- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

- And I'm Claudine Pepin.

- Today, we're preparing a special dinner for my best friend, Jean Claude.

- [Claudine] Pepin, how long have you and Jean Claude known each other?

- [Jacques] At least before you were born, Claudine?

- So, at least 20 years?

- Yeah, at least, yes.

- Okay, let me see if I can guess the menu.

Trout in a hot pecan sauce with deep-fried hushpuppies.

And of course, chicken Jean Claude cooked two ways.

The thighs roasted with an almond stuffing and the breast sauteed with shallots.

And let's see, coffee rum custard with a lime tuile cookies to finish things off in a festive Jean Claude style.

- Exactly.

To join us for a tribute to my best friend Jean Claude.

- Next on "Jacques Pepin Celebrates."

- Today we're doing a very special menu, we are cooking for Tonton Claude, right?

- Very excited to cook for Tonton Claude.

- Yes, Jean Claude is my dearest friend and he's coming for dinner tonight.

Usually he is in the kitchen cooking with me, tonight, he's going to be in the dining room.

So let's do the stuff he likes to do.

So let's start with a couple of tablespoon of water.

- And sugar.

- Sugar, and we are going to start a caramel, which we are going to use for caramel custard.

- With espresso.

- With espresso.

And this will take five, six minutes to cook.

Let's do cookie now.

- Okay.

- Cookie are going to be served with the caramel custard.

So those are tuile cookie - [Claudine] But they're roof tiles, right?

- Yes.

- Okay.

- Yes, because they have the shape of the roof tile, - There's the clay roof tile.

- Everything together.

- Everything together.

- If it doesn't work, that'd be your fault.

- Okay.

- So this is a neat little machine to do the lime and you can flavor it of course with lemon as well as lemon orange, whatever.

Okay.

- Okay.

- Yeah, you go ahead.

I don't think we can really do much more than like three cookie.

They should spread, you know?

- Okay, so I'm gonna put some almonds on top of this now.

- You can do that, but it's a little bit easier to spread it without having the almond in it.

- Oh, okay.

- And they have to have about the same thickness.

So the way they won't cook at the same speed, you know.

- Okay.

- But now another way of doing it here, help put that and then you can spread that in this way.

You like that bed?

- Oh yeah.

What's nice about this is I can actually feel how thick they are and it's a little bit difficult for me to feel that with the spatula, - But it's- - Although mine's still way too thick.

- It's actually Tonton Claude who showed me that.

And you wanna put them in the oven.

I've got some in the oven now, you can see on that type of thing, nothing stick.

So they'll come out very easily except now.

Ah, they are softing, so that's good.

So you can put them in there and it'll give you the shape of a tile, right.

- You can put one of them on here and it will give you the shape of this cup.

- Shape of this cup.

You have to be gentle with this, you know?

And it's going to, it get hard, you know, pretty fast 'cause of the sugar and that it can caramelize, you know?

Okay.

So let's just add the caramel here.

You can see the caramel, the bubble that it has now.

The stick bubble like that of caramel.

While this is finishing cooking, I have two cup of milk here and a little bit of cream, like half a cup.

Let's put the eggs in it.

I see that you know how to break your eggs properly.

- [Claudine] Hope I've learned something.

- Yeah, you break the eggs this way on something flat because if you break it the other way here against something like that, it goes, the shell goes into it and can put some bacteria into it or break the yolk.

So that's it.

- Okay.

- Sugar.

So you really have to beat this, you know?

Okay.

- Okay.

- Now this is espresso, you know, and you can see the way we did it here, there is different way of doing it.

I just put some good dark espresso, boiling water on top of it.

It goes right through and I have a very, very concentrated coffee here.

That's what you use.

- And I'm gonna put some rum in here as well?

- Yeah.

Now look at my caramel.

Caramel is indicated by a color.

And now we can put it in there just in the bottom of my pan.

- I'm gonna put this here so it's closer to you for the milk.

- Okay, I'm putting that in there.

Put your bowling milk there.

- It's nice and frothy.

- Yeah, you don't have to worry about it too much.

And we cook that into a bath of water, what we call (foreign language).

You don't have to put the water now.

I'm putting it to leave it a few seconds more so the caramel can harden.

Okay, now we strain it on top.

You don't actually have to strain it on top, but very often, we may have little pieces of eggs in case Claudine didn't mix the eggs properly.

Okay, go ahead.

That's it.

That's all there is to it.

That should go into the oven 350 degree, one hour.

Now you see what happened, Claudine?

Here I put my knife on the edge and then I turn the mold and I keep my knife really glued to the side, you know, put it this way, unmold it, and this usually unmold quite easily, you know.

