- Hi, I'm Jacques Pépin.

Cooking classic food in a modern way is no great mystery.

If you apply some basic common sense principles, you can reduce fat and calories and still enjoy great flavor.

I'll serve grilled swordfish with a creamy sauce that tastes rich, but it's made with no fat yogurt and intense seasonings.

Poached turkey breast served in a rich stock of vegetable and mushroom is moist and flavorful.

Even rice pudding, one of my favorite childhood comfort food can be made with no fat milk and a colorful fruit sauce.

It's all a matter of addition and subtraction.

Explore the light side of classic cuisine next on "Today's Gourmet."

(bright jazz music) (bright jazz music continues) Today we're doing a very interesting menu, and you can see already on the table that is going to be interesting.

The light side of classic cuisine.

And I want to start with swordfish, which is a beautiful fish.

Look at that fish about four inches thick here.

The whole fish has been cut, and that piece is about 10 pound.

And what we are going to do here, is to cut one quarter of it.

Here, I would do at least four steak in one quarter.

So you would do easy 16 steak with this.

This is the center cut of the swordfish, and as you can see, an absolutely gorgeous piece of meat fish.

Look at that, the center.

The swordfish itself is very rich, very velvety, but you have to be careful not to overcook it.

If you overcook it, it become dry like a piece of leather, you know.

So we wanna remove that skin also.

Remember that this is part of the fatty fish, which are high in Omega-3.

That is an oil which tend to dissolve cholesterol, so it's good.

A bit less rich but quite nice, however.

So here what we have is, I'm going to do, yeah, I'm going to do four steak out of this.

And those steak are approximately between five to six ounces each, you know, about, so that's an hefty portion, actually.

For a first course you could have it slightly smaller.

Some people will tend to remove the red flesh that you have inside, which actually are more of the fatty tissue.

This is where most of the Omega-3 tend to congregate, so it'd be fine.

And when you buy, like when you buy tuna in market, you have the dark meat, you have the lighter meat.

I tend to look, this one is very moist also, so I would not remove that.

So what we wanna do there is to put a little bit of salt on top of it on each side.

And, of course, if I had a bit more time than I had today, I would take the time of letting it marinate, which I am not going to do today.

I will show you a way here that we put a minimal amount, a little bit of a monounsaturated fat I have here.

I have canola oil that we put right on top, and this one on each side.

And sprinkle it with a little bit of a mixture of Herbes de Provence, which is a mixture of different type of herb including thyme, oregano, rosemary, and so forth.

And what we are going to do here is to put it to cook right away, but conventionally you would want to maybe marinate it for an hour or so, which would develop maybe a bit more taste, but it's perfectly fine this way.

So let's put that directly on the grill.

I have a grill which is very hot here that I did ahead.

And, of course, it always smoke a little bit, but very often, you know, you may want to do your grilling outside if you have a grill which work outside, but sometime it's not always possible.

So we have that grill that you can sit directly on the stove and it's great to do inside the house.

And after our first cook, while it's cooking because it has to cook a good two-and-a-half minute on each side approximately.

And preferably to rest a little bit after.

What we are going to do while it's cooking, I am going to do the second dish, which is the turkey.

And the third thing that I have here, I have boiling water.

And in that boiling water I'm going to put those mushroom that I have put to soak.

Those are dry shiitake mushroom that you reconstitute in water.

And you see I put them in water here.

You have that beautiful juice from it.

You can see how dark it is.

That's going to flavor my soup also.

This is a very light soup because it is done with the breast of turkey.

So I chop that carefully, or coarsely rather, into pieces.

You don't have to worry too much about this.

Put them in my water.

My water is boiling already to go faster.

And then, of course, I don't want to disregard the juice here, which has a lot of taste.

So I pour the juice in it.

Just pour it slowly so that you don't put the end of it.

The end of it that I can see has a little bit of gritty sand, or whatever, so keep the end out of it.

And now this is the base of our stock.

In that base we put a lot of vegetable to flavor the stock.

And I have different vegetable here.

As you can see I have leek here, a beautiful leek.

This is a coarsely chopped leek.

I have turnips.

See the white turnip that you have here.

Sometime you can put yellow turnips.

It's perfectly fine too.

You could also put cabbage, other type of vegetable.

On the other hand, if you don't like turnips, or cabbage, put another vegetable.

I have celery and carrot.

All of those go into our stock here.

So we'll have a very strong vegetable stock here, which is the base of many dish that we do now.

