- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

Today's menu comes from my French roots, the perfect Sunday meal, a crusty scallop in a nest of scallion, and then in our first course, roast leg of lamb coated with a savory breadcrumb, potato Boulangére, the classic accompaniment for lamb, and our dramatic dessert, a souffle of apricot and fig.

Delicious cold or warm.

Please join me for this traditional French Sunday meal on "Today's Gourmet".

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) A leg of leg, you know, it's for me the quintessential French Sunday dinner.

In fact, when I was with the French president, you know, this was one of the classic dish that we would do on Sunday.

Family, you know, everyone would eat after church, you know, and that was classic, doing a leg of lamb roasted with a gratin of potato as we're going to do today.

You see I have a whole leg here, the whole leg, what we call a gigot in France, and I get it with the hip bone here, the whole thing.

So you can buy it with or without the bone.

The first thing that I'm going to do is to remove that bone.

Taking a piece of meat here.

That piece of meat at the end that I'm cutting now is actually the end of the filet, you know?

You have to watch when you buy that on the market.

You know, very often people are a bit afraid of boning out something like if it was something very, very difficult.

It's a question of following the bone, and the bone here you can do a soup with it.

You can do the scotch- For example, we'll do a scotch barley type of soup with the lamb bone.

So that big bone that we call the pelvis bone can be cleaned, it can be frozen and you can use it.

You see the end of it here.

In that socket, that is the end of the femoral bone here.

So this is removed and usually, as I say, you take all the fat out of it and defrost it, and freeze it, rather.

So what we do here, taking as much fat as possible from the underneath.

Then I turn it on the other side to remove the fat on this side.

This is the hip, part of the hip.

This here where you basically have a layer of fat.

You see there is not munch really on this side here, you just have here the fell or the tail, they call it, that type of silver skin, you know?

But on this part here, there is a lot of fat and you want to remove it because we are going to put a topping on top of it, and if you put the topping on top of the fat, then of course you're going to have the topping, the fat underneath, so that's no good.

Remember that the strong taste of lamb, a lot of people don't like lamb or some don't.

It's because you don't remove the fat enough.

If you don't remove the fat enough, all of this is going to taste strong, you know?

If you remove the fat, the strong taste is already in the fat.

What we do too, at the end of the shank bone here, I'm taking a little piece of what we call la souris in France.

That is, the mouth, that piece, which is the shank, really we call it the mouth.

That you can cook it next to your leg of lamb.

We take it so that at the end we can hold that and carve.

You see that part here is really just the skin.

So this is quite lean.

What we do, we take a little sliver of garlic here.

You know, you can take a clove of garlic and cut it into slivers so that it's kind of pointed so that you can put with your knife, make hole, and put that into your meat.

We flavor the meat like that with little sliver all over the place.

You know, you put a dozen or so.

And this, you know, in France is usually cooked medium rare and that's how I'm going to cook it today.

If you like it well done, cook it well done.

You know, it's fine.

It's your piece of meat, you cook it the way you want.

But conventionally, if no one tell me that they want it in any other way, I would cook it medium rare.

This is what is called a spring lamb, which used to indicate a time of slaughtering, which now indicate an animal between six to nine months old, you know?

So we're going to roast it right on top of that to start it with a little bit of salt and pepper, you know, all around, on top and all this.

And, you know, you do quite a lot with a leg of lamb like that.

That would serve 15, 20 people easy with this, you know?

And the taste of garlic on top.

So we of course don't really need anything except maybe a tiny bit of olive oil I put in my hand, you know, just to rub it on top so that it doesn't stick to start with, you know.

Then I put it upside down this way.

We're going to cook it like that for a little while because we want the crust underneath.

Then we'll turn it on top and we'll put the topping, special topping on top.

And by cooking it on the high oven, this way it melt basically most of the rest of the fat on top.

So now it goes into the oven upside down.

Remember that the only piece of meat if you stop thinking, which can be rare, is a piece of meat, which is a big muscle with fat on top.

What did I do there?

I removed the fat.

If I have, on the other hand, a breast of lamb and it's got a layer of fat, layer of meat, layer of fat, layer of meat, you cannot do it rare.

You have to braise it to melt the fat, you know?

Then that's the only way you can remove the fat by braising it.

