggu!

And then I have some extra lean pork sausage and some green onion and ginger.

And this is the main course.

And then I also have some leftover rice.

I'm gonna steam your buns.

This is your bun, this is my bun.

- Looks good.

- We are gonna steam this leftover rice and also have some Chinese broccoli.

This is one of my favorite.

And I know that you also like this, too.

So this is what I'm gonna do.

To save time, what I'm gonna do is we put this in the wok over boiling water first.

- That's my recipe!

- The recipe?

- You're stealing my recipe, - The simple recipe.

Everybody can do it.

- Good.

- In the meantime, we'll get this ready.

Here, I would like to ask you to do me a favor and do some julienne ginger and green onion, and also slice this.

I'm gonna slice this and also remove the fat because I want to remove the fat and the- - You need the chicken?

- In the meantime, also, oh, do me a favor, also, Jacques, we have to remove the stem.

- The stem is tough, you're right.

- The stem is no good, we'll remove the stem.

This has been soaked for about half an hour.

These are black mushrooms.

Now, to save time, and, also, we have a lot of people in the studio, so we're quickly use my boning knife to quickly get the chicken breast out.

One, two, three.

Four.

- It hurts.

- Five.

And then this one, I'm gonna show everybody how easy it is to remove the meat out of this.

I'm gonna save this and use this.

The rest we'll save it for tomorrow's dinner, And then we'll cut it up, trim the fat, remove these.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10!

Set it aside.

Put it over here.

And then we will... We're done.

- I'm not touching anything.

- I am done.

And then we're gonna put all of this together.

The big one, let's cut it in quarter, for the small one, we put them all together.

In the meantime, this is a extra-lean pork sausage.

Cut at an angle like this.

Cut it up, cut it up, cut it up.

There's no fat, you see very little fat.

- This is cooked already, right?

- No, this is not cooked.

This is raw.

- Oh, it's dry.

- And then we'll mix them all up like this, and, also, all I have to do is mix them all up, okay?

Mix them all up and put some ginger and a tiny bit of green onion.

And then put all the seasoning.

This is all seasoning.

- What do you have here?

- Right here.

I have some soya sauce, Mix it, some corn starch, some dry sherry or any wine, left over white wine.

A few drops of sesame seed oil.

And then I mix it about, mix them all up.

Mix them all up.

Okay, very easy.

- I'll do the cleaning for you.

- Very easy.

Feels good.

It already smells... Look at this, it's already nice and- - Mm, that is good.

- Good.

- Do you need that?

- Oh, we don't need that because- - You don't need it.

- It's good enough for both of us.

- Yes.

- Enough.

And then we put all of these over here, we will steam it.

It doesn't take too long to steam at all.

This is light cooking, okay?

That's amazing.

You know, Chinese have been cooking- - I'm going to eat this.

- Cooking light for- - You don't put the juice on top?

- Oh, yeah, you can use the juice.

And then all we have to do is put this right on top, right here- - On top of the broccoli.

- All right.

And then you cover this up and let it steam.

In the meantime, I wanna show everybody, when you go to a Chinese market, you have different kinds of sausage that you can buy, okay?

Look at this.

There is regular pork sausage.

Look at this.

You can see.

- Quite fatty.

- [Martin] A lot of fat.

This regular pork sausage.

This lean, extra-lean pork sausage.

- [Jacques] It's still pork, there is only pork in it?

- Look at this, this is ridiculous.

- Yes.

- This extra-lean pork sausage and then also if you want to make the dish look a little bit darker, you can use a little bit dark soya sauce.

This is dark soya sauce, okay?

And then these are the dry shiitake mushrooms, xianggu!

- Those are nice.

- Oh, this is nice.

- Nicer than what we get here.

- These are really good looking ones.

And then you can also get ugly ones like this.

This is really ugly.

- But those are imported, right?

- This is imported from Asia.

So, some of them from Japan, some from China.

- Yes.

- They're very expensive.

Now, this is what makes it interesting.

Now, a lot of people probably have never seen this before.

Average broccoli, you basically eat the floret and the stem, the leaf, not too many people eat the leaf.

But in Chinese, when they eat the Chinese broccoli, this is a lot of leaf, like this.

