- One of the best drink of the summer for me is a frosted pineapple.

I make it with crushed ice, pineapple, honey, lime and rum in the blender.

One second and it's ready.

I'm Jacques Pepin.

This is fast food, my way.

Happy cooking.

I'm going to do a brandade of cut fish today, which is a dish very specific to the south of France using salted cut fish that we call bacalao very often, after the Portuguese name, or salted cut fish or bacalo.

In French, it's morue sale.

So I do potato with it.

I'm starting with a large potato like that, which is about three quarter of a pound to cut it into dice.

Here we are.

And here is my bacalao.

This is salted cut fish and this is fairly thick one.

When you use this, it could be a year old, sometimes more than a year old.

So you have to soak it in water, sometimes 24 hours.

And I soak this one since last night and you can change the water a couple of time.

You can see that this one is really a beautiful one, very thick.

And even the Portuguese who are the specialist of that prefer the one from Norway.

They consider the Norwegian salted cut fish, the bacalao are the best.

So this one is ready to go.

And what I did with that, I put it in water, cover it with water and bring it to a boil and simmer it five minute.

And now it has time to cool, it's still hot.

And at that point you wanna clean it up.

And that's what I'm going to do.

You go flake by flake to see if there is any bone.

Any bone to it.

I can feel some bone now.

You can see those large bone here.

So be sure you go through it.

I even tested at that point.

It's quite desalted now.

So I may have to put a little bit of salt in my mixture.

I'm not sure yet.

So you have it in there.

Garlic, put a lot of garlic, like five, six clove of garlic.

The potato, my potato.

And fennel seed, a few fennel seed.

It's not that conventional, but I like the taste of it.

Pepper.

And of course, milk.

We cook that in milk.

So I need a good cup, cup, cup and a half of milk here.

Okay.

You bring that to a boil.

Simmer it gently, about 20 minutes.

Well, this is ready now.

I can see that the potato, everything is very soft and cooked.

So now we can emulsify it.

'Cause we do a puree, a brand add is a puree.

So here we go in there.

And I should add that many recipes that I've seen and many people do it with heavy cream.

I'd rather do it with milk.

And then we put some olive oil in it.

So you do an emulsion with the olive oil.

About a quarter of a cup.

That's it.

Now, you're ready to do a gratin with it.

Actually, you know, it is served this way, but sometimes it is served in a gratin dish.

And this is what we are going to do today.

So you can see the texture is very smooth.

Beautiful texture.

This is also served under poached eggs.

Actually, the egg benedictine, you know, the real egg benedictine, everyone knows the egg benedictine, which is served with a slice of ham on a toast with a slice of brioche or ham, a poached egg, a piece of ham, the poached eggs, all on their sauce on top, and a slice of truffle, the classic egg benedictine.

When I was in the Navy, I went to the Navy.

I was at the officer mess, you know, cooking, and I had to pass an entrance exam, even though I work in the best place in Paris.

I flanked it.

Well, I flanked it because I did the poached eggs benedictine the way we used to do it in Paris.

Well, it's supposed to have brandade de morue, you know, brandade of cut fish underneath the poached eggs, which I've never known anyone doing that.

But of course, the Navy, you know, I don't know if it's the Navy, but it's actually in Escoffier, you know?

So here, for me, I put a little bit of Parmesan cheese on top.

And if you want extra richness, a dash of a little dash of olive oil on top.

Put that under the broiler.

Well, I think my brandade is ready now.

Beautifully browned brandade.

Here we go.

And this is served, a classic, you know, in French bistro with the toast around.

But very often we serve it with an oeuf mole, you know, going back to what I said before.

And those are soft, as you can see.

You do that just like you do a hard-cooked eggs.

As soon as they are cooked, you put them under cold water, right away to cool them off.

And when you're ready to use them again, you put them back in warm water, as I have it here, though they are warm.

With the center of it, you know, very often we cut them.

You can put that in there, put them right in there.

And you cut them open.

As you can see, this is very creamy because they are cooked just like a hard-cooked eggs.

And then you would serve that directly on your plate with the eggs.

And I'm going to do it here, you know, take a portion of the brandade here, which is nice and creamy.

And you have a poached eggs on top of it, you know?

And that you eat always with a toast.

Toast for brandade are like this.

You know, large, crunchy type of toast.

And this is what I'm going to have here with my brandade.

Good sturdy wine with that.

Excellent first course.

(gentle music) And now, I'm going to do my dessert today.

And the dessert to do is one of my favorite.

It's like brownie.

Brownie for me was maybe the best dessert that I discovered in America.

