- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

For me, bread is truly the stuff of life and no meal is complete without it.

Bread baking at home is relaxing and rewarding, from the aroma that fills the house to the beautiful rustic loaf that graces the table.

Today I'll show you how to make a variety of French country loaves from a single basic dough.

And since men cannot live by bread alone, I'll prepare a French meat and vegetable concoction called Garbure soup, topped with bread and Gruyere cheese.

For a light dessert, fresh pineapple and plum in cantaloupe sauce.

So let's bake bread together and break bread together.

Join me for "Rustic Breads and Soup," next on "Today's Gourmet."

(gentle jazz music) Today, we're going to do a very special menu.

Big soup, rustic bread, especially bread.

I want to show you how to make real French bread.

And the type of soup that you enjoy when it's really cold and you sit down by the stove with a big bowl of soup, a book.

This is enjoying life, you know?

And we're going to start with that book, that the soup called a Garbure.

Garbure is a soup from the Bayonne, that is the Gascony, you know, the country of Cyrano de Bergerac, in the southwest of France and the Garbure, the name may even come from the, the Spanish Garbana or it may come from other thing, but it usually indicate a very thick type of soup stew and it's used for different type of soup stew.

In the conventional one, of course, there is pig feet, there is preserved goods, there is sausage, there is bacon, there is ham and so forth.

In our version, of course much leaner, I am putting only ham and I'm doing a quantity here for like 8 to 10 people.

I have about one and three quarter pound of ham there and this is a very lean ham that I'm putting in like 12 cup of water.

And with that, I have half a pound of beans, those kind of navy or kidney shaped beans, you know, any type of white bean like that will work.

I pick up the stone out of it, you clean it up to be sure there is no stone or anything in it.

Wash it and put it to cook, bring it to a boil.

This has to cook for one hour.

After an hour, it'll look about like that.

Then at that point, we can put the rest of our vegetable in it.

Some of the vegetables, as you see, the beans are practically cooked now.

So what I want to do is to put vegetable, I have potato, but we have beans and potatoes.

As you can see, it's going to be quite rich.

I have leek here, I have cabbage, a great deal of vegetable.

It's a kind of pot-au-feu also that we call in France and I have carrot, celery, you can put any other type of vegetable that you have in your refrigerator.

And finally, parsnip.

The parsnip is that type of white carrot, which have a really very special taste and was used a great deal in the Middle Age in France and in Europe, it has a kind of revival now, a bit like a taste of turnips to a certain extent.

This again, we cover and now it has to cook for another hour, one hour here, one hour here.

And now let's move to bread.

As you can see, I have beautiful bread here, that I have made, some of them are four to five days old and I wanted to discuss the different type of bread.

You see this one is about five days old and the longer it takes to proof that bread, the longer I can keep it after.

I wanna show you the color inside.

And this one that I have here is a rye bread, which will be slightly different, more of a farmer type of bread.

This one is still slightly lukewarm because I did it this morning.

But you can see the white bread, I mean there is some, some other thing I need that I'm going to discuss.

And this is the rye bread.

When you do bread, bread is the stuff of life.

You have to start with the right flour.

We are using here, you can use a bread flour, we're using all purpose flour and it has to do with the amount of gluten or the amount of protein.

Gluten or protein is the same thing.

On the whole purpose flour, it's between 9 to 11% gluten.

Bread flour can go up to 15% gluten.

The more gluten, the more elasticity that you have in it and you need elasticity for that.

Now with this, we have water, yeast and salt.

This is about the equipment that you do.

I mean the stuff that you do in a real French bread.

Now the yeast, there is different type of commercial yeast, which we are going to use.

But there is also bread, which is done without any yeast.

Years ago, before the 17th century, there was no yeast in France.

And when I was a kid, I remember during the war, I was four, five years old, sent to a farm in the Alp with my brother and the bread was done every two weeks, no yeast.

In one gram of yeast, commercial yeast.

and when one gram of yeast is 1/28 of a ounce, you have 10 billion yeast cell.

So it's an enormous amount.

In one pound of flour you have about 10,000 yeast cell.

You can however do bread only with water and flour.

