- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

The first rule of good cooking is, don't be afraid to break the rule.

There is nothing conventional about today's menu, starting with homemade pork sausage with just as lean a chicken, served with a healthy lentil and potato salad.

Our vegetarian main course, zucchini boat with a mushroom and zucchini stuffing, is served in a bright, red pepper, tomato sauce.

Even classic chocolate mousse become unconventional with its wonderfully rich and completely fat free.

All this, plus a very special surprise guest, I'll help you become an unconventional cook too on "Today's Gourmet."

(bright jazz music) We are doing an interesting menu today, a bit unconventional, unconventional because it really expressed what we are doing in "Today's Gourmet," which is less, more for less, or that is, we are cutting down on calorie to a certain extent and trying still to get the best taste that we can out of things.

And the good example is sausage.

And here we have, as you can see, pork, and those are pork chop.

I use pork filet that I have already cut here and pork chop, and I de-fat that of all visible fat, you know, to get it as lean as possible.

Remember that conventionally, you're going to have close to a third of the weight in a sausage.

And a conventional sausage is going to be fat.

So this is going to be very, very lean.

Of course, when it's very, very lean, it tend to be dry.

So we'll do something to avoid getting it dry.

Have about two third of the meat, which I do in little pieces of about quarter of an inch, and the rest of the meat, about a third of it.

I put that in the food processor to do like a mousse.

And the mousse that we do, very often we put cream, egg, that type of thing, which I'm not doing here.

I'm putting ice.

Why am I putting ice?

I'm going to explain to you, the ice is a filler, and give moisture into the meat.

When you do, oops, when you do a frankfurter, makes a lot of noise, when you do a frankfurter, you use beef.

And in that beef, you put ice and seasoning, and that type of mousse is transformed into what we call hot dog or frankfurter.

If you are not putting any ice in it, then your frankfurter would be hard like a rock, just like a meat bowl.

If you don't put anything in the meat bowl if you don't put any filler and all that, it's going to be dry.

So what I have here is salt.

You have a fair amount of salt.

We have peppercorn here and the peppercorn, we're going to crush it with the back of something flat, to have what we call mignonette.

The mignonette are those crushed peppercorn that you have in sausage, you know, fresh in there.

Then I'm putting a clove of garlic.

In this clove of garlic, you chop coarsely, and the garlic will give you a lot of flavor, especially if you dry the sausage.

Remember that those sausage could be dry, and you will have the regular, standout dry sausage.

And then I'm adding here, a little bit of potassium nitrate, which is salt pepper, in like, air of a teaspoon.

This will give a beautiful red color in your sausage.

Some people may object to it, then don't put it in, but your sausage is going to be a bit gray.

And I have about two tablespoon of a red, sturdy red wine.

That's my seasoning in there.

You thoroughly mix it.

And what you want to do, of course, with that after is to cure it.

Cure it.

That is, you just let it stand.

We're going to wrap it up and after, let it stand at room temperature, or rather refrigerated.

What am I saying?

Refrigerated.

And you can leave it a couple of days, I would say two days so that it develop all of the taste that it should have.

We used to put that also in casing, in a regular casing.

Here, we are doing something else.

You have all kind of seasoning that you can have in there.

In fact, I see I have some walnut that I forget here.

I can add my walnut, doesn't really matter.

I can put them on top, make them a little bit with this in there with my plastic wrap.

And again, fold that gently.

Okay, to do my sausage this way, first in plastic wrap.

Then after that, I put that into a piece of aluminum foil.

The best way to do it, this way, the sausage is about, I had a pound of meat by the time I had all the other ingredient in it.

That would be about 14 ounces.

You put that into, when you're ready, after three days, you'll have to let it cure like three days in the refrigerator this way.

You put it directly into cold water, about seven, eight cups of cold water.

So it doesn't come to the top when you poach it, put a lid on top of it so the weight goes in, you bring it to a boil, lower the heat as soon as it boils to about 180, 190 degree and poach it 10 minute, then leave it for like 20 minutes into the hot boiling water.

That will be the way of cooking the sausage.

And with that, we're going to do some lentil and have different type of lentil here.

Those are actually yellow and green split peas.

They are not lentil, but people often confuse them.

This is the lentil there, we call the green lentil dupree from France.

and the regular lentil.

For there, you know, you would wanna wash it.

I have three quarter of a cup of lentil and I would put that into about two and three quarter cup of water, a dash of salt, a lid, and that's it.

You cook it, bring it to a bowl, cook it about 45 minutes.

So we're going to do a lentil and potato salad, and I cook those potato in boiling water.

You see those potato are actually unpeeled.

You can peel them if you want.

They should be soft.

