- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

- And I'm Claudine Pepin.

- Remember that wonderful house in the Catskill we used to live when you were little?

- [Claudine] That one you rebuilt with Mom.

- It was rustic but we all loved it.

So tonight, we are going to have a little French stew food, salad frisee of crispy chicken crackling and potato.

- [Claudine] Cassoulet, a southwestern French stew of white beans, pork, and duck.

- And for the dessert, an icy grapefruit granite spiked with a splash of vodka.

- Sounds great.

- Join us for Ski Chalet Supper.

- Next on "Jacques Pepin Celebrates!"

- Wait, today it's really cold.

- It's very cold.

That's why we've just finished skiing.

And I'll tell you something.

When I was about four, you taught me how to ski.

So today, among other things, you're gonna teach me how to make cassoulet.

- Yes, cassoulet, cassoulet is a stew, a bean stew from the south of France, southwest of France.

Usually, you have sausage in it.

You have a roast, sometime stew roast.

Sometime, in that case today, we're going to do pork, but sometime you also have lamb and you usually have a poultry.

Here is what we do now.

We pick up the little, - The bad ones.

- black pebble or stuff that you have in there though, they're just plain white beans.

And usually, they don't really take that long to cook.

Conventionally, what is done, this is soaked the day before.

I don't really soak it because those are usually from the last crop.

If you soak them too long, in fact they start fermenting and you see bubble on top of your water.

So if you want to soak them a couple of hours, you do them overnight, you know, to keep it refrigerated.

What I should do now, which I've done here, is to rinse them under water, and then put them in the pot with water.

Now they're ready to be cooked.

- All right.

- Now the seasoning for that, what we are going to do is to do all of that stuff in there, all of those seasoning, Claudine, this, this?

- [Claudine] I don't have to cut anything?

- The bouquet garni, all of that.

And a piece of ham shoulder here, I trimmed some of it already.

- I have bay leaf and I have cloves.

- Uh-huh, all of that because it makes it a bit easier to pick up out of the thing.

We can put this one in there on that.

Okay, now then you touch the four corner like this, you know?

Just to save string, you know?

- Saving is very big.

- Save string.

- Okay.

- And this?

- Here we are with this.

- Goes right in here?

- Yeah, salt, that I have in there.

You want to immersed that into your beans.

Bring that to a gentle boil, lower the heat, cover it, and you wanna boil that gently from an hour to two hours.

You cannot know exactly depending on how old the beans are, you know?

But usually an hour and a half, two hours would be more than enough.

Okay, so the rest of the cassoulet right now, we get into the roast and a duck.

So what we are going to do here, it's something that you like to do, Claudine.

- Uh-oh.

- It's to take garlic.

- Oh, I do like to do that.

Make a hole.

- And then, you make the hole in there and insert that in there.

You can do it on the top and in the bottom, okay.

When you cut your clove of garlic like this, you know, you do wedge so that it goes in.

Okay, let's put some on the other side.

Okay, salt, pepper.

Okay.

- All right.

- Now a little bit of salt inside the duck here in the cavity, on the outside, a bit of paper also back and forth.

And that can go into the oven this way.

Now this going into the oven around 400 degree, it's gonna cook for like an hour.

After an hour, you pour out the fat, then you put it back another 30, 35 minute, 40 minutes.

Okay, now I remove my package and that's why you don't have to put it in a package like this, but it makes it easier.

Now I want to open this, the four corner, that's it.

And you see as soon that this is cooled a little bit, we're going to chop it coarsely and put it back into there.

- and put it back.

- We're not losing anything.

But before that, we wanna do a sausage to put in it and we want do a homemade sausage.

Okay, so I have a pound of ground pork.

So into this, two teaspoon of salt, at least one teaspoon of pepper.

- [Claudine] Garlic?

- A little piece of garlic.

We are going to do - Ooh.

- I'll chop the garlic if you want, if you mix.

- Pumpkin seeds.

- This is pumpkin seed and I'm putting a dash of sel rose.

The sel rose is curing salt.

Curing salt, it's actually sodium nitrite.

And that will give you the beautiful pink color that you have inside the ham, corned beef, any of those things.

Okay, and another thing in term of seasoning that I want to put in there, one large clove of garlic, couple of tablespoon of red wine like this.

- My hands are a little- - Okay, now what happened here, if you want to take advantage of the curing, if you want the taste to develop as well as the color to develop, then it has to cure for a couple of days.

So you can leave it like that in a bowl or you can form it directly into a sausage.

I'm giving you the option here of doing a sausage without having to buy or to use any type of casing, you know, which is a bit more complicated to use the casing.

