- Beet, stilton, apple, nut, mushroom salad.

All the stuff that I can get in my supermarket.

You just grab it, put it together, a good dash of pepper, salt in it.

You mix it thoroughly, you know, with a little bit of mayonnaise.

And here you have an absolutely delightful, different, unusual salad.

Adding one new flavor to a traditional combination can create a whole new dish.

I'm Jack Pépin, and this is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking.

(oven thuds) I love to use those ready made bread that you find at the supermarket, you know, lavash like this one, as well as naan bread, even tortilla.

Usually I brush it with a little bit of oil and put it in the oven a few minutes to refirm it and that's how I use it.

And today, I'm using that to make a salmon pizza.

She's really crunchy and absolutely delightful.

Then next, a roasted split chicken with a mustard crust.

And I do it in a certain way so that it cook very fast.

Fluffy mashed potato with it.

It's classic.

And we finish with a very light, a Greek yogurt nectar with a mixture of honey and nuts in it.

Simple but really good.

So I have a chicken here, about four pound, three and a half, four pound.

And with this I'm going to do a mixture, so that's what I should start by doing.

The crust that I'm doing on it.

And it's a mustard out crust I call because I put a good couple of tablespoon of French style mustard in there.

A little bit of Tabasco, I mean, a little bit like a teaspoon.

And maybe a tablespoon of soy sauce, you know, in it.

A couple of tablespoon of wine, a white wine.

A couple of tablespoon of olive oil.

Always use olive oil.

And herbs de Provence, you see the herbs de Provence here with the tiny lavender flowers, you know, which are really good.

Like I have a tablespoon of that, which is quite a lot.

On top of it, there is savory, there is thyme in it.

And with that, garlic.

So we put a lot of garlic, maybe four or five.

I hit that on the side to separate your clove of garlic.

And I'm going to put at least three, three, four.

A good two tablespoon, three tablespoon of garlic.

So here first, you want to peel your garlic, and the best way is just to cut the end of it because if you cut the end of it, this is where actually the stem here is attached to, so you cut this, because you have to remove that part of the garlic before you peel it or after you peel it.

And the advantage of doing it this way, if you do it before you peel it, when you crush your garlic a little bit like this, that will release the skin.

The skin will come out very easily, which is not going to come out unless you take the end of it here.

So you crush it a little bit, and again, you see the skin will come out quite easily.

Now you check your garlic after some time, you know you have black spots, so you have to remove it.

Okay, that should be more than enough.

Yeah, that's a lot of garlic.

Okay, so now I'm going to crush that garlic.

(knife thuds) And you see, you always work on that end of the table because when you use that knife, you have space here.

But when you use it horizontally, then you have to clear up the table.

That release the essential oil, you know, releasing the garlic this way.

I think that's quite a lot here, so.

So finally, chop garlic.

Maybe a little more.

That's it.

So I think I have a good two to three tablespoon of garlic, so that's a pretty assertive type of crust that I'm putting on top here.

So here it is.

Now, the chicken.

As I said, this is a roaster, some call it a roaster depending on the side.

But this is at least four pound.

I want to remove the central part of the back here.

And those shear are great to do it this way.

Those shear are terrific also to carve the chicken after, you know, after you finish cooking it.

Actually I could open it this way.

Even if I leave that piece of back, it's okay, but I tend to remove it so it's flatter.

Of course, I don't throw that out.

I use that in chicken stock.

So here, break it a little bit in the middle, so you can break it this way.

I'm going to cut the end of the stem, so that by the time that chicken finish cooking, the bone should stick out like this a little bit and I'll bring that in the back.

And maybe the secret of that cooking is that the part where it's very hard sometime that it doesn't cook is right there.

You know, this is between the stem, between the drumstick and the thigh.

So I cut that open a little bit and that will, I mean, that chicken will go into the oven.

That chicken will take a good hour.

That chicken will be cooked in 30, 35 minutes because I am inserting it, you know, I cut it open between the joint here.

And the same thing again, the little bit of the joint of the shoulder here, you know that joint right there.

It's basically the spot that always get a bit red, you know, never get cooked completely.

So you do this.

Salt.

With the salt, actually, I could put it directly in there.

And I'm going to place my chicken on this here with my mustard.

So I'm going to put that inside.

A bit all over the place, the crust.

And I want to start cooking it in a large non-stick pan like this.

So you know what I did here?

So I'll put this on this side here.

Already cooking because my pot is really hot.

The rest of it is going to go right on top of it.

Mm.

