- In full summer, I make that herb salad right out of my garden.

I take basil, parsley, arugula, tarragon, fresh chive, the flowers of the chive even, olive oil and lemon juice, put it together with salt and pepper, and toss it.

(gentle music continues) I'm Jacques Pepin.

This is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking.

Today, I'm going to do a roast of veal, just the way my aunt used to make.

I mean, I'm going to try at least.

I've never had a roast of veal as good as what she used to be when I was a kid.

And it's very simple.

Just roasted either, in a cocotte, today I'm going to do it in a pressure cooker, a piece of onion, a sprig of thyme, that's it.

Somehow, when I do it, after 50 years in the kitchen, 55 years, never taste as good.

That's what it is, woman cooking in my house, whether it was my mother, my two aunt, they both had restaurant.

The three of them had restaurant.

Now my sister-in-law has a restaurant.

My niece have restaurant.

Everyone has restaurant.

The first male to go into that business was me, and still the only one.

I have that nice roast here.

And this is one of the best roasts for me, from the shoulder, the shoulder blade, always moist and tender.

So this would be good.

The shank would be very good, too.

This happened to be the top knuckle.

The top knuckle is the muscle you have right above your kneecap here, that round muscle.

And that's nice.

Also, it's moist.

You don't want to have the top round, for example, or bottom round.

That usually is dry, even though it's more expensive than this.

With the nice beautiful pink color, the way veal should be.

And I'm going to attach it still with the twine like this to hold it into a nice shape because there is pieces coming out here.

And there is basically no fat to trim out of this.

When you use those, by the way, I'll use kitchen twine.

I mean, this is a big one.

That's what professional use.

But this is cotton, you know.

People will do that with plastic, you know, or one of those string in nylon or whatever.

Then you put it into your thing, (imitates splattering) the whole thing melt.

So be sure you use cotton, and not a very thin one.

Often, people do the very thin one.

It kind of cut the meat or cut your finger.

So that's good.

You bring that here.

You make just a regular knot here at the end.

And then after that, you do a loop this way.

Very simple, a half each.

You know, all the people who have a boat know that.

Okay, you do this.

You again bring it wherever you want.

Again, you do the same loop here.

And when you do the loop, take that piece and grab it very thin, you know, very tightly toward the table where you want it.

And after you pull on this, and you ease it in with this, you know, you do that two or three time.

This is very, very good for your Christmas package, too, you know, so it's a good technique.

So here it is when it's finished on one side.

You roll that very gently.

Bring it on the other side.

Go underneath to duplicate the look from the top to the bottom, I mean from one side to the other.

When you're at the end again, you roll it, and then attach it at the end.

And now you have a perfect package.

So very often, you'll do that with veal, with chicken for that matter, when you bone out a chicken.

Because basically what happen is that this again is pretty solid, but sometime you have pieces of meat, wrap them together, even a stuffing inside, you have a nice roll, and you can attach it in this manner.

Okay, we're gonna put a piece of butter in there, nice piece of butter and a little dash of oil.

The oil, because I don't want the butter to burn.

Salt and pepper on top of this.

Always salt and paper on each side.

Freshly ground paper here, black paper.

Okay, and that's basically it.

And you wanna brown that for about 8, 10 minute.

You have a nice crystallization of the juice.

That make the difference, too.

Remember, when you do a stock, you do a white stock or a brown stock.

What is the difference?

In one of them, you brown the bone.

In the other one, you don't.

The same difference between a boiled chicken and a roast chicken, different intensity of flavor.

So here you want crystallization, browning all over so that you have beautiful juice, and the taste of the meat will be different.

Okay, so now this looks a bit wide, but it will shrink.

It will shrink.

So roll it into the butter.

Okay, and now let it brown for about seven, eight minute altogether, you know, four, five minute, you turn it and so forth.

While it's browning, I am going to do a very good dessert for you today, one of my type of dessert, where I use everything that I have left over.

I do that in restaurant, too, doing consulting work for restaurant.

And I have a piece of a bagel here, well, raisin bagel.

I have half a croissant here.

A bit stale, but it's good.

You know, Danish, this is Danish, too, whenever I go to the bakery, or the restaurant in the morning, and pick up all of that to do dessert with it.

So here I need about four cup, four cup of whatever you have left over.

I think I'll take this because this is like a scone.

That's very good.

Maybe the piece of Danish would be nice, too.

Okay.

I have there about three cup, two cup.

I had a restaurant in New York called La Potagerie.

That was back in 1970, a long time.