And this is an hazelnut kind of brownie cake, chocolate brownie cake.

And I'm going to cook this in that non-stick pan.

I wanna line up the bottom with a piece of aluminum foil.

One of the best ways to put it on the back of it.

And just run your knife along the edge like this.

That will cut it to the proper size, you know?

So, now we can butter it.

And what you wanna do is to butter a piece of it.

What I'm doing here.

Then you put it usually butter side down first.

So it glues to the bottom.

And then after you lift it up, put it back on the other side.

So it's buttered on each side.

Now I need glue to the bottom.

Butter the side a little bit.

Okay.

The first thing to do now is to put the chocolate.

And this is a beautiful, dark, bittersweet chocolate.

People tend to confuse bittersweet with bitter chocolate.

Bittersweet is bittersweet.

It has a certain amount of sweetness in it.

It's a dark, rich chocolate.

And that's going to go into the microwave oven for about a minute.

That's it.

It's ready now.

Now you know you do it one minute.

You look at it.

If you still have little pieces, well, put it back for another minute.

You know, it's not like, but as you can see the chocolate here and the butter is fine.

What we wanna do with that, I have nuts.

And I'm going to put the nut at the end, but I wanna crush them.

And those are hazelnut.

I love hazelnut.

This one, we are both roasted and with the skin removed.

That's when we're just crushing them.

You wanna crush them coarsely.

We're going to add the sugar.

And there I have brown sugar as well as white sugar in there.

We have vanilla and two eggs.

That's a very easy cake, flourless cake.

And that's basically it, you know.

You can see the whole thing comes out together quite easy.

And of course, my nuts.

That really give it a great taste.

Nuts, you know, it makes a big difference whether you toast it or not.

Okay.

So that is not very thick, as you can see, about half inch thick.

And that will go into the oven, 350 degree, about 15 minutes, 15, 20 minutes.

Now when I use broccoli di rape, and I'm doing dishes with broccoli di rape, peas and chicken, we always peel the end of the stem like this, makes a big difference, otherwise it's tough.

Takes a bit of time, 'cause I tell you, if you take that thing here, I mean, this is really, really tough.

Anyway, this is the way you peel it.

And what we're going to do is to put this with oil and garlic, flake of garlic.

And I'm going to use the enormous garlic here, we call elephant garlic.

I love to use that, it's very mild and quite good.

Years ago, when I live upstate New York, I had a garden and a good friend of mine, name was Raymond Richet.

He unfortunately passed away many years ago, but he was a frustrated gardener.

He came to my house once and I had just out those elephant garlic and it was new.

You can see I do large flake here with a vegetable peeler.

So those were new at the time and he had never seen that.

So I decided to play a trick on him.

So we were cooking and I said, "Gee, I need some herb in the garden, I need garlic also."

So we go into the garden and I had planted one of those enormous head there.

And very casually with the pitchfork, I pull out that head of garlic.

And he looked at me, "What is this?"

I said, "It's garlic."

"But I've never seen garlic this way."

I said, "Well, what do you want me to tell you?"

He said, "But what kind of garlic?"

I said, "It's just regular garlic."

He said, "But it's impossible."

I said, "Yes, I bought that new fertilizer."

Whatever I had a fertilizer at the time.

And I said, "The thing has been going crazy."

So, you know, he bought like five bag of that fertilizer to bring back to upstate New York.

And then he would call me and tell me, "You know, it's not growing more than usual."

So it must be the soil upstate New York doesn't work as well.

Anyway, we love to play tricks like that on him.

As you can see, this is browning lightly now because the flake are very thin and you don't want to let them burn.

Otherwise, they get bitter.

So put a little bit of your broccoli in there, which is still a bit wet from washing.

And what I wanna do is to turn those a little bit so that the garlic is kind of on top.

Okay.

That's it.

Then salt.

And the rest of it.

That's going to melt, you know, as it cooks.

And it's going to render liquid too.

That's it.

Now this is cooking nicely.

I think I'm going to check on my cake because it may be ready.

Yep.

See, I wanna keep it quite moist.

And you can see that that cake, I mean, still, it's still bubbling around and it's still soft when you touch it.

But by the time it's set, it will be just perfect.

And not only that, but still a little moist in the center, which is really what I want.

So now I'm going to do the chicken.

We have the peas here also, by the way, but those peas will go into the broccoli therapy in a little while when they are cooked.

I'm using the frozen tiny baby peas here.

And those frozen tiny baby peas are good.

They come out of the pad, are the smallest one.

And if you buy those tiny peas, they are good.