I add a little bit of... Here.

So first, the chicken being split up and cooked faster.

And secondly, as I say, I cut between the articulation to increase, you know, to make the cooking faster.

All of that has to be cleaned.

This is going to cook for a couple of minutes on the stove.

And then after, I put it into the oven, like 425 degrees, really high temperature for about 30 minutes.

So I need about two, three cups of water to do the mashed potato.

So I'll do it here, but we'll do that because I need to wash my hand after the chicken.

Okay.

And I need about three cup of water.

That's about it.

Okay.

To start the mashed potato that my aunt used to do, we call la marraine, my marraine, which was my godmother, if you want.

La marraine used to do a mashed potato this way.

So what I do there after I peel the potato, of course, and I use Yukon gold here, I love the Yukon gold potato.

Good dash of salt.

And her secret was to put a little bit of garlic in it.

Now the garlic that she would do, she could get, you know, a whole clove of garlic like this and she would put them directly like this without taking the shell off.

And the reason was that because she was always putting that through the food mill.

I may put it to the food mill today in case I don't, then you might as well peel the garlic.

Because see, the fact of putting it through the food mill, of course, eliminate the skin.

But if you don't, you better take the skin before.

So here I am here, bring it to a boil.

This will be incorporated in the mashing of the potato and it get very mild.

This has to come to a boil.

And the chicken about ready to go into the oven now.

And we see what I'm going to do.

So 425 degree oven, remember.

High oven.

For a good 30 minute.

Okay.

And now, let's do the first course, which is our pizza.

So in the pizza, I'm going to put some red onion.

A beautiful red onion here that I'll slice thin.

(knife thudding) That's it.

And separate it like this.

Okay.

And I'm going to put sour cream, a good half a cup of sour cream I need for that.

Two, three quarter of a cup.

And a couple of tablespoon of horseradish, cracked pepper or freshly ground pepper.

That machine is good because I can turn this here to get it coarser or finer.

Okay.

That's it.

So you do that, well, maybe 10 minutes before you serve it, but not too, too long ahead.

You don't really want to soften too much the, you know, your pizza or your dough here, whichever dough you're going to use.

So for me here, I'm going to use that.

It's nice and dry now on this.

And put some of my mixture right on top of it here.

You know, you can find in any market, you find great smoked salmon now.

You pay more money depending whether it come from Ireland or whether it's a lox or whether it come from Scotland as well.

But any type of salmon is going to be nice here.

Good.

Okay, onion on top.

And then the smoked salmon.

I need a little bit of onion to put on top, which I'll leave here.

And my smoked salmon come directly in package like this, you know, and it's all pre-sliced, which makes it very easy to use.

I don't know where this one come from.

Okay, nice slice of salmon.

You want to arrange it, maybe not too flat on top of it.

You can wrinkle it a little bit because like that, you can put more salmon.

What I'm saying is that if you bring it, if you twist it a little bit like this, you have a bit of a thicker layer of salmon.

I mean, for four people, you would want to have about six, eight ounces, six to eight ounces of salmon here.

You can still have a little bit of the cream showing, you know, it's nice.

Here we are.

Another piece.

And another two piece here, should be about, yeah, should be about enough this way.

A little more red onion on top.

I'm going to add some capers on it.

About a good tablespoon or so of capers.

Mm.

Here we are.

Now I could put some basil on top.

I tend to like to put a bit of cilantro on top here.

So I put the cilantro kind of coarse like this.

That's a great... Give it another taste, you know, some people love cilantro, some hate it.

If you don't like cilantro, put parsley or put basil.

Basil would be perfectly fine on top of it here.

And then I can cut it.

You can hear how crunchy it is.

This one, at least in three pieces.

I'll move this one a little here so it hide up the mess that I did on the side.

Here we are.

And this is beautiful.

And what better with this, when you start a nice and elegant dinner like this, people will never know that it only took you three minutes to do.

A glass of champagne.

Notice that I have a piece of wet paper towel here.

I always put that on the counter when I cut so that the board doesn't slide all over the place, which is often the reason why people cut themselves.

They cut and the board slide all over the place.

So here, we want to have a little glass of bubbly here.

You want to remove this up to that point.

Always keep your thumb on top of it so that you don't get the eye out of someone else.

And at that point here, when you grab your cork, you grab the cork and you move the bottle, you don't move the cork.

See I move the bottle with that hand, and very slowly, so you just pop a little bit.

In great restaurant, it's not supposed to pop more than that.