So what we want to do on top here is put bread.

Actually, you know, first I can tip the bread and put it separate, but it's even easier to put garlic, shallot, chop of red onion on top and parsley.

So this is my base.

I'm going to chop this, and after it's chopped, (food processor whirring) I will put breadcrumb on top, a fresh bread.

About that amount, four, five slice of bread.

Day old bread, you know?

This.

And that is going to be our topping on top.

The topping to put- And brown, you know, it's going to be beautiful on top of the leg.

Later on when I'm ready to use it, I will put like a tablespoon of oil in it just to moisten the bread so the bread is not dry and doesn't fall off, you know?

But for the time being, this is what we are going to use.

And meanwhile, we're going to work on the gratin, which goes with it, which is a gratin of potato.

And the gratin of potato is also classic.

This is what we call Boulangére in France.

Boulangére is the baker and the Boulangére, of course, is the wife of the baker.

We call that potato Boulangére because in all the time, people would put those gratin, would bring it to the baker in town to put it in the oven for a few hours.

We have potato, we have onion, garlic, and we are going to do a bouquet garni here.

In there, you know, to flavor it.

We're going to put a little bit of oil first to saute the onion that I have there.

We can even put the garlic with it.

Put that to saute and the potato.

I peel the potato.

You can keep them in water after they are peeled, but when you take them out and slice them, don't put them back in water.

If you do this, a lot of the starch disappears.

Even if they discolor a little bit, it doesn't matter.

So what I have here is my flavoring agent, and my flavoring agent, you know, in that piece of cheese cloth, is just that you don't want to put it all over the place because you don't know how to retrieve after.

I have dried thyme, those beautiful bay leaf, and I could even put even a clove of garlic in addition in there.

It's not really necessary.

Or you know what goes well with it is peppercorn, you know, that we can put in the middle here like this.

I have the black peppercorn there.

Now this will give me a lot of flavor in the middle and it's very easy to retrieve.

So here it goes.

Put it this way, attach it with a little string.

And, you know, we do that very often.

Actually, you know, there is place that I've seen you can even buy those so-called bouquet garni.

But as you can see, literally not worth spending a lot of money to do something that you can very easily do yourself.

So here we saute that for a minute or so, and then we put our potato.

Potato goes in it.

We're going to put a little bit of white wine in there.

You know, in Alsace, in the northeast part of France, they do the whole gratin with, with white wine, but here mostly we put just a dash of white wine, dash of salt, because I'm going to put stock, which is totally unsalted.

I have stock here.

Here very lean stock.

You can see that that stock is very lean, a chicken stock or whatever stock you want.

And this, we want to bring it to a boil.

It is basically boiling now for the simple reason that the stock was already hot, and that will go into a gratin dish.

Actually, you know, if you cover this and cook it like that here, it'd be perfectly fine.

The advantage of putting it in the oven is that the juice will evaporate in the oven and concentrate the taste in the potato.

You know, so then that's one of the reasons why we are doing it this way.

So here we have our gratin.

This, everything goes in it.

And this right in the center for flavor and this has to go now into the oven and that will take, you know, like an hour.

You know, it takes a while in the oven for all of that juice to evaporate and the gratin be quite nice and thick, you know?

So we put that in the oven here.

Actually, I put it on the small shelf.

And now our gratin is in the oven.

We have the lamb in the oven, the main course.

Now we have to move to the first course, and the first course we are doing today is scallop.

And large scallop.

The big sea scallop, which I love.

And we are going to do that in a very interesting way with scallion and with a little sauce.

So the first thing that I'm going to do is start cooking those scallion.

Scallion are very available all over the place, very inexpensive and great, you know, flavorful.

You know, all those green vegetables, what you do, just cut the lower part of it and bit of the top if you feel that they are sometimes strong.

Like big one like that, that may be a bit strong.

This, this and then cut the end of it.

That's about it.

You can even keep that for stock, you know?

Those pieces.

This way.

When you're new, this is great to eat just like that anyway.

So I am putting those to cook directly in there.

You see what I have in there is just a bit of water.

I have a touch of water, that much.

I have no salt, nothing.

And that will cook in a few minutes here, covered.

You know, two, three minutes of cooking.

And while this is cooking, we are going to do the scallop.

And look at those scallop, they are very large scallop.

