- Here is a nice presentation for a great first school salad.

Take a couple of slice of ham, a beautiful glass like this.

You buy that at the super market, you know.

Olive, feta cheese, marinated mushroom, put a bit of olive oil in there, ground pepper, you can even put a little bit of grain inside.

I have a bit of water press and that's it.

You have your salad that you will present right in the center of your ham.

Delicious and beautiful.

(relaxed music) I'm Jacques Pépin, and this is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking.

(relaxed music) You know, very often when I do a menu, I start with eggs.

It is not conventional in America, but in Europe, in France, certainly we do start menu, even special dinner, with eggs.

Sometimes with truffle, sometimes we use scrambled eggs to stuff trout with, it's very good.

And when you break your eggs, I like to break it on something flat, so that your eggs just have a little indentation, you put your thumbs in it and you open it.

That instead of doing it on something sharp like this, when you do it like that, the shell goes into the egg, often break the egg yolk and certainly bring bacteria into the eggs.

So that's the right way of doing it.

We are going to do our eggs with bacon, scallion, and serve it with a tomato, a can of tomato sauce, which is a tomato au jus really.

And I have three slice of bacon here.

Then I'm going to put to cook directly into that no-stick pan there, that's good.

It's gonna take a few minutes to cook.

Now with this, we're going to do au jus, a tomato au jus.

That is a fresh juice of tomato.

and I'm going to put it directly right through the food mill.

And the reason I put it through the food mill is that if I were to put it through the blender or food processor, the skin and certainly the seeds stay in.

So I do it directly in the food mill.

However, you have to be careful to have a nice tomato.

I mean this one is very ripe.

That's what I want, a ripe tomato.

Because if my tomato is really hard then I'm going to have a hard time putting it right through the food mill.

So here it is, I cut it into pieces like this, right into there.

You know that jus, we call a jus tomato, a fresh, it a nice, very fresh type of tomato sauce, you know, which is uncooked.

And you serve like this, you can serve it directly on the on egg that I'm doing or even on fish.

Then we're going to put it through.

And it takes a couple of second to do this.

What you should have left is only the skin.

The skin and the seed inside.

So I have a fresh puree of tomato here.

My bacon is cooking nicely and when you can see the bacon like this, it will of course render some fat.

Another way of doing the bacon, which I learned from my wife, is to do it in the microwave oven.

And she put it flat on the special tray with paper towel on top, a couple of layer of paper towel, just the weight of the paper towel keep that slice of bacon very dry and flat, you know?

And then the fat goes in between.

This is a nice way of doing it too.

You can do it this way and crumble your bacon on top of your eggs later.

That's a nice way of doing bacon.

So here, inside I'm going to put some olive oil to create my sauce.

The olive oil will emulsify very nicely in there.

Salt and freshly-ground pepper in there.

Here we are, takes a few seconds and the sauce is ready.

Now we'll put scallion in our, if you feel that you have a little too much fat, then you can always remove a little bit of it depending on your bacon.

And you decide I want to remove a little bit of the fat that I'm doing here, then that's fine.

We are doing it this way.

Next, the scallion.

I have three scallion here, that may be a bit too much, it depend on your size.

You know, sometime when I do recipe very often I put cup, you know, half a cup of this, third of a cup of this, which I think is more accurate than the number.

'cause sometime I've had a scallion for example, a whole bunch of scallion which is usually six scallion and I have less scallion than here with three, it will depend on your size, you know?

Maybe I won't put in all of it.

That should be enough.

So here it is.

I have my eggs, pepper in the eggs again, salt, and that's it.

Break your egg yolk this way, and then you beat them.

You know, this is a dish that we often sever lukewarm, you know?

Sometimes with a puree of wild mushroom underneath.

Very good too.

I have eight eggs here, it's plenty for four people, you know?

I think my bacon are cooked enough.

So here goes the eggs.

Of course, you would want to do that, you can prepare everything ahead, do that at the last moment.

Those whisk are really good for that.

Those are Teflon-coated whisk and if you use the type of pan that I have here and you don't want to damage your skillet, instead of using a regular whisk, you can use this, you know, and this is really nice.

And they're available all over now.

Now, what we used to do, here I'm going to transfer the eggs to another bowl.

But often we used to keep a little bit of milk or a little bit of cream if you want, and put it at the end to stop the cooking of the egg so that they don't get too dry or too cooked at the end.

And here as you see those eggs are still quite soft.