It'll start fermenting.

And then what you do, you add more flour and water every day.

That's what we call to (speaks French), to refresh it, to add more water, more flour so that the yeast has something to feed on and it'll take a week like that to do bread.

This is the way it used to be done many, many years ago, when we used to finish it this way.

The idea was to take a piece of that dough, keep that dough in the refrigerator or I mean in the cellar at the time for three, four days or even up to a week and a half in water.

And that was the starter that the bread was made of, you know, now what we are doing is very often what is called a polish or a sponge, which is a mixture of equal portion of water and flour, a bit of yeast, and that created a very bubbly, very strong yeasty mixture.

And this in turn is mixed with a lot of flour and the bread are divided in this way, and what we are going to do here, it's slightly different.

We using different type of flour.

I have bran here, which is just the coarse surface of the wheat.

I have rye flour, in that bread over there, I have oatmeal and I have, those are wheat berry, actually they are bulgar, precooked wheat berry, all that can be mixed for texture in our bread.

And the yeast, granulated yeast.

The lower the amount of yeast, the longer it proof and the lower the temperature to a certain extent, the longer it's going to last.

What I'm saying by this, the making of bread is dependent on all of those factor, temperature, the amount of yeast and time.

What I do here, it's a kind of dry yeast, a very easy way to do it, you see I have a pound and a half of flour, a pound and a half of flour is three and a half, four and a half cup of flour done this way.

And in this I can use, let's say a little bit of our bran here, you know about half an ounce, even a little bit of this, you can mix it in there.

Then my yeast, I put like one teaspoon of yeast, I can go up to one tablespoon, half a teaspoon, if I let it go longer and approximately two and a half teaspoon of salt.

Now I have a type of dry yeast.

I could do that ahead, I could do that for several days.

You see, I have it already now to do into my mixer.

And this is what I'm going to show you here.

I have the same amount that I have in the other one here, except I have some rye flour in there.

So I put that in there and I put two cup of water, usually try to use good water.

I have good water here as you can see.

And what I'm going to do is to that directly in there.

And normally I would let that, I would let that turn on low speed or medium speed because I have, I can with that type of machine, vary my speed for about, for about two, three minute.

And all I have is that here I would remove this from that, leave it a little longer than this and I could actually let that proof into that thing.

I could put a piece of plastic wrap on top and that will have to proof and I will go back to the proofing.

It can proof a long, long time.

Second recipe that I'm doing with the one that I mix in front of you will be in the food processor.

And that work just as well, except that if it turn faster, it'll increase the temperature.

I use cold water when the dough is finished, it should not be more than 70, 75 degree, you know.

So again, the same idea.

And I can have that on the medium to low heat.

And here I think I need a little more flour.

I see it a bit soft actually.

When the dough is soft, it's not bad either.

It's a bit harder to handle.

You get bigger hole, you get bigger hole in the cooking of your dough.

What I do here, however, you cook that for not that long really and we put that directly into that type of plastic, you know, the other one, it would be big enough to proof, but this one, I like to use those type of plastic, watch out, not to cut your finger here and I put that in there and maybe a little more extra flour.

I did this one a bit soft.

I think I have, this is the one that I mix myself.

You know what I think I don't have the exact amount of flour, I should have a little more flour than that.

I don't know if I measure it.

I may have put three and a half cup of flour.

That's what it looked like rather than four and a half cup and that's why it's soft.

But in any case, it would be a pound and a half of flour, which is four and a half cup, approximately a tablespoon or two and a half teaspoon of salt, one to two teaspoon of yeast.

It depend again how long you're going to let it proof and two cup of water.

This, you cover it and you let it proof again, room temperature in the area of 65 to 70 degree is a good average.

And that will proof from six hours up to 24 hours, I can leave it.

And very often I have done it up to 24 hours.

And this is basically what I get out of it.

This has been in for about eight, nine hours.

This is the first bread.

And you can see here the proofing of the dough.

You know the carbon dioxide, if you want, the air that develop in it and which will give you the texture and that strong yeasty taste that you have.