- It looks so beautiful - Beautiful dessert.

I want to make you see how beautiful the side is.

There is no air bubble.

If the water in the water bath boil, you start cooking too fast, the mixture will expand, the protein will expand all the outside will be like a sponge.

So it has to cook slowly through the air bubble.

What I've done here, I have put some of the same caramel that we add here, put it on top of an oiled bowl.

And you know you can use that other kind of a caramel cage to put on top.

This is just for decoration.

You don't really have to do that.

- I'm gonna grab some lovely flowers to put on top.

- Edible flowers.

- Yeah.

- Okay, here one here, - Eh, there we go.

Done.

- So the caramel custard, only for Tonton Claude the caramel cage, you know.

- And then we can put the cookies on the plate next to it.

- Mmm, dark rum and coffee.

This is a great combination.

So what we have here, I have trout, and the trout has been bought all bone out here.

When they bone it out, however, there is a little line of bone, fill it with your finger there.

- Oh yeah.

- And if you wanna remove it, you remove it with a little plier.

Most of the time it's so much work that people don't, what we do on that one, we call it (foreign language).

We open the mouth of the trot with anger, we open the mouth of the trout to put the tail right through it.

- [Claudine] Okay, if you did that to me, I'd be pretty angry.

- Okay, that's a way of presenting it.

So like that it's flat this way you see.

You wanna put a little bit of butter and oil.

- Butter and oil.

- Yeah, oil.

Put me a little bit of butter.

And this dash of salt, flour, you wanna flour it on each side.

- [Claudine] Did you put salt and pepper?

- I just put salt, yes.

I'll put a bit of paper later.

Okay, bring that in the middle.

Is it hot enough?

Yeah, it's about fine.

Okay, this way.

You can also do your fillet.

You know, just fillet like that, probably easier.

Now again, there is those tiny bone.

If you want to remove the bone here, put that on top.

It makes it easier so it bend and you wanna use a little, you can feel the bone with your finger here.

And look at that, I have three or four there.

I can see.

- Yeah.

- Can you see it?

You know, so you have a bunch of bone.

It does take a little bit of time to do it.

It's a bit more delicate, you know.

A bit of salt, but less of paper.

And you know what, I think I'm gonna cook it only on the skin.

Although to cook it only on the skin, I should not have put flour on the other side so I may have to turn it.

Next.

- So now we're gonna make some hushpuppies.

- Flour.

- Cornmeal.

- Cornmeal.

- Corn starch.

- Baking powder.

- Baking powder.

Butter?

That's just melted.

- Melted butter.

- But not clarified.

- No.

- No.

- Milk, regular.

- Milk, I'm giving you scallion.

- [Claudine] Scallion.

- And I'm giving you that directly in there.

So this is quite easy as you can see to do.

And then I'm going to cut the sheet that piece of jalapeno pepper.

So you know, you put as much of this as you want.

It depend on your tolerance.

Do we have everything here?

- I hope so, oh, there's no salt in here.

- So put a little dash of salt.

We don't need munch.

Well put a dash of paper if you want.

Okay, fine.

Here is what you wanna do to cook it.

And you want to get close to the oil to let it fall into the oil.

Don't try to get away from the oil because it's going to splatter.

This is too hot.

I'll put it on low because you don't want it to brown that fast.

- [Claudine] Yeah.

- I can't think we have plenty here.

Okay, this is doing pretty good here.

Those filets you can see are whiteish around like this.

It indicate that it's almost cooked.

So if I wanna cook them on the other side, I can turn them.

This is a no stick pan, which help, you know?

But otherwise it should not really stick.

No, I can't put that on the other side to cook it too.

And at that point probably cover it.

Let's do the sauce for that.

You don't really have to have a sauce with that, you know, but it's nice.

- We have some pecans and walnuts.

- Put a dash of this in there.

- So this is anise.

- Yes, this is anise seed.

Anise seed, it's pretty strong, so you don't wanna put too much.

Your mushroom, and now I have again, some jalapeno pepper, those are serrano which are stronger.

And fresno pepper, which I don't really know.

Maybe I'll put a little bit of the red one.

Okay.

- This is pretty.

- Maybe remove those.

Certainly the fillet are cooked.

You want one skin side like this?

- Like this?

- Yep.

- And you know what, I'm gonna put some chicken stock in there.

Okay, about two tablespoon of lemon.

You probably need the whole lemon.

And what our trout (foreign language) here, it's not an happy, it's (foreign language).

- It's angry.

- And you know what, this is basically ready.

Now I'm going to remove them.

But instead of putting them on paper towel, as mostly people do, I have learned from a Korean chef friend of mine that the best way anything fried, you put it on a wire rack.