I'm removing them from the heat because there is still residual heat, a lot of heat left into my pan.

And I'm going to let them cool off, maybe a bit more.

You know, it depend also the way you like your eggs.

I like my eggs slightly wet in the center so this should be about fine.

I'm gonna put that into a bowl.

So this, as I say, you can even do a little bit ahead if you decide to have your egg the way like them, lukewarm.

So here it is.

Okay, now we're ready to finish the dish.

I'm gonna season my eggs too with some cheese.

I mean you can use Parmesan cheese, again, one of my favorite here is Emmenthal cheese.

You know that I add to it when the eggs are still a bit warm so the cheese get quite soft in the center of it.

For a nice presentation, I can use one of those things, this is a kind of a tuna or one of those little container.

I mean there is different thing you can buy on the market like that to use.

And if you don't do it, you know you can put directly your eggs in the middle of it and it'll be just nice as well.

Maybe not quite as neat as this, but quite well too.

We have our eggs, and then we want to finish up with our special coulis.

You see my coulis and sometime it happen, get thicker here.

So what you do there, put a little bit of water in it.

You can put a dash of water.

I have enough oil, I could put oil too, put a dash of water to get it to that consistency so that I can put that all around my eggs.

I'm gonna put a bit of chive on top of this.

You know, you can chop it or maybe just take the end of the chive and put it in there like this.

This is architectural cooking, way up, and this is our first course.

(relaxed music) Very light and delicate.

And then what I wanted to do is to cook a cauliflowers for you.

I love cauliflowers.

Cauliflowers is one of the best vegetable that you can have.

And I think it was Mark Twain who said that the cauliflowers is a cabbage with an education, you know?

So here is our cabbage with an education here, we cut it into what we call the flower head.

So you cut all around and cut little flower.

Now if I had a soup I would use this too.

In fact, you know, even if it's a young cauliflower like this one, I can slice it and use that in there too.

In the oldest one that tend to be tough.

So I have boiling salted water here, that's going to go right into it.

And this will boil covered about six, seven minute depending on the size of your flower head.

You want it tender, not mushy, but tender.

While the cauliflowers is cooking, we're gonna start on the fish.

Striped bass, I'm going to grill striped bass.

I get beautiful striped bass in Long Island.

I go fishing for wild striped bass and I tell you the wild striped bass is so firm, it's incredible.

But the farm striped bass is good too, not as good as the the wild one, but still quite good, and available in basically all markets.

What you want is fresh fish, more importantly than anything else.

A little bit of oil on top.

Lightly, this we have removed the skin, but you can see that under the skin there is still a layer of fat.

The blacker tissue right here, that's under the skin, and that's fatty tissue more than the the part which is again the bone.

So you start on the fatty tissue here on this side.

And those are relatively thick.

So yeah, about at least one inch thick.

So that will take a couple of minutes on each side to cook.

During that time we're gonna go back to see where our cauliflowers are at.

The cauliflowers are cooked.

Now I'm gonna drain them.

Here we are.

I like cauliflowers better than broccoli, and I like broccoli a lot.

So, here.

And that directly we gotta put scallion in there, season, You could have chives or other herb from the garden.

In the summer, usually I go to the garden, pick up herb sometime very indiscriminately and start putting that in any of the dish that we are doing at the house.

Sometime I do a salad of herbs that I call a salad Sante.

You know, I get bunch of herbs which I put together and a bit of olive oil on top, that's it.

So here what we have is a dark sesame oil, you know, type of sesame oil, which is done in Asian market and that usually done with roasted sesame seed.

That's what it's dark, like when you roast coffee, the more it's roasted, like Italian coffee, you know, it's stronger.

So if it's roasted like that, the oil is going to be stronger.

Salt on top of it.

Again pepper.

My salad look good this way I could toss it a little bit and it'll marinate a little bit like that with the juice.

So that's going to be nice.

Of course I mess up the side of my bowl now, but it's okay.

So we bring the salad, and now I think that it's ready for me to turn my... And they are sticking a little bit.

This is a non-stick pan.

Ah, this one is fine.

As you can see, I will grill outside at my house very often, but sometime you grill inside.

When you grill inside, makes a lot of smoke.

So preferably go grill at the neighbors, you know to mess up the kitchen.

If I do that at home, my wife throw me out.

So I'm going to let it cook a little more.

And as you can see, this one stick, this one stick a little bit too.

We are going to do a relish, we're going to do a sauce to put on top of it.

Maybe conventionally I would've put the relish around.