Of course, very light, very low in calorie, doesn't have just water in it.

And, of course, a dash of salt onto this.

You have to season it.

And we want this to come to a boil.

And boil for a good five, six minute, before you continue the recipe.

Let me check on my steak here, it's beautiful, look at that.

That grill is great, works nice.

Be sure that your grill is very clean.

And now I say again, be sure that you have a good exhaust.

That's what's important in your house, or do it on the outside.

So while this is cooking on the outside, let's go on with the turkey here.

And I have, as you can see here, a breast of turkey.

Breast of turkey is, of course, very low in calorie, lower in saturated fat than chicken, or other thing.

So what you do first you remove the skin.

Again, in chicken and in turkey about 40, 50% of your calorie are going to be on the skin.

That's where most of the fat is.

So you wanna remove this.

I clean it up all around of any fat, you know, to have a nice strong but very lean stock, you know.

This, I will discard.

And, of course, the stock should be cooking as I say, for a good five minute, five, 10 minute, to develop the taste of the vegetable.

And after that, what you do, you drop that directly into your boiling stock, right in there.

Now what you don't wanna do is to overcook the turkey.

So, basically, on the size turkey that I have, which is about a pound and a half, you bring it to a gentle simmer, very gentle.

And then for about eight minute this way.

You cover your pot, you shut off the heat, and you leave it into the boiling stock.

And I have this one in there.

So it stay into that hot stock and it continue cooking slowly without boiling.

And that tend to prevent it from drying out, you know.

A moist center you want.

I better get rid of that.

When you use poultry, be careful of salmonella.

And you will get salmonella more probably in the cutting, if you have a cut on your finger, and if the poultry is contaminated.

So it's important to clean your finger, and change board when you finish.

I'm going to rinse my hand after this.

(water whooshing) A little bit you would want to do it with soap, but in any case it's important to keep it clean, but what I wanna show you now is how to serve that turkey that I have here.

And this is like a whole dish in itself.

So I'm going to put that right here.

And we're going to serve the turkey in there.

And in there, as you see I have mustard.

I have the cornichon, which is those French sour little pickle, you know, and horseradish.

I even have some fresh horseradish here that you could use.

Now the fresh horseradish, as you see very white inside, and that horseradish you can grate it.

And as you grate it, it will make you cry it's so strong, you know.

So what we're going to do there is just remove that breast of turkey.

Put it directly on the board, and some of the stock I will serve with it.

So maybe I'll put the stock first.

Now you can, of course, serve that individually, but, you know, I can tell you I can smell, especially the mushroom here.

Those shiitake mushroom, those are imported shiitake from China.

They are in most market.

They're really quite inexpensive.

See, I have extra stock, I have quite a lot of stock.

So serve some stock on the side also.

And you would want to serve approximately at least a couple of slice per person of the turkey, which in my opinion is just about perfect here.

You see, just slightly, slightly pink, and I see it's not too, it's not dry at all.

So I put them back directly into the hot stock here, serving it in there, and this is the way.

If you wanna put maybe some vegetable on top for color.

And you wanna serve that directly with your crouton, or the country bread serve it with that.

This is the main course.

Let's go back to our fish and see the way it's cooked.

The way it spring under my finger, I know that it's cooked enough, so I'm going to remove it.

Surely I can use this.

And at that point, if I add, very often we do that in restaurant, marking it on each side, and after it's marked what you want to do, you put it into an oven, about 180 degree or so.

And in that oven as I'm doing it here, the residual heat just a little bit of heat will continue cooking it very gently.

That is it finish cooking itself in the residual heat.

You don't want to overcook the center.

However, with that grilled fish, which you can serve by itself, I wanna show you how to make a sauce that I serve with it.

A very piquant, you know, a very spicy type of sauce which I love, and you can use for other thing.

In that sauce I have different type of thing.

The first thing that I'm going to use in there, I'll put that directly in that little blender, is some jalapeno pepper, and I cut it from around the seed.

The seed in the center are going to be much harder.

The seed actually and the rib of the pepper is, I've been told in the area of 60% of the hotness in it.

So if you don't want it too hot.

And I would advise you to taste it, you know.

Take a little bit like this, or just touch it with your finger and taste the hot.

This one is quite hot, I can feel it, but sometime, you know, you're going to test it, and it's very mild so, you know, test it first.

Then I have two clove of garlic, cut it into pieces there.