And the reason that the air goes underneath and on top, it dries out, the fat drain because when you put it on a paper towel, then it get all soft and steamy underneath, you know?

- [Claudine] So this will keep them nice and crisp.

- Crisp on both side.

Okay, and I have a little bit of parsley here with my sauce, okay?

I hope he's going to like it.

If he doesn't like it, he'll tell me too.

But now isn't that beautiful?

But actually at the first course you could serve one fillet, you know?

And here we are, we have our angry trout and hushpuppies.

Okay, I know that Claude loves chicken.

In fact, we raised chicken together.

Last year, we had like 50 chicken.

We're going to do two type of chicken.

The leg of the chicken, we're going to stuff it.

And this is part of the stuffing that I'm doing now.

And the breast of chicken is just going to saute it with shallot.

So now we have this, this is scallion, as you can see, you could use onion also.

See, the beauty with stuffing, you know, you can really let your imagination go wild.

So now we have sliced mushroom or coarsely sharp mushroom.

- Do you want salt and pepper in here?

- A little bit, but you know I'm using ham and the ham is relatively salted.

So you wait to put your seasoning.

Take the crust, you know the crust here is a bit tough.

I'm taking it out.

Could put that in your stock if you had a stock going on, you know, and I'm going to chop that coarsely too and that will cook a few minutes.

During that time, I wanna show you how to bone out the chicken.

Now when you do the chicken, you know, instead of trying to do it on the back like this, put the chicken on the side, - Okay.

- Lift up the chicken because just the weight of the chicken itself, you see if I cut with my knife, basically all there is is a piece of skin around.

So it's already halfway done.

Now what I have at the corner of this, I have a piece of oyster, I mean the oyster, that piece of meat here, it's a little, you know, round thing.

And I go and I finish.

Now I bring the knee back up and crack it up and you see here, sinew, I cut the sinew, grab it, pull it out.

We're gonna take the end of it too that goes into our stock and we are going to bone this out.

All of that, we keep, right?

- Okay.

- So I'm gonna bone one out and maybe you can do the other one.

So I will go here following the bone, then I cut a little bit on the other side, cut a little bit on the other side.

I want to kind of open those bone.

As you can see here, I can put my finger underneath like this and slide the knife here, scrape it, cut all around.

You have to cut around the knee, you know, go there, scrape it and basically, that's it.

You know, I have the bone.

And what I have here is that piece.

You know the leg of chicken flat directly on the skin.

Okay, this is about cooked Claudine too.

While you're finishing this, I'm gonna put this in there.

Smells good.

Almond or almond have been toasted, right?

And a little piece of mozzarella cheese, maybe, piece like this.

Surely I can carry it directly into piece here.

Coarsely.

This is a nice mozzarella cheese.

Now we're gonna put that on aluminum foil, you know?

Okay, that's mine.

A little dash of salt on that thing.

Little dash of salt.

And I'll give you your stuffing.

You know the mozzarella is cooking.

You can see that?

Mmm.

That looks good, huh?

Now here is what I do.

Start folding it this way and try to get my skin here.

I have a little bit of the other skin on the other side.

I try to tighten it as much as I can.

And then I bring this around and here, you know, I tighten it this way, close the end of it, close the other end of it.

Stop rolling and tightening the side.

Here we are.

So all of that, you know, you put that into the oven and that would take, how about 30 minutes?

Because then we put it under the broiler to make it brown.

- I have some ready to go.

There's a lot of juice.

- There is a lot of juice.

And you want to keep that juice.

- Okay.

- All the unrolling process, we have a lot of juice, you know, look at that.

This, it's nice.

There is the seam underneath.

So you wanna present that on top.

Now let me put all of that juice.

It's right there, quite a lot of juice.

- Yeah, which is good.

- And we need that juice and that.

Now you wanna put that under the broiler to brown the skin, okay?

And during that time, I'm gonna cook the breast.

So the breast here, I can use actually the same skillet.

And we start with maybe a little bit of oil there.

It's beautiful, virgin olive oil, a dash of butter.

Okay, here is what we do here.

We remove that at the joint, there is a joint here.

The other one at the joint again.

And that great, you can fold that up, remember?

- Mmm, oh yeah.

- And doing a stew of rice or we remove the skin here because we're not going to use skin.

You can remove also the wishbone.

You know, if I go around, got it in the back, I have- - When you roast the chicken, do you usually take the wishbone out or?

- Yeah, it makes it easier.

And then we cut on each side of the central bone here.

Okay?

And you remove those breasts again, you pull on it.

I see the breast of chicken, just the way you get them in the super market.

Okay.

Cut the shallot to tiny dice.