What's important is that as sooner they are cooked, what you want to do is to remove the water so that they don't soak into the water.

And now they are nice and smooth this way.

The lentil here that we have now cooked, or the lentil that I had, shouldn't use that spoon, the spoon from my meat.

And you want to put seasoning in there.

I have some chopped onion in my salad here.

I have a lot of herbs, you know, different type of herbs that you can put in it.

I have garlic and this is a classic salad.

The potato salad, you know, potato salad and lentil.

And with that, some scallion that I'm putting here, give you color.

And it's better if you mix your salad lentil as well as potato when they're still warm, you know?

About half a cup of this in there.

And the seasoning for this now is going to be a bit of salt and some olive oil, bit of olive oil and some red wine vinegar.

And that's basically what we wanna mix together and serve with our sausage.

So I have that mixture right here, but a beautiful color.

And as I say it, so much better when it's lukewarm.

I wanna put it this way, arrange my salad on top of it here.

I may, if I have too much, keep some salad and put it on the side.

Serve it separate.

And finally, our sausage, this one has been cooking the amount of time that I told you.

Be sure to remove the paper around, and watch out.

Sometimes, there is some water in it, still hot.

As you can see, this one has cured a couple of this.

So it has a beautiful color.

Let me put it in there 'cause there is liquid in here.

And slice your sausage.

It's a very lean sausage, as you can see now.

You have to slide the whole thing.

We can arrange it on top.

Now the whole sausage with maybe a little piece of green.

And this is our first course for the menu, today.

(bright music) We are going to do a meringue chocolate mousse, contrary to this conventional meringue or chocolate mousse, rather, which has a lot of cream and butter in it.

This one, we start with half a cup of sugar and a little bit of water, just enough to moisten the sugar.

And you want to bring that to what we call a soft boil.

That is about 240 degree, where the sugar starts forming a little boil already.

So that would be the base of a meringue.

We're going to do what we call an Italian meringue, like a bowl of frosting.

And with this, what we're going to do, other seasoning, is first, espresso.

I have a strong espresso here.

This is nice and hot.

And in the espresso, we are putting cocoa powder, unsweetened cocoa powder.

That's where our chocolate come from, you know, that we're going to dilute in there.

And a little bit of gelatin.

I got this one.

And we want to mix this up, at least for the gelatin, the gelatin to be totally diluted.

See what we're going to do here, I think I may need a little more coffee there.

And what you want to do is to mix it together.

I know it's hard enough that the gelatin is diluted, so that's fine.

At that point, you may want to cool it off a little bit.

You can cool it off at room temperature.

There is no big, big area.

But for us, I may cool it off directly a little bit in the ice here to go faster.

And with this now, let me look at my meringue and my caramel, or it's not really a caramel, it's just sugar and water that, as I say again, should come to a boil and boil a couple of minutes to form that type of boil stage.

And then we start beating the egg white.

I have three egg white here, and the egg white can beat them by hand, of course.

But this is a very handy, easy machine to use.

Don't do it in an aluminum pot.

You're going to have problem if you do it in an aluminum pot.

So you will have a physical reaction with the aluminum on the outside, which is going to make the white flat.

You want something more acidic.

In fact, in there, I could put a little bit of lemon juice, lemon juice or something like that, just for acidic taste.

But I don't need it.

It look perfectly fine, there.

So I want to bring that to a stronger, you know, a nice peak if you want.

And look at my sugar.

I think my sugar is about ready now.

So what I would want to do is to pour that slowly in there as you are adding this, like an Italian meringue, you know?

There we are, and I have all my sugar in it.

So your boiled frosting is in there.

Okay.

It holds a nice peak.

As you can see, I can even use that whisk to make sure that everything is nicely mixed together.

And now let's see if this is cold.

Oh yes, this is nice and cold.

I mean, it's cool enough so I can add it to it.

I'm going to use this directly with the whisk to put this in there.

Of course conventionally, you know, we would use whipped cream.

Here, I have the meringue.

Okay, more chocolate.

See, the cocoa powder is going to be very strong in test.

Remember, the cocoa powder does not have any sugar in it.

But there, my three egg whites should give me three cup of beaten egg white.

And you can mix it by hand.

It's perfectly fine to do it with a whisk.

It's a bit less delicate, but it's okay.

And with this, I wanna put that into a mold.

You know, you let it come to a peak like this and that has to go in the refrigerator, I would say it can stay overnight, but at least for a few hours.

With that, I'm going to put that in the refrigerator and I have another one done here.

Notice that after it's cool enough, I cover it.

You know, you don't want to cover it before, you don't want it to touch the one it's going to stick.

And this one has been there a few hours, and now it's set enough.