Look at this.

A lot of leaf.

- It's like the Italian- - Oh, right.

- Broccoli wrap that we use.

- When you go to Chinese restaurant, what they normally do is- - You eat the flowers also.

- You eat the whole thing.

Normally what they do is they trim this off and they serve this.

- They don't serve that?

- They don't serve that.

- They're really wasteful.

- Oh no, no, no.

Because this way we save it for tomorrow.

Look at this, we save it.

- All right, put it in your pocket.

- And then you steam it.

So what we have to do now, it doesn't- - What do you do with this one?

- This one, we save it for tomorrow too.

- You wanna put this on top here?

- We put this on top here, can you imagine?

Now, this is almost done.

- Already?

- Almost done.

But why we're doing this is a lot of people, just in case they don't have a bamboo steamer, they can use this two pairs of chopsticks.

Tic-tac-toe, look at this.

Ti-tac-toe.

- Oh, yes.

- Put it on top of the wok over boiling water.

They can put whatever they want to steam.

Put it right on top, they can steam it.

And, of course, steamer come with different size, okay?

Big size, and they also have steamer about this size.

This for smaller family.

If you are on a diet, they have diet steamer.

This big, look at this.

This is diet steamer.

- It is small.

You can cook as many as you want and only have about maybe 15 calories.

- Do you think this is cooked?

- I think this might be done now, because when this is done, you make sure you pick... Wow!

- The whole thing up.

- Pick this up.

And I wanna show you one.

- And I'll take... Wow!

- Two.

Now look at this.

We have to put this right here.

Look at how beautiful.

- Beautiful!

Look at that.

- And we'll pick this up.

- [Jacques] And this is a neat thing to put, you know?

- Neat thing.

- Actually, you know, this looks better than my food.

I think that's what I'm going to eat tonight.

Looks too good, so let's go to eat in the dining room.

- Now I'm ready.

- Yes.

- Are you ready?

- I'm ready too.

- This is a wonderful dish.

We just use a bamboo steamer to cook the chicken with shiitake mushrooms and extra-lean pork sausage with some Chinese broccoli.

And sometimes some Chinese chefs also put a tiny bit of oyster sauce to serve with the broccoli.

This is how they serve it.

Very easy to do.

- It looks great.

Let me tell you what I have in there.

I have the chopped salmon and broccoli potato.

I have a sauce made of cucumber and so forth.

And the whole meal is, like, under 600 calories.

- Wow, that's great.

- That's low for French cooking.

- For French cooking- - You don't have to lose weight.

- You use potato for carbohydrate and starch, and in China we serve rice, a lot of rice.

And we also sometimes in Northern China, we serve steamed buns.

- Yeah, I love those.

- [Martin] This is marvelous and substantial.

- I'd like to taste your food though.

- Oh, definitely.

In fact, we're supposed to share the dinner, so we will exchange dinner and nobody, I'm quite sure you know, nobody takes cooking more serious than the Chinese do, except the French.

- Of course.

- In French they have French designer kitchen stuff in the kitchen and everything makes the chef look better than the food.

This is a French designed chopstick.

- That's for me?

Okay.

- And this is for you, and this is for me, fork and knife, of course.

- And now it's time to taste.

- And the good thing about Chinese cooking, using steam technique, and, of course, you can use the bamboo to steam everything, is when you cook, you use minimal amount of oil.

You don't even have to add any extra oil.

And not only that, every single thing is cooked in its own juice.

So it's very wonderful to retain its flavor, color, texture.

So it's wonderful, let's go for it, let's taste.

- Okay.

- And make sure, - And do you serve wine with this?

- It's wonderful to go with wine because very light, very delicate.

Any white wine would do.

And this seems to be marvelous.

- Oh, you're a wine connoisseur too, Martin, mm.

Well, this is a Sauvignon Blanc from Napa Valley.

- This goes really well with a variety of Chinese dishes.

- Well, I enjoyed making that meal, but I enjoy even more eating yours, you know?

So I hope you enjoyed my guest today, Martin.

I'm glad you came.

- Like I always say, (speaking Chinese).

- And happy cooking, that's the translation.