What we do here, you put this in there.

- And it'll hold its shape?

- You really apply it here.

Yeah, fold it there.

Turn it really tight like this, you see?

- [Claudine] And that looks like a sausage.

- Underneath, and then you have a sausage.

So we have one which is cured and now we are going to unroll it.

- Now if you just left it in the refrigerator for a day, two days, 24 hours, like how long?

- Three months.

- Three months?

- No.

- Perfect.

- Yeah, this was about 48 hours.

- Oh, okay, so not, okay.

- So this, I can put that directly into my beans up to poach it into it, you know?

So I'm going to immerse it a little bit with that, so sure it goes into the liquid, Okay, you wanna lower the heat, Titine.

- Sure.

- We wanna cover it again because now it has to cook approximately 25, 30 minute.

Okay, well, you know, all of this has to be cut into coarsely little pieces, you know?

Okay, now you wanna remove those, Titine.

- All right?

- I'm gonna give you all of this in there.

- And I'm gonna put it in - And we can put it back here.

- [Claudine] Okay.

- So you see, we don't use, we don't lose anything here and it's very coarse, doesn't really matter if a lot.

Okay, I'm holding it.

- I'm shaking.

- This is really, I have a pan and a half of beans here and a pan and a half beans.

- It's some serious beans - Like that, you can eat 10 people.

You don't cook a cassoulet for two.

You cook a cassoulet, you cook a cassoulet, you know?

Okay, and what happened here, we have not only the duck and the roast of pork here.

And I say after an hour, I pour out the fat.

And even though I pour out the fat, I still get a lot of fat out of it.

- So that cooked two hours?

- Well, it's about an hour and three quarters, something like that now.

Now the end of it, which is the juice here, I want to deglaze.

So Claudine, I put a little bit of water.

- Okay.

- You have a bit of water there in the pitcher, that's it, just to melt this, a little more for the corner.

- Oh.

- That's it.

And then now with a wood spatula, scrape it out.

We are going to put that back into our cassoulet, okay.

Boy, there is a lot of garlic, I see the slice of garlic coming out.

I probably have too much for a good 10, 12 people.

But you know what?

Okay, if you have some left, you can do a good sandwich tomorrow with that, right?

- Oh yeah.

- Now this is the type of thing we use bone and all.

I'm going to cut that duck this way, you want to cut it?

- You want me to cut it?

- Okay, you cut around.

Okay, go ahead.

Hang on, take a smaller knife.

That should, okay, you cut right through the bone here.

Through the bone, that's it here.

Exactly, beautiful, okay.

Now you have this, do you wanna cut?

No, no, wait, wait.

Do you wanna cut that in two piece?

- Oh.

- You know, the drum and the other thing, you wanna serve a piece like that per person, it's more than enough.

Okay, see the type of thing when you have the cassoulet, you eat at home and you want to eat with your hand.

You can even, you know, cut it into smaller piece like, it's perfectly fine.

You would want to keep that in a warm oven now until you're ready to use it.

You know what I wanna show you?

- What?

- It's to mix a little bit of a breadcrumb to put on top of our cassoulet there.

This is fresh breadcrumb, you know, a slice of bread.

Put the slice of bread directly in the food processor.

You have that there.

And we want to mix a little bit of the fat - Oh yeah.

- from the duck here.

- [Claudine] That's good for salad dressing too.

- It's good for salad dressing too.

What you wanna do, you wanna moisten the bread.

But I mean, as you see, not that much because it's still fluffy.

- So, all you're- - So you don't want it to be gooey-like.

- You're just taking the fat and moistening the breadcrumbs, but that's it?

- Yeah, that's it, that's it.

Okay, so that's what we'll put on top.

If you do that, you get a nice crust on top of it.

Otherwise, if it's not, the bread tend to do little dots of burn, you know?

I think that's, I'm sure must be cooked now.

- Okay, let me.

- Let's see what it looks like.

Okay, still boiling gently, you know?

You remove that sausage.

- [Claudine] Ooh.

- Okay, let's cut that sausage.

Look at that, you see?

- Yeah, it's beautiful.

- It's beautiful, yeah?

And so you wouldn't have the color like that other one.

- Oh, and that's the curing salt?

- Yeah.

- The sel rose?

- Yeah, now you can put just as much meat as you want in the bottom of this.

So let's say we put a piece of duck, let's say, a piece of pork like this, like this one.

- That one.

- Like this one with the garlic?

- That one with the garlic, yep.

- Okay.

A piece of salami like that one?

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

And then, you should have a little, Titine.