I can see the caramel, the chocolate mousse is holding.

I can serve a couple of piece like this.

This is a kind of chocolate mousse indulgence without cream, egg yolks.

So you can dig into it and we can garnish that with a little bit, maybe a crystallized violet that you can do yourself or buy, and maybe a few rinds of lemon.

Lemon rind will go well with the chocolate, also.

(bright music) I am working with my favorite sous chef, today.

Actually, Claudine is going to be the chef.

Claudine, my daughter, will be the chef today.

- Well, I don't know about being the chef, but I'll do my best.

- Okay, here is that we're going to do, to start with, we're going to do zucchini boat.

See those little thing like this?

We're going to empty them.

I think you've done that already.

- Yep.

- And you can use one of those teaspoons, and that's fine, but it's a little more difficult for that melon bowler.

So, you know, try to keep it almost flat and do like a roll like this.

I mean, the idea is to have a shell on the outside, not to make any more hole in it than you should.

I mean, if you make a hole in it, just say, "Well, my father did that one."

I'll say the same thing, you know?

So it's about all right, like this, you know?

You wanna try your hand at it.

- Okay.

- And, you know, when we use all that stuff, put it in there.

All the inside, we're gonna use that in the stuffing.

So we wanna go, we put this one here.

Put our small one.

That's good.

- [Claudine] Do I have to go?

Oops.

- [Jacques] That's good.

- [Claudine] There we go.

- [Jacques] Good thing you cannot cut yourself with that.

- [Claudine] Yeah, this is good.

This is my kind of cooking.

- [Jacques] You cannot cut yourself.

- [Claudine] Anything that I can't cut myself with.

- [Jacques] You can't use the other one.

So what I'm going to do while you're doing that, finish that up.

There is another one that you can cut into after.

I'm going to cut some onion here.

I have some mushroom, have those large, dry mushroom, which have been reconstituted in water.

Those are large shiitake mushroom, the best for me.

Those are, remember, I do them in salad.

- I love those.

- The croissant in them, you know, broken on top like this.

Those have a lot of taste.

I mean, it's like a stick, you know?

'Cause this is our main course today, right?

- [Claudine] Mhm, I love those mushrooms.

They're great.

- [Jacques] No meat.

- [Claudine] Nope.

- [Jacques] You like that as well as meat?

- Yeah, because they're so chewy and thick.

It's almost like a piece of meat.

We've done them on the barbecue, too.

They're really great.

- [Jacques] Oh yeah, that's true.

That's true.

Your mother likes that too, yeah?

- [Claudine] Yep.

- Okay, so are you doing all right?

- There's one.

How's this?

Is this good?

- This looks pretty good, yes.

It looks better than mine.

- [Claudine] Oh, well I don't know about that.

- You're trying to make me look bad.

Okay, why don't you try to do another one, then?

Okay.

So I have about nine mushroom here.

Okay.

It's good to work together, you know?

Because when something go wrong, you can always say the other one did it.

I didn't do it.

- I'll take the blame.

- And while I'm going to put that in there, I have some onion here.

I got a cup of onion with a little bit of olive oil.

You see the base of the stuffing.

You know, something, this, a little bit of salt and I want to put some water, the water of the mushroom here, because that's going to reduce and that water will reduce and intensify the taste.

I could put basically all of the water in it.

In any case, you don't want to throw the water if you have any left over.

It's very good.

Use it for a sauce, or use it for a stock, or do something with it.

So here we are.

We're gonna do this.

Oh, you practically finished.

You see, this one, you can do with this.

- [Claudine] Is this deep enough?

Or do I have to go deeper on this?

- [Jacques] No, that's good.

- [Claudine] Okay.

- With, you know, the off teaspoon in aluminum here.

Okay, we put those stuff in there.

And you know what we're going to do?

We're going to do a sauce with that.

And the sauce is going to be done with this.

So why don't we cut that tomato and put it directly in the food processor.

That's it, in pieces.

During that time, I'm gonna chop a little bit of garlic to put in my recipe here.

For the garlic, I'll put it directly into the inside of the zucchini here.

Right?

And that's ready to go.

Now this in my sauce, you can cut that in half.

I'll get rid of the seed and the stuff.

Yeah, break that into pieces and you can add it to it.

These are very simple sauce.

Huh?

- Do I cut it or break it or does it matter?

- Cut whatever you want.

- Okay.

- [Jacques] Okay.

Use your knife.

That's good.

I'm cleaning up your table, you know?

- Thank you.

- Okay.

And then now, going back to this, this has to reduce more.

I mean, I would want to reduce the juice until there is basically no more juice left.

And then you add that to it, a bit of paper.