What we are going to do here is to mold a couple of bread and what you do are use a piece of parchment paper in the bottom of the pan and you can put in the bottom, I have cornmeal, here I have oatmeal and here I have farina.

Any of that stuff you can put in the bottom, it'll help, it'll prevent the bread from sticking, in addition to that, if you put it on this, you don't dirty your pants.

So it's a bit better also and easier to take out.

So what I have here is the first bread, which is really stuck in there.

And what you want to do, I have that wonderful smell of yeast that I can really smell here.

You start from the side, you know, to bring it inside toward the center, bring it this way and fold it on itself.

You see what I'm doing actually here, I am molding my bread directly in there, makes it even easier.

I could use a little bit of flour, if you think it sticks.

But basically you bring, you could knead it on the table, see how easy it is to bring it from the side to up the center to establish a nice bread.

And this way, I have a kind of round bread, you see, with the right texture, you don't want to tear the top, you want to be smooth.

We put that right on top.

I press it down a little bit and this goes directly on top of it and that's how I make it proof.

And that will proof like that for an hour and a half to two hours.

Again, that room temperature about 70 degree.

If you do baguette, of course, smaller bread, then 45 minutes of proofing is going to be enough.

See this one of the rye in it and I can smell quite a different, quite a different smell out of it.

So what we'll do here, I'll do another one and maybe in that bottom, I'll put some oatmeal, you know, the crushed oatmeal, any of this will go fine and again I bring it together together and I can really smell, beautiful smell again a bit of flour to help in this and I could do this this way or you know what you could do with that also, you could do what we call a couronne.

That is you make a hole in the center and you start working it from that hole into a kind of large donut.

This way, you know, taking a bit more time than I would want to do.

But basically this is the idea of extending what we call a couronne in France, which is a crown, you know, of bread.

We mark it in different way and basically you want it fairly large in the center so that by the time you put it on top, it's not going to join together.

It's going again to proof in this way, again, you turn it upside down and now you let it proof for a couple of hours at room temperature.

Remember it is very important to be covered.

If it's not covered, you will have a skin forming on top and if you have a shell or a skin forming on top, the bread won't expand anymore, it has to stay moist.

So this will create that type of environment where the carbon dioxide coming out of the bread create a moisture and it'll stay soft and very soft, other way it should be so that it can expand properly.

I don't think there is one meal for a French man without bread and whether it's we start in the morning with the cafe au lait and the baguette or (speaks French), the small snack in the afternoon when the kid come from school, again with a baguette, crunchy baguette and a piece of chocolate.

I have here some baguette which are molded in this way and I pull a piece of saran wrap on top, plastic wrap so that it proof again under something moist, you know, and what you want to do, if you want to give it a shape and a look, just give a country look.

You just put some flour on top of it and then there is different way of shaping it.

Here, the classic way is to really run your knife across and I'm using a serrated edge knife.

The real baker are using a blade, a razor blade, you know, and then to do an epi which is the head of wheat, what you do, you cut it this way, bring that on the side, cut it, bring it on the side, again and you're doing like a head of wheat here.

Those are all of the different type of shape that you can do with your bread, you know.

Now this one here is kind of a different shape of all again, you know, I could put a bit of flour on top and you want to run your knife, again, not the point, run it on top of it in the center and do like the leaf of a flowers, you know it'll be beautiful by the time it's cooked.

And finally the one that we had here, which is the round one that I could do in another way, I could put some oatmeal on top and even a little bit of flour on top of this.

Give it another look and finally just mark it in the center this way sometime you may even, you can see it, it's starting proofing already, starting pushing, cutting the side to give it the expansion.

And now directly into the oven, you want to put it in that cave here, I'm putting it on a stone.

And the advantage of doing what I did here is that I can slide this directly on the stone and a little bit of water, one, two tablespoon in the oven to create the steam that I need to get the real crust of a French bread.

And I have one here in the same way cut about in the same way.

You can notice that this one I actually cut it, cook it directly on the cookie sheet which we can do also.

There is a certain sound to the bread when it comes out of the oven, (fingers knocking) you know, a certain sound that you recognize is cooked.

