- Hi I'm Jacques Pépin.

The flavor of Russia are intriguing and appealing to me.

Today's menu inspired by that country and its pungent taste and hearty dishes.

Cut fish poached in wine, then served with olive and horseradish sauce has a real bite.

Chicken thighs prepared with onion, garlic, wine, and cilantro are served with sauteed zucchini.

And for the dessert, a classic kissel.

Cranberry cooked in orange juice with a sprig of mint, served with plain yogurt.

French cuisine influence Russia in the 19th century, now Russian flavor a me on "Today's Gourmet".

(inspiring music) (cheerful jazz music continues) (cork pops) Years ago, I work at the Russian Tea Room in New York as a consultant, I have a lot of friend Russian or Russian immigrant in New York.

But I get really interested in Russian cooking and in Russian taste, you know, which is a bit different than what we do.

And that menu today is inspired by the Russian taste that my friend and I have enjoyed at the Russian Tea Room or at home and what we have, it's a very easy recipe.

We're going to start today with a chicken and coriander sauce.

The Russian use a lot of coriander and when I'm talking about coriander, which I have here, I'm talking often what is called cilantro, or Japanese parsley or Chinese parsley, or culantro, or coriander, or coriander in French and all of that is the same.

First you have the tiny seed that we use in the pastrami mixture.

Those tiny seed have a special taste when you put them in the ground, what grows out of it is this.

And what we're going to do is to actually use the bottom part of it, the stem you know to cook in the dish and use some of the cilantro, the leaf to put on top.

Now I'm taking the skin here, we have just planned chicken thigh, you know, and of course when you remove the skin, you remove basically three quarter of the calorie.

And that's very important because in that recipe, conventionally the Russian type of dishes are quite fatty, and this, we're going to do a very light dish with that.

So what we want to do is to start browning this, you know on one side.

I have a little bit of olive oil in the bottom here and it should be, you know, to brown properly, it should really be in one layer work much better, which is what I'm going to do here.

(pans clanking) (pan sizzling) So flat start and on this side here, I'm going to start a skillet.

I have a tablespoon of oil and a tablespoon of butter, this is going to be the garnish for the chicken and that's going to be zucchini.

So let that brown for a little while, I may even put a bit of pepper, I didn't put pepper in it.

Cracked pepper is good.

Okay and we'll come back here and I have zucchini here.

I have some shallots and some are already cut and I want to show you how to use that French looking piece of equipment that we call a mandolin in French.

You have a leg which you put on this side.

You cannot put it on this side because there is nothing here, there is a return here.

Then there is a little teeth in the center so that you can cut it in different way, then there is the blade.

So the blade has to be totally up in order for that thing to move back and forth here.

We use that in professional kitchen and frankly what we use, you have a guard which comes on top of it so you don't cut yourself.

So if you're not used to it, you should use the guard.

Professionally we often, I don't use the guard, keep my hand flat because what we do here, we cut right through.

See that's a bit too thin so I can lower it.

(mandolin slicing) This way, then I turn on the other side.

Then in the back, the idea is to do the whole outside of your zucchini into those thin long strip so that you keep the cottony center, you know, which is soft and all that, you don't want to use.

So this is what we do, if I wanna wave that, I bring that up and let that go and bring that blade level so that I don't feel anything here.

I wanna show you how to use this but maybe with a potato.

And what you can do here, cutting this way, if you twist your hand this way... One time this way, one time this way, you will end up with what we call a pomme gaufrette you know, a waffle potato.

And this is the only instrument which does that.

We use that for appearances you know, in kitchen.

What I have here is shallots, which is a type of red onion.

We're going to saute the shallot (knife chopping) for a few seconds (knife chopping) into our skillet there on this side.

(pan sizzling) And with that we'll put our zucchini on top.

So those zucchini are very nice, they look like spaghetti, great for garnish, you know, you can do a lot with it.

I love zucchini and zucchini are very inexpensive.

Zucchini have fiber, very low in calorie so it's a good thing to do.

And we're going to put those zucchini to saute here and they saute pretty fast, you know?

This, maybe a dash of salt that I have here (pan sizzling) and we're going to saute that here.

Maybe I put a cover on top to make it a bit more moist so that the moisture will start cooking it.

Now what I want to do is to turn those chicken.

Here they should be brown on one side, they could run a bit more than that, but this is okay.