Yeah because it should be a bit more liquid like that.

I mean, you know, this is a big portion, okay.

- [Claudine] So you just put it right under the broiler?

- Right under the broiler.

So now what we want to do is actually fry a little bit of breadcrumb, to a fresh breadcrumb to put on top of our cassoulet just to imitate the way it's done when you do it the conventional way.

- So you would just take fresh breadcrumbs?

- No, first you put a little bit of that stuff in it.

- Okay.

- That's it, go ahead, put some in there - More?

- Yes, yes.

At that point, you could also put a little bit of herb sometime it's done, like fresh thyme in it if you want flavor it or even some parsley or whatever.

This now is going to start browning.

So you wanna continue cooking it, you know, for three, four, five minutes until it's nicely loose like sand, you know?

And nicely brown all over the place.

Okay, it's getting to loose like this.

- That's what you mean by sandy?

- Well, not quite, it's still a bit moist.

If I take some of that, I say it's a bit moist, but eventually it's going to get harder and brown.

- Oh, you can hear it.

It's starting to get crunchy.

- You can hear it, you see?

Yeah, that's what you want, crunchy on top.

It's bubbling okay.

- [Claudine] Yeah, it's nice and brown.

- And then, let's do one plate like this, cassoulet.

- This is home cooking.

- This is real home cooking.

I think the portion is big enough.

Now, what, do you want that piece?

- Yes, please.

- Okay, a little piece of pork, that should be enough here.

A little piece of sausage, that should be enough there.

That's about it.

And then, the breadcrumbs on top of it.

- Whoa!

- These are sizzling.

Okay, this is it.

- There we go.

- With a big salad, this is the real cassoulet with pumpkin seed sausage.

And I wanna show you to do a salad, which is very special to me.

Salad that I used to do when I was a kid, when I was in Bourg-en-Bresse with the cousin.

And that was done with the liver of the chicken, the heart of the chicken here, gizzard of the chicken here, even the skin of the chicken.

Everything was used in that salad, everything but the chicken.

- Yeah, what happened to the chicken?

- Chicken was too expensive.

So the heart like that, chicken heart are really good.

We cut them into sliver, you know?

Now, you see this here?

- The gizzards.

- The gizzard.

There is a skin, a blue skin here, there is a skin underneath.

So the idea here is to go with your knife along the side of the skin to twist your knife and to kind of roll it.

- Hmm?

- You know, to just remove that piece of meat, which is nice and clean without any of that skin there.

- Oh, yeah.

- You see?

- [Claudine] It's kind of like the way you showed me how to skin fish.

- A little bit.

So you know, this is fine, you can use that in your stock.

Now that liver where you see you have two side to the liver, one here, one there.

If you see any of the green stuff around, you would want to remove it.

- It's fat, right?

- No, no, no.

The slightly greenish, this is part of the gallbladder, very, very bitter.

- Oh, whoa.

- Okay, a piece of butter.

I put a dash of oil too so that it doesn't burn there, okay.

And then right away, I'm going to put the gizzard which take the longer, and the heart, in a couple of minutes.

- And then the livers will go in last?

- Yeah, and you want to keep away from it because it splatter a lot.

- Yeah.

- Salt, pepper.

Okay.

- Okay.

- You see the skin of the chicken here?

- [Claudine] Right.

- You want to put it this way and spread it out, a little bit of salt.

And that salt, - And nothing on the?

- No, nothing, because you want this to stick to it.

If it stick to it, you know, it kind of pull, and it sticks and it get thinner and thinner like a wafer, and very brittle and that's very nice.

- Well, we're gonna take this and bake this and kind of make crackling?

- Yeah.

- Okay.

- About 20, 25 minute in the oven.

Good, boy, it shrank a lot.

- [Claudine] Definitely.

- Okay, and then we- - Take that.

- It's like a wafer, you know?

I mean, look.

- Wafer, you do this a lot with duck, actually.

- Yeah.

- I've seen this more with duck than with chicken.

- Hmm, at The Russian Tea Room in New York when I was a consultant, we did that all the time.

- All right, we're gonna do kind of a conventional vinaigrette.

- With cooked potato season in there.

- Mm-hmm.

- And you notice that I left the skin for you.

- [Claudine] Thank you.

- So this is about fine, you know?

For six, don't put too much vinegar.

- I'm not putting too much vinegar.

- Boy, the vinegar, you get crazy with the vinegar.

Okay, this is going to go on top and I'm gonna deglaze that with a bit of stock to add to my salad.

- Okay, and I have- - Let's see the salad - beautiful frisee.