And if you're good with that, you can take a pea in your mouth, as I do as an apprentice, and try to blow it in the air.

When I was an apprentice, a little bit.

We had our trade and our custom in the kitchen, you know?

You were not a good apprentice until you could blow the pea in the air.

So here, what we have to do, or what I'm going to do is to remove the skin of this.

And I discard the skin.

Also, you know what?

You could take that skin, you put it on a cookie sheet, salt on top of it, 375 degree oven, 15 minute to your beautiful crackling, instead of bacon to, and certainly when I was an apprentice, we would use that.

And the fat coming out of this.

Okay, I'm gonna put some oil in there.

And we'll put butter at the end.

And for the time being, this is going to be cut into dice like that.

Now, I call that dish at some point, poulet en grenouille.

You know, poulet is chicken in French and grenouille is the frog legs.

Because the classic way of doing frog legs is to do just as I'm going to do here.

Roll that in flour, and then to saute them in a skillet and finish it with a lot of butter and garlic, sometimes shallots and so forth.

So I kind of took the idea from the frog legs, a bit less expensive, maybe less esoteric, but basically this, I put it in there and I'm using Wondra flour here, which is a type of instant flour, you know?

And then a lot of pepper in it.

So you roll them so that they are well coated with the flour.

You can drain them if you want, it's not absolutely necessary, but and then directly into your hot oil.

Okay.

I think I'm gonna need a little more oil here.

This is the chicken, both I get rid of it, rinse my finger.

And then I can do the garnish for that, which is basically, again, the persillade, that is parsley and garlic, which is the classic mixture that we use in small bistro or at home in France.

Let me check on those broccoli here, as you can see.

Ooh, they're going quite fast.

And actually, too fast, they need some moisture.

And what you can do, you can put a little bit of chicken stock in it or water.

And then I'm gonna put the peas in it now.

Okay.

And then they'll cook another couple of minutes.

That's it.

So this is going to brown nicely.

You can turn it with, you know, with the tong like this to be sure that you have each piece are jumping in the air as I did.

The wound-dry flour, you can also use rice flour, give a wonderful crust on top.

I have some garlic here, which is peeled.

So for this, I put three, or maybe even four clove of garlic, a lot of garlic in that recipe.

Crush it.

Crush it.

So at least three clove is going to be a lot.

So that's enough.

The parsley.

I will put that much parsley.

You gather the parsley into a bunch, slice it, and combine it with the garlic and cut it.

When you shop like this, always tell the apprentice, often people tend to do this, go and down, and it's fine, but up to a point when something like parsley, a lot of fiber in it, so you have to cut it.

And to do it, you put the head of the knife first.

If the head of the knife go first, when you put the bottom of the knife, it automatically move forward, and you get a bit of that cutting process.

This is the right way of chopping.

And of course, the more noise you make, the more you impress the neighbor.

Okay, that's it.

I can see that those are now ready.

We finish them with a piece of butter.

And a little bit of salt on top.

Needs two.

And then, the persillade.

That's it.

Now you don't wanna burn it.

And now it smell exactly the way it smell when we did frog legs when we were kids, so.

And it look like frog legs.

Almost.

Here we are.

So let's see our broccoli.

They're happy, where it is?

Beautifully green.

Here the peas didn't cook too long.

And this.

It's got a wonderful aroma, you know?

Slightly of the bitterness of the peas.

And the garlic on top.

Oh, this is a great, a great accompaniment.

(upbeat music) I beat some whipped cream here with a bit of Grand Marnier in it.

Of course, orange, chocolate, for my chocolate cake.

It's cooked now.

I'm going to unmold it.

Nice and soft.

And one way of unmolding it you can do is to put a piece of plastic wrap on top.

And if you have something flat like a lid, you know, actually turn it upside down there and leave that part of it, if you wanna come out, oh good.

Then of course, the aluminum foil here.

Oh boy, I can see that it's still quite moist in the center.

That's it.

Place that actually back on your cake and turn that upside down this way.

When there is chocolate, you're bound to have chocolate on your shirt or somewhere.

And the way I like it, it's really with the whipped cream on top like this.

We're very lavish with that.

So chocolate, whipped cream, Grand Marnier in it.

You can put a little bit of the orange rind because that goes, again, with the taste that goes well with chocolate as well as mint.

Mint and chocolate, mint and coffee, mint and Grand Marnier.

Chocolate with all of that chocolate goes great with it.

So this is it.

With this, I would say a little glass of a deep port wine would be great with it.

I gotta taste it.

I can't wait for it.

Boy, that's good.

Thank you for spending time in the kitchen with me and happy cooking.