And we used to do that big Apple Brown Betty.

And that's what I would buy, tray of sliced apple.

But then we would do a kind of a lean brioche, you know, a kind of bread, and this was the type of mixture that we would do.

That's when I get the idea.

But in restaurant, very often, there is a great deal of leftover, and that's what you should take advantage of it.

That's how your food cost get better.

Otherwise, you get fired anyway.

So here is, I have this in there, about 1/3 of a cup of raisins.

Beautiful raisins, here we can put them, dark raisins, as well as this, a little bit of cinnamon.

I have melted butter, couple of tablespoon.

And I have pear here.

And I'm going to use about a cup.

Well, maybe 3/4 of a cup to a cup of the juice from the pear.

And the pear, I'll slice coarsely into pieces.

This is not very important there because hopefully they're going to kind of melt.

When I say melt, you know, I mean they're going to get very soft in the mixture.

Here.

Okay.

I'll bring that on this side, bring that here.

And that's it.

So you can see with that mixture, different type of fruit, bread, croissant, any of this.

I smell my roast here.

I think it's browning a bit fast.

I'm gonna check it out.

Yep, it needs to be turned.

Grab it by the string here, and turn it over.

There, it's beautiful on this side.

And I'm going to go finish my dessert here.

So here we are.

I want to pile that up.

And you wanna put that in the oven.

We used to serve that La Potagerie with hot sauce.

I was doing a hot sauce with butter and powdered sugar, a little bit of cognac and vanilla.

And we would take like a little scoop of this, and we would serve that warm, also with an ice cream scoop, and that bit of hot butter on top, or hot sauce.

So this goes into the oven, 400 degree.

About 40, 50 minute, take a look at it.

It can go up to an hour, too.

That's fine.

Okay, my roast is doing well.

Here, I'm going to lower that heat.

Roast it on the other side also.

Okay.

And in that simple roast, I'm putting onion, just cut coarsely.

Here.

A nice spring of fresh thyme.

And that's basically it.

So that roast of veal would probably cook, after it's brown like that, I would say an hour, an hour and a half, or something like that in a cocotte, you know, like in a cast iron cocotte, cooking it slowly.

We do the same thing with the pressure cooker in like 30 minute at the most.

My sister-in-law always use those type of dishes when she came out of work, when she work in Paris.

She took the train in Saint-Nazaire, get there, get her bread, a little roast, get home, put that to roast, before she took her coat off, and then make her drink and all that.

By the time, half an hour later, it was ready to eat.

Now what I have to do here, you see there is a gauge here, and that gauge will go up to the third red line and that maximum pressure.

Don't worry about it.

If it goes above that, the pressure will come out the safety valve so you cannot really explode or something happen.

So you know when it goes up, and the pressure has reached, then you lower the heat, and then time your roast.

And here, with our roast goes well with veal, for me, we're going to do endive, you know.

And now I have a very simple way of doing endive, too.

I have done endive many, many time in my life.

But this one here, I'm not cooking it the conventional way.

The conventional way is usually to put it with a little bit of lemon juice, a dash of sugar, a dash of salt, a little piece of butter, and a little bit of water in the bottom.

And as it cook, you put a plate on top of it as it cooked, the weight, take it down, and it cook in that liquid.

That's how we do it in professional kitchen.

And what happen is that when you have it in that liquid, you can keep it for five days in the refrigerator, you know, in that liquid, and when you need it, you grab one of those cooked endive from the liquid and saute it in a skillet and use it in one way or the other.

So those endive are firm.

And you can see, this one is slightly greenish at the end.

This is what we call Belgian endive.

However, if you go to Belgium, it's not going to be called endive.

It's called chicon, C-H-I-C-O-N, for chicory, because it come from chicory, you know.

So it's called chicon.

And on the other hand, what we call chicory, it's called endive there.

It's confusing, okay.

So here we are.

I'm putting this directly in there.

Four, five endive here, bit of salt on top of it.

And a little bit of sugar, which are going to give me some crystallization, you know.

You wanna cook that on low heat.

You want to cover it.

Moisture is going to come out of it and cook them.

And I can see that my thing is releasing thing here.

It's starting going up, you know.

So a few more minute, when it reach the proper temperature, lower your heat to very low, and your endive should cook very low, too.

So while this is cooking gently, this is slow, gentle cooking, I'm going to do a first course with tomato, tomato and onion and basil and the classic combination.

But I'm going to do it a little bit different.

I have those nice tomato here, which are nice and ripe.

First I want to take (speaks in foreign language), you know, out of it.