And a couple of them I didn't clean here.

You can see that on those scallop, there is that large sinew, you know, that I remove here, here and there.

So we serve like three scallop per person, and it is quite a lot because those are large, you know?

So those scallop, you want to put a little bit of salt and pepper on top.

And a little bit of olive oil.

We're going to do that just enough to oil it slightly.

We want to do that in a large skillet here, and that skillet has been preheated, you know?

It's a big cast iron skillet.

It's like doing it on the grill practically, you know?

Scallop are quite good for you.

It's very, very low in cholesterol, you know, and you can also cut them and make them smaller than that.

So here, the scallop are cooking like a couple of minutes on each side.

During that time, we want to do a little bit of a special sauce with it, you know?

Done with a strong Dijon mustard, a bit of red wine vinegar, again, cracked paper.

Here we have cracked paper, a dash of salt, and a little bit of olive oil or another type of oil.

You just want to stir it, you know?

You don't care whether the mixture is separated, it's fine and you don't need munch, you need about a tablespoon per portion.

So we have it here.

Next thing I should probably turn those scallop as you can see, which brown nicely now.

See there is basically no fat in this, but your skillet has to be really hot, you know?

You can use a grill like a type of home grill would be basically the same thing.

And now let's check if the scallion are ready.

Yes, as you see, those scallion are beautiful.

Let's see if they are tender.

Yeah.

It could cook maybe one more minute, but that's perfectly fine.

I'm gonna drain them on top of this.

And you know what I can do here is to take a little bit of that liquid from the scallion.

You know, I have basically nothing and extend my vinegarette with it, you know, which is a nice way of making it lighter.

So we have it here, the scallop are basically ready.

We're going to present them and the idea here, this is quite hot, is to bring this around, you know, like a nest, you know, like a type of nest.

You have about three, four scallion per person would be fine here.

A beautiful kind of nest.

We can pick up a couple of our, as I say, three, you know is more than enough because look at the size of those scallop, which are beautiful.

And finally, a little bit of our sauce on top that you can put.

I would put the sauce mostly on the scallion, you know, on the other side here.

Look at that, beautiful.

And for a bit of fanciness, if you want, a bit of paprika that you can, you know, put it on just for color.

And this is the first course for today.

(soft music) The best way to beat egg white for our souffle is in a copper bowl, or stainless steel is fine too, but copper is the best.

You have to clean it, however, because, you know, you have that green stuff, the verdigris and all that, which can be quite dangerous.

So we clean it up with salt and vinegar and that clean up- See, there is a physical reaction between the copper and the egg white and that will acidify the egg white and make it foam a lot.

And as you can see here, that mixture is going to be very, very potent, you know?

So in the kitchen we used to use that mixture.

Vinegar, actually, salt.

I'm not doing the outside here because I don't have time, but the outside is fine.

So we used to do vinegar, salt, egg white and flour to make a paste, you know?

Inexpensive copper polish.

And now it's nice and very shiny and I will have the type of reaction that I need.

As I say, again, if you don't have it, you know, egg white will beat very well in stainless steel also.

So we're doing an apricot souffle.

Egg white only, we're doing that only with egg white, no egg yolk.

I have little pieces of fig for color and texture, a bit of apricot jam, a dash of sugar and dry apricot.

Those dry apricot here, I cook them with a little bit of water.

And this is what we are going to use.

Now we put that juice and all directly into the food processor with the jam, you know, apricot jam.

And that we're going to process (food processor whirring) right here.

It's a very intense puree, you know?

You can, of course, do that also with fresh apricot, but the dry one, I would serve the garnish, you know, the fresh apricot with that because the dry one would have that very orange, you know, strong, very intense, deep flavor, you know, concentrated taste and it's good, I love apricot.

One of my best fruit.

When they are really ripe in summer, they are the best.

Okay, so we have our puree of apricot here.

Clean it up as best as you can.

You don't want to lose anything.

I need this.

That I don't need anymore.

Now what I want to do is put the fig in there.

You'll dice a fig, and, you know, you can slice them or put them in any way you want, you know?

This is the way I did.

And our egg white.

I have five egg white here and we are going to beat them with a big whisk, what we call a balloon whisk.

And what you do first, you go very fast and you go fast to break the white.