I'm covering it up, and that's it.

You cook it until it's nice and tender, and then you let it cool off.

This is what I have here.

You wanna process that thing over there?

- Okay.

I'm gonna add a little bit of water to this now.

- [Jacques] Yeah, you go ahead.

Just put it in.

- [Claudine] And what, a tablespoon?

- [Jacques] And a little bit of oil.

Okay.

Good, good.

Turn it, turn it.

- Okay.

- All the way.

And we put a good leg there, put a bit of salt in there.

- Is that good?

- I think it's about fine.

So, good.

The other way.

Terrific.

See, this is the sauce is all emulsified salt, past like that.

Just put the whole thing in there.

- [Claudine] This is a beautiful color too.

- [Jacques] Yes.

I'm going to bring it to a boil.

It's going to be even redder than that.

Bring it to a boil, dash of salt in it, cover it, and bring it to a boil.

That's it.

Then we have to stuff this.

You wanna bring me, yeah, this is going to be easier with this, now.

What we have to add first is a bit of breadcrumb.

Those are dry breadcrumb and leftover, and a bit of Parmesan cheese.

Do you wanna mix that a little bit?

Have to give you some parsley, some herb to put in there to give some color there.

See, I always give you the hard thing to do because when you make that, the bowl is too small, it goes all over the place.

- I'm just not as neat as you were.

- [Jacques] Well, I don't know about this.

Okay, so you make this, what we are going to do is actually to arrange all of those in there.

You have in a cotton dish or anything like this, I think you did too many of that, three, six, seven, eight.

That's right.

The recipe's for eight.

Fourth thing.

That's good.

And all right, you wanna hold this, hold it on top of the table there.

And I put it in there.

It's easier with the vegetable and it's good, what you did here.

You turned the side of the bowl and by turning the side of the bowl, the side of the pastry bag, then it makes it better.

Now look at that.

Here, why don't you put a little bit of a Parmesan cheese on top here.

- [Claudine] Okay.

- Here.

It's underneath here.

Here, I gave it to you to do and it's underneath.

Okay, let's fill up all my things.

Here, I'll do it because now you put that right on top.

And now I'm gonna put that in the oven.

Why don't you bring the platter?

I'll bring another one.

So this is going to cook in the oven around 400 degree, 20, 30 minutes.

And those are here.

It's right there.

I'm gonna put that there.

You can start arranging some on top with this.

And my sauce there is not ready.

Of course, I have one which is ready, boiling nicely here.

And that's what we are going to use.

Go ahead.

Keep putting some in it.

I'm going to put some of the sauce in the bottom of the pan like this, you know?

It's a beautiful red color.

Look at that.

- [Claudine] Yeah.

- [Jacques] Okay.

And we have eight to arrange on top.

- Not quite as good about this as you are.

- So I'll give you a hand for that.

Okay, we'll take them this way.

See?

Take it with both hands like this, or then with a flexible spatula, you know?

- Yeah, I was trying to get underneath.

- Very good.

You wanna put one?

- Yeah, this is easier.

- Easier.

So in the kitchen, you know, you use your hands.

You don't tell anyone to use your hand.

I have a bit of shears on top.

We can arrange that on top.

Does that look good?

- That looks beautiful.

Good enough to eat.

- You did a good job.

- Thank you.

(bright music) - We have an unconventional menu today.

Did that with an unconventional cook.

Was good to have you in the kitchen, working.

- Well, thank you for having me.

- Yes.

- This was fun.

- But first, you know, before you came, I did the sausage with the potato and lentil salad.

Those potato lentil are very high in fiber.

And remember that that sausage is extremely low in fat, so it's very good.

Seasoned with a bit of red wine, garlic, and so forth.

And then what did we have at the main course now?

- Well then we made the zucchini boats, which are stuffed with shiitake mushrooms and onions and herbs.

And we made this great sauce that goes with it, which is tomato and red pepper.

- That's beautiful sauce, huh?

- Yeah, it looks beautiful.

- There's almost no fat in it, vegetarian meat.

And we start with a piece of meat.

We continue with that and then a salad.

And with that, what do we have there?

- We have chocolate mousse.

- [Jacques] The chocolate mousse, that's it.

And the chocolate mousse again, no cholesterol, no fat in it.

This is done only with Italian meringue and bitter cocoa powder.

So I think we deserve a glass of wine or so.

- I think so, yes.

- We have a Moulin Vent.

And as you know, the Moulin Vent, you know, from Beaujolais, where I come from, where your grandmother, where your aunt is, you know, I'm sure they'll be happy to have a glass with us, but they are not here.

So we'll drink by ourself.

Thank you for working with me.

Thank you for watching, and happy cooking.