- that we have here.

- This is what a frisee looks like.

- Yeah, this is a curly endive, what we call frisee, which means curly in France.

Okay, you wanna make that in your salad a little bit.

- [Claudine] That should be about enough.

- And we want to do, okay, whatever fall into the table, you have the right to put it back into.

This is really like a lunch, you know?

- Mm.

- Okay.

Now a little bit of this on top and now a couple of crackling like this.

- [Claudine] I'll put some in here.

- Oh see, okay, you are right.

Now I deglaze the pan.

And as you can see here, I have crystallization.

So that goes in to have a little bit of complexity to my salad here.

Okay, and this, Caesar salad.

So this is our frisee salad with crackling and innard.

- When we met, Jacques was a ski instructor and I was on ski patrol.

And I spotted him in the lodge and he had very tight ski pants on and he was really cute and he still is.

And I took ski lessons and paid for them.

And it took two weeks, two weekends.

And then, he handed me his phone number and waited for me to call him.

And I wasn't about to call him.

I thought he couldn't have asked for my number.

So Monday came and went.

And Tuesday, I called him.

And sure enough, the first thing he said was, "Oh, I was waiting for your call."

And that really, really got me mad.

And I almost hung up on him, but I didn't.

And then, we had a date.

And then, that was it.

That was the beginning.

That was February and September same year, we were married.

But I chased him.

I really chased him.

Oh, this is really beautiful.

What is it?

- Well, taste it.

You tell me what it is.

- I always want to taste, that's grapefruit.

- Now it is a granite and I'm going to show you how to make it.

We start by doing some rind.

And to take this one out, just, that's it.

So we have about one tablespoon here, which is what I need, put in there.

And then, you want to take the juice.

And those, of course, are Ruby Red, which is what you would want for that recipe, a bit nicer.

You need about four cup of juice.

You also want to take some of the pulp, you know?

Out of there to give a little bit of texture in your granite.

We can remove some of that pulp there.

And you want to stir that in.

You want to do about four cup of it.

I have a mixture with enough pulp here now.

What I'd like to do, a couple of tablespoon of the Grenadine for those Ruby Red, or sometime not too Ruby Red.

So we add this, a bit of sugar.

I'd like to put a little bit of honey in there.

Okay, so the first thing you do, the granite, you don't need an ice cream maker.

It's frozen, kind of slushy, and frozen in the freezer directly.

So you can put it on that tray like this.

And that's it.

You put it to freeze in your freezer first.

And until it's hard and kind of slushy like this, not quite frozen, you know?

And that take it two, three, four hours depending on your freezer.

And you wanna stir it at that point here.

Actually, you could practically serve it this way, but I like it a bit harder.

So you want to mix it here 'cause sometime it gets slushy in the center.

And then what you want to do, you can leave it in there or put it in a bowl to put back into the freezer.

That is really what we use.

You know, in between dish in a big dinner, you know, when you do a- - This is a palate cleanser.

- Exactly, this is the real palate cleanser.

A little bit of vodka here, like this on top.

- Ooh.

- And that will help me to melt the rest.

No, I'm not going to drink it.

And here is our grapefruit granite.

So you wanna go skiing again?

- I always want to go skiing.

- Great, just to have cassoulet at the end of the day.

- Right?

- Guess what?

That's what I love because I can freeze it too.

So that's a good thing.

- Well, certainly the beans mixture - The beans and the ham - and all that.

- and everything.

- You can do a lot.

- Yeah, it's wonderful.

And for that, you have Rioja, which is made with Tempranillo and Grenache.

- Oh.

- It's also very cool because it's aged in American oak.

I found out- - American oak.

- that Spain is the largest importer of American oak.

- No kidding?

- Yeah, I think that's great.

- Is that true?

- Yes.

- It's surprising.

- And I'm gonna have a Viognier.

- With what?

With your salad?

- With my beautiful, beautiful salad with the potatoes and liver and the gizzards and the heart.

And this is gonna be beautiful and floral and just really, really wonderful.

- And not too much vinegar in the dressing.

- I like a lot of vinegar.

- Yeah, but not with your wine.

- No, not with a Viognier.

Viognier is kind of floral and delicate.

- I love Viognier, yes.

- And this is American.

It's from Santa Maria Valley.

- And with that, we're going to have our granite.

- Yes.

- Of grapefruit.

And this is really refreshing.

- With vodka?

- This is more summer than winter, but with the vodka.

- Well, that'll make it so we can go skiing again tomorrow.

- So let's toast to skiing and cooking together.

Happy cooking!

- Happy cooking.