I have my other stock cooking here.

I'm going to stop it so it cook very slowly.

And then I have fresh mint.

You see, the mint for me is a great addition.

The mint and the hot pepper go so well together.

The mint give you that type of very cool feeling in your mouth, and the hotness of the pepper on top of it make a great combination, you know.

So we put mint.

With mint I like to put cilantro.

And the cilantro here is also what is called Japanese parsley, or Chinese parsley, or coriandre in French, or coriander in English.

Don't confuse the leaf and the seed.

If you have those tiny round seed which look like peppercorn, those are coriander seed, and it's used in pastrami, making pastrami corned beef, and so forth.

We use it a lot in France too.

And those little peppercorn, or those coriander seed have a very specific taste.

If you take those seed and throw them in the ground, what grows out of it is that green thing that we call coriander, the parsley itself.

And really the leaf itself in my opinion, have a different taste than the seed.

And here I have a piece of ginger.

It's a beautiful piece of ginger here that you cut.

And actually for something like this, you know, if it's clean, you look at it if it's clean outside a little bit, you don't even have really to peel it, you know.

It doesn't matter as we are going to do it to ground it, and so forth, so.

There is some ginger that I use sometime, which I've had in Hawaii, which is slightly greenish, smaller and very tender, and it's used now.

There is another type called Galangal.

You may have seen Galangal, and it's a type of ginger, which is small and quite tender.

So what we're going to do is to make a puree out of this.

Place that thing on top.

(blender whirring) It looks good.

And at that point, this is almost as fine as I want it.

This is when I will add yogurt to it.

We're doing that very piquant type of sauce, you know, with yogurt.

I have one cup of yogurt here.

Of course, except the tablespoon that drop on the table.

I'm a mess in the kitchen sometime.

I know when I'm a mess in the kitchen my wife throw me out, so I watch, but otherwise, I'm a neat cook.

(blender whirring) So you wanna emulsify this together.

(blender whirring) Right into a smooth mixture.

And this is, oh, and I need a dash of salt in there, which I have here, which I will put.

And you will notice that this will have a very piquant type, not only in a beautiful color, you know, with all those herbs in it.

Now this is an ideal dish that I've served, an ideal sauce that I've served many time with grilled chicken, terrific with grilled chicken to put underneath.

As I said, again, you can serve that by itself without the sauce, but it's fine this way.

If you were here you could not eat that.

There is a lot of juice.

See, I can't even put the juice in there here.

What does that tell me?

It tell me the fish is cooked enough, you know, because the fish rest and can releasing some juice, which I mix in there, which is very nice.

So now what I could do is actually putting a little bit of that sauce directly on the plate, that spicy sauce here.

And, you know, you can be lavish there.

Remember it's done with no fat yogurt, so it's pretty, it's quite lean.

And then I would put that piece of fish on top.

I'm picking up that piece here.

And I think the way it look and the way it feel, the cooking is just about right.

Here I'm going to cut a piece just to show you the inside.

And the inside should be just slightly pink as it is here.

And this is the way I would want to serve my fish.

For our light side of classic cuisine, today, we're going to do a creamy rice pudding with fruit sauce, kind of comfort food dessert with no guilt.

In that case there is no cholesterol, and the old classic way, we used to cook it with milk and cream.

And in that way I'm going to do it differently.

And I'm going to do that with a fruit sauce.

And the fruit sauce that I'm going to do here, I do it with cider, apple cider.

My pan is hot already.

About half a cup here and about half a cup of a strong, sturdy, robust red wine here that I have.

You wanna bring that to a boil.

We put some, those are seedless grapes, you know, that you put in this.

And I have a plum here.

You can have other fruit, just cut it around, slice it next to the pit, take the pit with the point of your knife.

We can cut that into little dice.

Again, there'll be slightly different in color than the grapes.

To add to our sauce you can, of course, put another type of fruit if we don't have that one.

Here it is.

And a little bit of a sweetening agent.

Inside I'm going to put a little bit of honey, a couple of tablespoon of honey in there.

You want bring that, stir it, bring it to a boil.

And you wanna cook this about four minute, four, five minute.

It depend on your fruit.

You know, you don't want the the fruit to fall apart, but you want them to be a bit tender.

And then after that we're going to thicken it.

Meanwhile, I wanted to show you here.

See, I have three cup here of skim milk.

You know, with even skim milk here there is nothing in it.

And in that three cup of skim milk, I'm putting a third of a cup of Carolina type of rice.