This sound kind of hollow and if you put a thermometer on it, I would have to leave it a minute for the temperature to rise up, that should get to between 200 and 210 degree to be totally cooked inside.

So what I want to do next is finish our soup, which you can see here.

I did a soup here for actually double the amount of people that I have in a recipe.

The recipe is for four and the soup is at least for 8 or 10 here as you can see.

So I'm doing that pot which would be enough for four or six people for a whole meal.

This is when we put our bread, cut the bread and soak it into it on top.

You wanna cover the top, you know with your bread and I'm using here, I'm using the rye bread, which I love.

So I'm wetting the whole top of it, cheese, I'm using a Gruyere type of Swiss cheese on top to finish our Garbure, spread it on top and now you want to put that directly into your broiler, not too close to the broiler, you know, but with the broiler, about in the middle of the oven to get a nice beautiful crust.

This is going to cook for about 10, 12 minutes and as you can see, I have half of it left over.

That freezes very well, you can enjoy it the week after.

(soothing music) And our fresh light fruit dessert is what we need after that meal, all that bread.

So what I have here is cantaloupe melon, which we'll put with a little bit of honey in there.

That's to create a sauce, you know, in that sauce, we'll put a little bit of Grand Marnier, if you don't wanna put the alcohol, you can do without.

And then we're going to puree that into that blender and then take the core here.

I've already cut the core of a pineapple.

Start cutting it here.

This is beautiful this way.

I can cut, you want to cut that quite thin, you know, quarter of an inch, eighth of an inch.

This is really ripe, I can smell it also.

And with this, we are going to put a garnish of red plum there.

So again, cut them, it give you, it's already interesting to take fruit with different color and do combination to put them together, you know it's good.

So what I would want to do here is to put the sauce directly on this, if I let that sauce time to rest, the color would be a bit darker.

And the reason is that I have a lot of air in it.

Air with the emulsion, which is created by the food processor, you know, so you place those directly on top of it.

You can mount a certain amount there as much as you want and then start decorating the outside with a little bit of those beautiful plums.

This is a very fresh, simple dessert.

We can do all the type of combination of fruit, of course, but I mean this would be perfectly fine this way.

And now let's see if our soup is ready, our Garbure, beautiful under the broiler.

This is as you can see, beautiful, deep rich color that you want to cut here.

And this is, as I said before, really a meal in itself, you know, serving that whole soup.

You want a large portion of this and serve that as a main course.

And now I'm ready for my rustic bread and my soup.

And the first thing we're going to do is to bring a salad also because we already have a salad and some wine and of course the big basket of bread that we made today.

Remember, bread is so satisfying, it is great to do it with the kid.

The kid love to kind of knead the dough and get involved into it.

And believe me, the whole house smells so good when you make bread, the neighbor are going to come over.

So if you've never met bread, you know, I try to clarify the technique for you.

I hope I didn't do the opposite and confuse you, it's a bit complicated.

Basically it is simple, flour, water, yeast, a bit of salt.

And take your time, do the bread.

All I do at home, put it in a plastic at night, late afternoon, I let it proof slowly the whole night and in the morning, mid-morning I kind of mold the bread, let it proof a couple of hours and it's ready early afternoon, it has to cool off for at least two to three hours, just ready for the night before I drink the aperitif, we start on the bread and with the menu today of course, starting with that beautiful, thick, heavy, satisfying soup that we have here.

A green salad is always welcome and always goes so well with the soup.

Finally, our refreshing dessert.

And to go with that, we are going to have a wine from where the Garbure, the Garbure, the name of that soup come from, which is the southwest of France.

Lower than Bordeaux, near the Basque area, a bit more center of France.

There is certain interesting grapes in there like the Tannat, T-A-N-N-A-T.

It's a different type of grape and some Cabernet Sauvignon, a very earthy type of wine that is going to go so well with the soup.

And with that, of course, have your bread, have a piece of cheese in it.

Enjoy it.

I'm sure that the kids are going to enjoy the bread.

And remember what I say, that bread can last five, six, up to longer and it make fantastic toast after.

I enjoy making bread for you.

Make bread with your family, enjoy it, happy cooking.