Remember that I have no skin here on those chicken as they say.

And they are going to be much lower calorie than they would be with the skin and also they're going to cook much, much faster.

So what we have in those here, I have the coriander and the coriander you see as I said before, we are going to use the stem (knife chopping) of the coriander here into the dish.

And onion, I already have a lot of onion chopped here just to show you we're gonna slice a bit of onion.

(knife slicing) So sliced onion, sliced garlic.

You know the garlic, all clove like that just slice them very thin this way, you can crush them with you want that is perfectly fine.

That recipe will have much less than 30% fat into the dish itself, which is what we want to do within the recommended surgeon general indication for dishes.

So what we have here, we put that back there.

(pan sizzling) The thigh, I like the thigh, you know?

If you do breast of chicken, your timing is going to be different.

So do only breast or do only thigh because they're not going to cook in the same amount of time.

We have a lot of onion, (pan sizzling) here the garlic.

(pan sizzling) The coriander stem here, she'll give it a lot of taste.

We use that in Caribbean cooking, also my wife use coriander stem, you know?

She freeze it and keep it.

And we put the white wine in it.

I have a nice fruity wine here, my chicken go right back on top of this.

(utensils clinking) (pan sizzles) Cover it and this will cook for 20, 25 minutes.

15, 20 minutes should be enough.

And during that time, let me look at the zucchini.

The zucchini are browning nicely as you can see here.

And I have another chicken ready on this side, which I'm going to prepare.

Put this one in the back.

(pans clanking) This is for our fish and now I think we are going to finish preparing that chicken.

The first thing that I'm going to do if you want to serve it with it, is to place your zucchini on the outside.

You see when you place like a border on the outside, people try to arrange it directly on the outside.

Put it right in the center and from the center, push it on the outside.

You don't have to worry whether the center is dirty because you're going to cover it with something anyway.

Okay, here it is.

This one is there, now we can serve our chicken right in the center of it.

We have a lot of onion in it as you see and here we are serving two thigh of person, which is more than enough of quite a nice portion, you know within the context of our menu.

And again, put your onion on top and what we have to have in addition to this, a bit of the juice, the wine, it's very lean, nice looking.

I want to put of course a little bit of the coriander top, which I didn't put here.

(knife chopping) That will go on top of my chicken.

Here we have a lot of coriander in that menu here.

And now what I'd like to do is to start my fish.

(pans clanking) So I'm going to do it in that skillet right here.

And for this also we are going to use some coriander so I'm going to keep it here for the time being and I wanna show you the fish that I'm going to use.

I have a beautiful filet here of cut fish, this is more of a lean cod that we have here.

As you can see it's a bit darker on the other side, but just the flesh, just the smell of it and all that, I know it very fresh.

There is a line of bone right in the center, So I would want to cut that here and on this side, you remove that line of bone from the center.

Okay and then we cut that into pieces about five, six ounce pieces.

I have four pieces here that I'm going to put in there with... I need some onion in there, right?

I'm putting some onion, sliced onion (knife chops) in the bottom, (knife slicing) Onion, cabbage, coriander, sour cream, you know that type of thing.

Beets are used a great deal in Russian cuisine, you know?

I mean not that this is pure Russian, but at least an interpretation of what Russian cuisine is for me.

So we have again, some white wine here, the salt, my filet of fish which I'm going to cook directly in there.

That's it.

(pan sizzling) And then I want this to cook, depending on the thickness of the filet of course, but I want that to cook for four, five minutes.

And during that time, as you can see I've used a lot of pots here, I went from one pot to the other.

I wanna discuss pots with you a little bit.

And here I have a whole area of different type of pot, different type of metal.

When we discuss pot, we discuss the way the heat goes into the pot and transfer into the food, what we call heat transfer.

For example, the best is going to be copper.

The best is really silver but now a silver pot... But in any case this is a thick, heavy layer of copper and it's lined up with stainless steel inside so it's very good because of that.

Here for example, I have a stainless steel, only stainless steel pan with the bottom in aluminum because the heat transfer of aluminum is better.

If that part was only in stainless steel thin, the heat would go underneath and that would've a black spot right there.

No diffusion throughout the metal so it's important.

This is a cast iron pan, you get attached to it, you know those pots, you have them forever, but they tend to discolorate food, you know if you do sauces and all that, but they are very good to sear or do different things in it.