So it's not much.

It's a lot of liquid for a little bit of rice, but what you want to do to bring that to a boil, put a bit of cinnamon in it.

Let's say I put maybe half a teaspoon of cinnamon.

Bring it to a boil.

You wanna cover it.

And the best way to cook it is to put it into the oven, you know.

In my opinion, this is the best way as it cook from all over, you know, or you can cook it on top of the stove, but 350 degree for, like, 45 minute.

And, basically, that's what it looks like at the end, you know, kind of mushy.

And you can see if it's a bit too thick, even at the end put a bit more skim milk in it because you want it kind of soupy.

As you can see the outside there is a bit burned, but it's okay the way it comes out.

And you see with a third of a cup of rice, I get quite a lot.

It's even a bit burned underneath, but it's okay.

In this I'm putting a few tablespoon of maple syrup, and a dash of vanilla.

Remember, there is no sweetening agent that we put in there.

So you have to sweeten it now.

And even this way it's not really very sweet, you know, it's quite nice.

Now it's soupy as I say.

And this is why we call it this way.

That, of course, after it's been taken off the stove has been cooling off.

This is cold now.

And you would normally, after you take it out of the oven put it in a bowl.

Let it cool off, put it in the refrigerator.

Now this has not been cooking for five minute, but let's suppose that it's been cooking for five minute.

What you would want to do is to thicken it.

I have a teaspoon here of cornstarch, and I put a little bit of cider here, like one teaspoon of cider.

And I'm going to dilute directly into, you have to dilute it with liquid and I could have a little bit of wine, a little bit of water, all this, you know.

I'm going to stop it because you can see this way, and that add directly to this.

You will see it will give you, just stir it as you put in, and it give it a little bit of viscosity in there.

And, basically, that's all there is to it.

You would let your fruit and red wine sauce cool off now.

So now we can serve it.

What you want to do is to put it there.

And I think, yes, I have one of the sauce which is cold now that I have in the back, which has been cooling.

So you put your rice pudding.

You want to serve that cool, you know.

I don't really like it ice cold.

So this way, that type of comfort food, you know, right?

And a little bit of the sauce on top, different color.

As you can see, the wine and this thing will pick up different color.

It's very kind of soothing.

Other garnish, you know, you can serve if you want a little bit of, I like the color and the taste of kiwi, you know, so you could serve a couple of slice of this, or even cut your slice in half, and put them around, or mix them into your sauce.

It'd perfectly fine to put them around this way.

And then maybe a little spring of mint on top.

And you have a beautiful dessert.

Now with this, I have a bottle of wine here.

I wanted to show you how to open a bottle of wine properly.

It's good to have good wine at the table.

You cut it all around here, and remove that part of the top right here.

And this is especially for old bottle of wine where the cork tend to get crumbly, old bottle.

Then you would use that two-pronged thing.

There is one which is longer that you start inserting first, then put the second one next to it, jiggle it like that to get it, then twist it, twist it, whoop, never work on television.

Here it is.

Again pull it back.

You can reinsert your knife by the way.

You do exactly the same thing if you want to re-put your cork in it so you don't damage the cork.

No crumbling inside.

And that's the best way to open wine.

Again, as a kid, you know, when I was a small infant, I remember the rice pudding that my mother used to do, and that rice pudding was part of my memory as a child.

And what I have tried to do today it's a recap of those type of memory.

I think we have a very interesting dinner tonight.

A very interesting meal.

Even though we have fish and meat, it's done in a very light way.

And the piece of swordfish here could be served as a main course.

We have it with that beautiful piquant, and spicy sauce with garlic in it, and hot pepper, and mint, coriander, and so forth.

And then we have that type of pot-au-feu, so like a pot-au-feu in France, which was a boiled dinner, but instead of doing it with meat, as we have done with the breast of turkey, we have a great deal of different type of vegetable.

And finally that type of mushy, well-cooked creamy rice pudding, you know, with the red wine sauce.

This is the idea of "Today's Gourmet," you know, to try to take those old classic, and I'm not a macrobiotic guru, or anything like that.

I'm trying from a common sense point of view to tell kind of old classic recipe and do that in a modern way.

And with that, what can go better than a spicy, well-rounded, full chardonnay from the Santa Maria Valley.

You will enjoy that meal if you do it and that wine also.

And I hope you do it for your friend.

I enjoy doing it for you.

Happy cooking.