Maybe I'll have two tomato on this.

Okay.

And onion.

And fresh mozzarella here, it's nice and firm.

That's how I like it.

So what you do, all you want to do is to cut your tomato to about here.

What we're going to do is like a fan, you know.

So this is about every half inch.

I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, slice.

So I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 inside.

That's what we're gonna put inside.

2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 with this one.

So let's see whether it fits.

(pan sizzling) I can hear my endive.

I think they're going a little too fast here.

Yep, I'm going to lower the heat.

And I can even see if they are starting browning.

See, they are starting browning.

Now, you wanna go slow because those don't dive are hard, and I want them very soft.

(steam hissing) Now, you can hear my pressure cooker here, and I'm at the third line.

So at that point, I have to lower the heat to low, maybe even to simmer.

And within a minute or so, you see the noise just stopped.

Now the pressure is just fine.

So it should stay now at that temperature.

Okay, back to the tomato.

Want to open my tomato there.

This is really an assemblage, you know.

It's always interesting, you know, to do... You have a classic combination.

I mean, what is more classic than basil, tomato, and mozzarella, but then, sometime, you think in presenting it in another way, you know.

That's the beauty of what we do in the kitchen, you know.

It's already the same thing that we recycle in one way or the other.

So here is one here.

I'm gonna do two.

And often, you have to do that in a restaurant business, you know, to keep the people interested.

Well, you do the same thing, but you do it slightly differently, slightly better.

You can always do something better.

And often, that's what I tell young chef, you know.

It's not a question of putting more things on the plate.

It's a question of working in depth to get better things.

So you have two.

You get the gist of the idea.

Bring our tomato here.

Now put a bit of a salt and pepper on top of it.

Enough salt because it has to go in between, and you really want this to be salted, pepper.

And then the red onion, we can have some red onion.

Maybe I'll cut it very thin.

Very thin like this, to put it around.

That's it.

I mean, you can put your onion the way you want.

You could have little slice of onion also.

And I think a few leaves of basil here and there, you know, to put.

Maybe that's a bit too big.

We cannot always add more basil on the side.

I'll put some basil here.

I like herb in the garden.

I get crazy in summer.

Simple salad, you see, if you give people in a restaurant half a tomato with a piece of mozzarella, a bit of olive oil on top, you charge five, six bucks.

If you do it this way, you can charge 12 bucks at least, you know.

So everything is relative.

I have a nice, very nice, I have sherry vinegar here.

Any type of vinegar would be fine.

And of course, you want a very good olive oil there.

That's when you really use your extra virgin olive oil, high quality, because you don't cook it.

You wanna be generous with it.

And this is it.

This is a nice salad.

Let us check on my endive.

Oh, they're beautiful.

See, now they're going slowly, just the way they should go.

Good.

Okay.

This is time to depressurize.

If you're nervous, now my... I can smell right through that pot that that roast is finished.

So of course, shut off the heat.

And there are different pressure cooker.

If you wanted to open it, you could not open it with the pressure inside.

So this one, you just apply on the top like this.

And you keep it down until it don't make any noise anymore.

This is it.

I think it's about it, like this.

You can see that that thing first will stay down, and it will open.

Yeah, it opened very easily.

Here is our roast here.

I can test it, and I know it's nice and tender here for our roast of veal.

Here we do.

Right there.

And you can see the amount of juice that I have in there, even though I didn't put any liquid.

I didn't put wine.

I didn't put water.

I didn't put it, so this is the real juice of the veal.

Don't forget to take the string out.

And actually, you know, the piece of meat, as I said, that we had was pretty compact.

Even if I had not put a piece of string, it would have been okay.

Good.

Now this is pretty, pretty hot, but... See, the veal should not be red.

It should be just about like this.

I can taste a little piece here at the end.

Mm, good.

Put the veal inside.

And I would put homemade, all of the juice, juice and stuck onion, all that around here.

Maybe be a little piece of parsley there just for color.

That's it, homemade roast of veal.

And now let's check out the endive.

See those endive have a beautiful caramelized color here.

I'm gonna put them in that bowl, in that plate.

Just look around.

This is a bit burnt, so show the other side.

All right.

There's a little bit of the juice here also.

So here we are with this, the endive.

(gentle music) I'm gonna serve even a little bit of that Brown Betty here, which look really nice and scrumptious.

Bit of that sour cream on top.

A glass of wine.

Even classic dishes can be done the easy way.

Enjoy it, and I hope you do it for your family and friend.

Happy cooking.