I like to make it do a lot of noise, but... And often in your glass of champagne, you see when the glass hasn't been used, it foam a lot.

So you pour once, let it go down and pour a second time.

And a third time and a fourth time.

Well.

(upbeat music) Salmon pizza.

That's good.

So next is our dessert.

Very simple, elegant dessert.

I've been to Greece many, many times and there is no yogurt like the Greek yogurt that you get in Greece.

But now, we can buy Greek yogurt too.

It's still not quite as good.

So to make it a bit richer, I put a little bit of sour cream here.

This is two cup of yogurt and I put about a cup, half a cup at the most, of sour cream to make it even more like the Greek yogurt in Greece.

Okay.

Stirring that together.

It's classic in Greek to be served with honey, you know?

Another classic ingredient of Greece is lemon.

Another classic one is nuts.

Another classic one is mint.

So I put all of those ingredients together.

Here we are.

So look at that yogurt.

Beautiful.

About that much at the most.

That's a hefty portion.

Okay.

I love to use that little gadget here.

See that really nice honey here.

Sometimes, you like your honey when it's slightly grainy, you know, when you have some of the comb in it.

I have walnut here.

Some of them are toasted, some are not toasted.

I think I would rather have the one not toasted.

Three or four, that'd be fine.

Maybe a little piece of zest of lemon, you know, a couple like this goes well with it.

And actually the mint here, we can serve it whole, but I like to do a chiffonade, what we call a chiffonade of mint, meaning you gather the leaf together and you cut it into a wrinkle mixture like that to resemble chiffon.

You know, the material called chiffon.

You put it a bit all over.

And here it is, our Greek yogurt nectar.

Oop.

My chicken look beautiful.

Nice and brown.

Maybe even a bit too brown.

It cooked quite fast.

And what we're going to do with this is actually to deglaze it with a little bit of chicken stock to extend the natural juice underneath.

In any case with this, a good chicken like that, I want a good red wine.

And a good red wine, I have here a wine from the south of France, like a Gigondas type of wine, which are Shiraz, Grenache, and so forth, and that's very good.

I think the chicken is going to thank me if I gave him a little bit of that too.

Just a little bit.

And a bit of chicken stock.

And boil that a couple of minutes just to extend the sauce.

Smells wonderful.

And then the mashed potato have been cooked here.

So what we need to do is really to drain them out.

I need this.

Take the water out.

Okay.

And in the mashed potato now, remember I have the garlic in it.

I want to put tablespoon of butter, some milk.

And there is different way of making your mashed potato.

I think this is fine here.

Too plenty.

Or you can use a ricer like this, which is perfectly fine that you would've to take your potato, put them right through it.

We use that for puree of chestnut as well, you know?

It's really good.

Especially the puree of chestnut because it does long string and you want to keep sometime those string like this when you do certain type of dessert.

So that's one way of doing it.

You can also put it directly into a food mill, which I use often.

And thirdly, if you don't mind the potato being a bit coarse, you know, you can use just your regular masher like this, which is more homemade type of thing, which is fine.

One way or the other, you don't want to put your potato in the food processor.

That'd be the worst thing to do.

We call that (speaking French).

They form the cord, you know, stringy and pasty-like.

So a bit of milk.

Want to mix that with this.

Yeah, they are fluffy enough for me.

(masher thudding) And in addition, very often, I finish them with a whisk to make them nice and fluffy.

And here is my shear again that I used to cut it raw.

I washed it, of course, but a great way of using it to cut the chicken cooked this way.

Cut it in half.

Again, hold it a little bit with this so it doesn't run away from me.

Cut in half the leg.

The breast like that, I can cut the breast even in two pieces.

I like to usually serve pieces of the breast, as well as pieces of the leg, you know?

It'd be great for four people.

It's more than enough on a big chicken like this.

And remember, that wonderful juice that I have underneath.

The leg is cut in half as well.

My wife loved those because I don't mess up the table.

This is the idea.

Okay.

And now, we can serve that real classic dish, you know?

A bit hot.

My mashed potato here.

Real.

Oh, maybe a piece of the breast here, and maybe the drumstick right there.

I already messed up my plate.

A bit of juice.

And you have all that natural juice now.

You want to put that on your chicken.

And here, especially for the kid, you know, you go with a good tablespoon of that, make a hole in your mashed potato, you know, to pour it all around.

And this with a glass of red wine is like heaven.

Mashed potato and roast split chicken.

Sometime, you know, the familiar, the earthy flavor that really satisfy you.

And it does satisfy me.

Happy cooking.