But if the skin stick then I put it right on top of the fish so you don't see it.

It won't change any of the taste, except it doesn't look as good.

So here I have pimento, the pimento relish, you know those are beautiful jar or canned.

If there is any more seed inside, remove the seed here.

That's it, I'm gonna cut that together into little dice.

There we are.

Then olive, you know, and I like the so-called all cure the olive.

you know, seedless.

You know, when there is the seed in it, what you do, you crush it like this and the seed, the pit in the center comes out.

But those are all cured, you know much more concentrated in taste.

We can leave them whole or maybe I'll cut them a little bit to have the same size.

This is very nice, you can do that not too much ahead with those black olive because they tend to discolor, you know?

Whatever they are in, they are very strong.

Scallion, three scallion would be more than enough.

Cut them together.

You know what I like to do with the fish here very often is the way they are scaled, you seal them on both sides to really get the taste of the charcoal, you know, all the searing, you know, of the charcoal in that case.

And then you put them in 180-degree oven about, just so that they finish resting and cooking at low temperature and like that it turned out quite good.

Put my relish in there.

A dash of salt, I'm going to put, maybe I'll put a little bit of that, I like that zester, you know.

Okay, and then the juice.

You know if you want to get a lot of juice out of your lemon, you put it in the microwave oven for like 20, 30 seconds, it soften the lemon and you get more juice out of it.

I know the ways to really roll your lemon like that to break the fiber, same result.

Or dropping it in boiling water, again, another way of doing it.

And then we have olive oil on top.

Maybe I put a bit more lemon in there.

Okay.

that's a nice relish.

And let me check on my, this one is ready.

This one will take another, oh it's nicer on this side.

So what I'm going to do is to turn it on the other side.

Very good on this side.

Here is what happened, you see the fat which was on the side that I say put it on the fat, will have a tendency to stick much more than the other side.

Here it didn't stick.

Okay, this is ready.

This is almost ready.

And this one, maybe another minute or so.

Those are cooked the way they bounce back.

And I like them, you know, cooked, but I don't like them overcooked.

So this one here will be slightly more cooked than the other because it's a tail piece and at the end of the tail, of course it's a bit thinner.

Here we are.

Four nice piece of striped bass, and then, now see that I'm going to put a lot of the relish where it's very nice here I won't cover it.

Okay, and this is it, you know, very fresh, delicious.

The grilled striped bass with the pimento relish and with that beautiful dish, what else but a beautiful glass of pinot grigio from Italy.

Nice dry wine, fruity.

It going to go great with that.

(relaxed music) I've made a beautiful, refreshing grapefruit tearing today.

This is my version of gelatin dessert.

It's very simple.

What you do, I take ruby red grapefruit, with a thin, sharp knife, remove the skin and the pith from the grapefruit.

(relaxed music) Then remove the segment.

Place them in a bowl.

Squeeze the juice right on top of the segment and divide the segment between the crystal cup.

(relaxed music continues) Place the gelatin into a small saucepan or a metal measuring cup.

Add a little bit of the juice to it and place it over hot water.

Stir it until the gelatin is melted, then place it back with the juice of the grapefruit.

Add the honey.

The grenadine.

The mint leaf to it.

Stir it.

And pour it over the segment.

Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least three, four hours until set.

And the this is set, nice and set.

Now actually it can be done the day before even, be sure to keep it covered.

So what you want to do is to run your knife, you see I put my knife right down and I don't move the knife, I move the cup to go around to be sure to loosen it a little bit.

Then bring your plate, you want to turn that upside down, and very often I do that right on top of my finger.

So you know what you want to have is to put your knife here and move it up a little bit so that there is some air going on.

When you see there is air going on, it's going to unmold.

There, I put it like this and it'll be there.

Beautiful.

Well, now we do the sauce for it.

And the sauce is very simply made with orange marmalade, a good orange marmalade here.

Some good freshly made orange juice here, and a little bit of garmoniam so it's all orange, in a sense, a different type of orange if you want.

If you don't want to use garmonia, it's okay too.

But I think it does add a lot.

Mix it with a whisk and then we are ready to put it around the terrain.

(relaxed music) We have a nice color contrast here.

It looks great.

It looks so good even that I'm going to taste it.

So we have the large segment here.

I use my finger to push it in.

Well, it's quite good.

Well, it's always a joy to cook for friend, and I'm glad to cook for you.

I hope you'll cook for your friend too.

Happy cooking.

(upbeat music)