- Okay.

- Okay, now I have to turn this out.

- I'll get you some tongs.

- See, this will cook pretty fast.

Remember when you have no skin, what?

And you know what?

I can put my shallots now all around and the chicken will run on some juice.

And I think if you- - You wanna cover it?

- Yeah, it'd be great.

Cover it and just keep cooking it gently on low.

Now I wanna show you how to use that strange looking piece of equipment we call a mandoline.

So we do a special potato with that.

And that's, I wanted to show you.

I mean, professionally we use it only like this.

People- - Like me.

- By the guard, you know, that's it.

And then you put your potato in there and you do, and then you cannot cut yourself.

- [Claudine] Okay, I like that one.

- You like it, but for me, I'm gonna cut it this way.

And you see if I were cutting that straight, what happens?

Straight it make that type of things.

If you happen.

- That's nice.

- Yeah, no, but if I change direction, if I do it this way, and you see my hand is like this.

- Right.

- If I put my hand like that, that's 45 degree angle to my hand.

This way.

- Ooh.

- This way, this way, this way, this way.

And I- - Oh that's very cool.

- [Jacques] The waffle potato, you know, look at those.

- They're great.

- They're beautiful.

When you do that, of course you keep that into water, wash out the starch when you're ready to use it, then you of course deep fry it like potato chip, you know?

So it's not really difficult to do.

- Do you want me to see if the legs are brown?

- [Jacques] Yes, let's check the leg.

- Oh yeah.

They're nice and brown now.

- Now I'm gonna finish that sauce right here.

Put a little bit of that stock.

You see the stock that we get out of the... - Oh yeah.

- Of the leg and- - From this.

- And I want to thicken that Claudine.

- So you're gonna use- - A little bit of potato starch.

Yeah, a little bit, and stirring it.

It'll thicken on contact as you can see here.

- [Claudine] Okay.

- Okay.

And now we're ready to serve it.

I'm gonna cut it right in the center.

Wait, do you look at that?

That's nice.

Now, you could serve half a breast, you know.

- That's very nice.

- Okay.

Now maybe I'll cut it also so that you can see.

You know, this is just barely cooked inside.

- It's nice and moist though.

- And that's what you want.

Let me put the sauce on top.

There.

You put your potato right there.

You know, usually you wanna do... Okay, I need bunch of watercress.

- Watercress.

- The head of the watercress is stem.

You use it for, to make a soup with it.

It's a real classic dish.

- And this looks- - The chicken Jean Claude and waffle potato.

Wow, look at that, this is beautiful.

- Thank you, papa.

- You have all the lemon here.

- Yes.

- Big beautiful vase, and now what are you- - A friend of mine taught me that if you have a clear vase, what's nice is to have color from the bottom all the way to the top.

And I use some of the limes that you use to zest.

- I see that- - For the tuile cookies.

And we have kumquats and we have lemons, we have everything.

So I'm just gonna finish the arrangement and you just kind find a little spot for it.

- Well this is really stunning, Titin.

- Well thank you very much, Papa.

The table is set.

The flowers are done, I think we should go eat.

- I think we should too.

This is my best friend, Titin.

- I'm so happy you control all the cooking.

I'm sure it's gonna be excellent.

- Yes, but Claudine choose the wine too.

What are we going to have Titin?

- Well, we're gonna have a Riesling, and it's from right outside about south of Frankfurt.

It's a false Riesling.

It's really beautiful, a hundred percent.

And we're also gonna have a Chinon that's from the Loire Valley.

And you can see there's a picture of (indistinct) on the- - 16th century writer.

- Yep, he's a poet.

- Doctor, poet.

- So this is what I chose for Tonton Claude especially with the chicken.

I think it'll be just perfect.

- Great.

- And I think this has nice, bright acidity and it'll be really beautiful with our fish.

- We're going to have (indistinct), the Chinon, right?

- It's 90% (foreign language).

- And I think you want the Chinon, right?

And I know you.

- I love the Chinon.

I can't wait.

- And with that, we are going to start the menu with the trout Jean Claude.

And this is a trout sauteed with, we have some jalapeno, we have some nuts.

We have mushroom in it.

And the chicken Jean Claude.

- [Claudine] And the waffle potatoes.

- We add the hushpuppy, which are going to be good.

And for the dessert for you, because I know you love cream caramel.

- I do.

- And when we do it at home for us, we never do it with the caramel case.

The caramel case is only for you.

- Oh god.

- And we are delighted to have you here with us.

- Wow, I am delighted.

- And we'll do it again, thank you for being here.

- Thank you, thank you.

- And happy cooking.

- Happy cooking.

- Happy cooking.