This is an enamel cast iron kind of Le Creuset you know, type of pot that you can bring to your counter and serve directly in it, that's very good.

This is plain aluminum.

Aluminum is fine but it will tend to discolorate in it, so what we do now, because aluminum is the good heat transfer in term of thickness but acid, any type of thing, white wine and all that will discolorate in it.

So we have what is called here anodized aluminum.

This is not a non-stick, it is a thing which appear in the surface of the metal through a technique that they have, which eventually wear out but it is part of the metal.

Here I have enamel, enamel is very good this is steel.

Steel pot which is enamel inside and outside.

Great, it doesn't discolorate and all that, it had a good heat transfer.

Finally here I have an aluminum pan with no-stick inside and this is very good because it's a permanent no-stick.

So it's not supposed to go anywhere, you're supposed to be able to use Brillo.

But ultimately this is your ultimate pot, it's riveted right through.

I have thick heavy copper, which give me a fantastic heat transfer.

Stainless steel inside so that I have no discoloration and now let's see if our fish is finished.

Yeah the fish should be about cooked now and what I'm going to do is to remove it to that, to do the sauce and that cod is a bit soft.

Remember that I have the reduction of wine and the wine does have a certain amount of calorie, but on the other end this would be better.

On the other hand, by the time you boil the wine, you know most of the calorie goes with the boiling.

You see that recipe happened to be very low calorie.

I have the garish here, which is going to go into it and the garnish here I have capers, I have again coriander, I have fresh horseradish, you know, which I can grate here it's very, very strong.

Horseradish is very common in Russian cooking.

So here I have the fresh one and I can of course use the one in can.

I have olive and those are all cured with oil, you know, type of dry olive.

All of that is going to go inside with a bit of sour cream.

I have a quarter of a cup of sour cream here, which is one tablespoon per person.

You know a tablespoon of sour cream is 29 calorie.

Remember we put no butter, we put no oil, nothing in it so it is relatively very low calorie, you know?

And I'm saying that because when people tend to see a sauce where I have cream in it, you know, then they start getting crazy.

There is cream in it and they think they're going to fall dead, you know?

So here I have the sauce, you know what I need here, I have too much evaporation, I'm gonna put back a little bit of water.

This is the water that I from the coriander because what happened is that after you put... (pan clinking) After you put your sour cream, you don't really want this to boil a lot.

If it boils a lot, it's going to break down, you know?

So put all of it together, season it.

(Jacques savoring) It's delicious, a little bit more pepper in it and that sauce is ready to be served.

And we're going to serve it individually right here.

I have a beautiful plate here and as you can see, that plate already has some olives on top.

So very often you know when you can have a piece of equipment, you know, which is going to bring together the dish, it makes it nice, you know?

Those filet are quite thick, you know, and actually they could be cooked for another minute or so.

You don't want them to be overcooked but you want them to be cooked.

So what I have here is my garnish, let me put some of the sauce on top and some of the olive are going to fall around.

And we could even put a bit more coriander.

Now remember you may say, "Boy we have coriander all over the place here."

We have coriander in the first course, in the main course, and yes it's true I love coriander and that dinner is inspired as I say by that type of seasoning, if you don't like coriander, put the chives in it or put a bit of basil or whatever.

But the recipe this way is great and I'm sure you're going to enjoy it.

(calming classical music) And for our dessert today with our Russian menu, we are going to have a kissel.

And the kissel sometime is spelled K-I-S-S-E-L, sometime with one S. It's the classic Russian dessert, which is very simply made of any puree of fruit.

It's very classic to have it with cranberries we have today but very often there any type of berry I'll use.

Usually a puree of red fruit that's what they call a kissel and that's what we're going to do here.

This I'm going to put... Those happen to be frozen, you know you can use the fresh one all the frozen one is going to work fine with this.

We're going to put a different type of ingredient with it.

I have some corn starch here that we're going to put in there also.

And orange juice.

(juice pouring) The corn starch is going to thicken of course, the orange juice.

Sugar because it's quite acidic and we put orange rind, there is different way of removing the orange rind.

We add that duster here, which will do that type of job, you know taking only the surface part of the skin and that's what you want because that's where you have the essential oil.

Well then there is that part of that little thing which cut strip like this, you know.

Sometime we cut the strip out sometime you leave it here to fold it back into an orange and do a decoration all around like this, you know, which look good too.