You don't break the white, what happen is that they just slosh around like a wet towel.

Then I go slowly.

Notice that you can hear it.

(whisk tapping rhythmically) I lift it up, let it fall on itself, and by with that technique, of course, I go much, much faster than an electric mixer.

You see that and you try to move only your wrist so that you don't get too tired.

You get tired a little bit with one hand, you change with the other hand, you know?

And they should be nice and holding a peak.

Done this way, you know, it's not going to take you much more like a minute, minute and a half to beat egg white.

And you get the best volume this way also.

See those egg whites are basically almost ready.

They are ready when they hold a peak.

Kind of like this, you see?

At that point, I put a little bit of sugar that will stabilize the egg white and we tighten the white.

We call that tightening the white.

Then we put some of it, about a third of it, in the mixture with the whisk and you mix it with your whisk.

What is the reason for that?

Because often the mixture is too thick and if you try to fold them in, they don't fold in, you know?

So the best way is to put a bit of the egg white in it, which will lighten the whole mixture, and now it will fold very easily.

And notice the way that I'm folding here, I'm folding with the right hand.

I'm not moving the right hand the same motion.

The left hand is turning the bowl.

This is what we do here.

Now we have the souffle mold.

You want to fill it up.

This is a six cup like souffle mold and I just fill up the mold here.

That's good.

And we want to decorate the top a little bit.

I may have to do that on the side here.

You spread it out with a spatula to have it smooth.

Then after, with the spatula, you do a little bit of a design like this.

I have to hold it underneath.

If in your design, you get some leftover here, you put in the center of it to do a little bit of a cap.

And with your thumb, you make a little line on the outside so that it has a neat margin to start, you know?

And this is it.

The souffle, you know, you can do it 45 minutes to an hour before you put it in the oven.

But the best is really to put it in the oven just when you're ready.

So here it is in the oven.

And while I'm here, I'm going to remove my gratin of potato, which I have here.

Remember those potato cook for over an hour.

You would want to remove that little bag now here and maybe put a little bit of parsley on top.

Then now what we want to do is, of course, see our lamb.

And remember, the lamb I put in the oven, it brown here on this side.

I want to turn it on the other side.

Watch out, it's hot.

And this is the time when I'm going to put all of that beautiful mixture on top here.

You can spread that out all over nicely.

And that goes back in the oven for a good 30, 35 minute.

I have one which is ready right here.

As you can see, it has picked up by then a beautiful color.

So we're going to carve it on top of this, put it there, or I could put it directly, oop, it's hot, on top of my serving platter.

I don't even need a carving board.

And carve it there.

And it should be nice and pink.

Well, the idea is to hold it with the hand of your hand here.

You know, you hold this and you carve portion here and I think it has a beautiful color.

I'm gonna serve you a plate of this right here with the potato.

So again, you know, I can see the little sliver of garlic in it, you know?

Put it right there.

And I like the end piece of it.

The end piece is a bit more cooked.

But I love that piece, so I would put it there.

And this, I can serve quite a lot with this, you see.

I have this a bit of the natural juice or a bit of that crumb, you know, that you put on top.

And the potato.

I wanted to serve some potato with it right here.

This is a real country type of dish, but elegant, you know?

That you will get in a nice bistro in Paris.

And this is our main course of the day.

A souffle always make a dramatic finish to a meal, you know?

And look at that, there is always a certain amount of suspense in the making of a souffle, you know?

Never know exactly the way it's going to come out.

So we put a bit of powdered sugar on top of that.

You can do without.

Directly serve it and we always say that you have to wait for a souffle, you know?

The souffle doesn't wait for you.

And here we have to the dining room, our souffle, which is really stunning.

And with that, of course, we have our scallop.

Remember those very elegant scallop that we did large with the scallion around, that light sauce on top?

And the leg of lamb, classic leg of lamb.

You can leave it whole in the dining room so you can carve it in your dining room or cut it, the gratin of potato with it.

The salad, of course, and the souffle.

And with that, the classic wine with lamb is a Medoc.

And we have a Medoc here made of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot, a great wine from the middle part of France.

I'm sure you're going to try that dinner or you should try one dish at the time.

You will love it.

Your friends are going to love it and your family will enjoy it.

I had a great time cooking it for you.

Happy cooking.