And of course the most common way is to use this and you can of course grate that directly on top of this but you can also put a piece of plastic directly on your grater and grate it like this.

The plastic will go right through, you know the plastic will go right through the teeth if you want.

And it's easy because this way you just have to lift it up and you have all of your... (grater taps) Or most of it here that you can clean up with a knife and put with our cranberry.

Okay, right that here.

Now we are going to put that to cook, it has to boil for about 10 minute, five, 10 minute, it's going to thicken and so forth.

And during that time I want to talk to you a little bit about the garnish you know, and they have different type of garnish here.

Usually in the type of cooking we do, we try to keep it plain without too much fat.

We lower the fat a great deal.

We're going to serve that with a bit of yogurt.

You may not know that yogurt that I have here, you see the thickness of it, is a low fat yogurt, it's about 10 calorie a tablespoon just like milk, milk is 10 calorie at tablespoon.

The sour cream however, there goes to 26 calorie.

By the time you get to light cream, it's about 30 calorie and heavy cream, 50 calorie per tablespoon.

However, I had a cup of heavy cream, which I whipped here and I end up with two cup, so a cup of heavy cream whipped is going to be 25 calories.

So if you use cream whip it that extend it, rather than just putting heavy cream on your berry.

And just for your information, you should note that a tablespoon of butter is 108 calorie and a tablespoon of oil is 120, even higher, so this, you know, has to be taken into consideration.

And what we are going to do here is just serve a little bit of yogurt with our garish here.

I have another pot here with those cranberry cooked and as you see they're getting nice bright red.

We're going to put them into that bowl here, it's a very refreshing dessert and as I say, very Russian.

What you could do is to alternate with a little bit of your yogurt in the middle to give different color, you know?

Especially if you have a beautiful glass as I have here.

Although as I say, you could very easily serve that plain.

It need sugar remember because this is extremely acidic, now a little piece of mint on top of this, here we are and you have a nice dessert.

You could have if you want even a tiny piece of pound cake or a couple of cookie or conventionally it's served just plain like this and it's excellent this way.

And this is our classic Russian dessert the kissel.

Here we have a Russian table, actually the Russian table is called zakuski table, (Jacques speaking in Russian) which is a combination of all kind of different salad, cold, hors d'oeuvres and so forth and it's very classic, especially around the time of Easter you know in Russia.

A great deal of the cooking of Russia was codified in the 19th century by a lady by the name of Elena Molokhovets.

And the book has been actually translated in English now, which was a gift to young housewife, which is the "Mrs.

Beeton" that we have here, like "Cuisine de Tante Marie", we have in France.

You know, often those type of cuisine have been codified by women.

We have an interesting menu today because the whole thing is less than 30% of fat so we fall within the recommended surgeon general recommendation.

And as you see here, we have the esoteric, slightly esoteric if you want Chinese ingredient... Russian ingredient, excuse me, you know the coriander here.

And we have the black olive and of course the caper, and particularly that fresh horseradish here, you can use the bottled one but believe me, the fresh one is great.

It grows in your garden and grow and grow, year after year, so try to plant it in your garden.

Then our fish and as you see the fish here, which look very scrumptious with a big cream sauce and so forth, have in fact very, very little calorie.

If I had grilled that fish, I would've needed probably about a tablespoon of oil to put on top to grill it, which would've been about 120 calorie.

And instead of that, all I have in it is one tablespoon of sour cream.

That is I have a quarter of a cup for four people, and a tablespoon of sour cream, as we say is 29 calorie.

So this is a very deceptive dish and very low in calorie and quite flavorful.

Of course we have the chicken also, and in the chicken itself we have removed the skin, which take more than 50%, the fat away.

And we have a nice salad of course with our dish, and the famous kissel and that kissel, which we did with cranberry, but could really be done any type of berry.

And with that we're going to serve a Gewürztraminer from the central coast of California.

I think quite an unusual one because it's in the Alsatian style, that it in the style of the northeast part of France.

Very fruity, gewürz means spice in German and traminer is the type of grape, although the Gewürztraminer is very spicy but very dry, different than what is usually done here.

And that type of spicy wine is going to be terrific with our menu today.

Do it for your friend, be a bit, you know esoteric and try different thing in your kitchen.

I enjoy cooking it for you, happy cooking.