- Hi, I am Jacques Pepin.

My wife and I both love the flavor of Vietnamese cooking.

It's fragrant, enticing and make my mouth water.

Almost nothing as satisfying on a cold winter night as Hanoi soup, hearty and spicy, flavored with ginger, hot pepper, and star anise.

Oriental savoy cabbage is made with seasoned oyster sauce and rice wine vinegar.

For dessert, banana tart glazed with apricot preserve.

A perfect example of French influence on Southeast Asian cooking.

So join me on the journey to the orient to taste the flavor of Vietnam on "Today's Gourmet".

(serene music) I love to cook pot au feu, we call in France, which is a boiled beef dinner and my wife does an Oriental version of that, A Vietnamese, we have Vietnamese friend who do that type of soup, a type of Hanoi soup.

And this is very filling.

I mean the whole thing is a meal in itself.

The most important part of it however, is to have a great stock.

And that's what we're going to have here by using oxtail, you know, and beef bone and beef shank.

All of this will make the stock and it's very important to have good ingredients.

So what we do, we drop this into a stock pot with cold water.

It's important to have cold water in this.

And what happen is that as the scum come to the top, it's gonna take like 20 minutes to come to the top.

What you have to do is really to skim it.

And this, as you can see I have a lot of scum here, which has been removed to get it as clean as possible and boil it slowly.

If you don't boil it slowly, if you boil it too fast, what will happen is that the mixture will emulsify together.

That if the fat come to the top, if it boil fast, it'll combine the fat and the liquid together, emulsify.

And you're going to have a cloudy stock with fat in it.

So it's important that it boil gently and slowly.

Then the special flavoring that we are floating on top here is this.

And it's quite interesting the way we do it.

And it is actually shallot that we have here.

And ginger.

I have star anise and cinnamon.

And what we do here is to take pieces of a large piece of ginger like that and shallot, you know, and you put it to burn, you know, and when you burn it, it really char, they're all over, I have it here.

This is what we put in the stock with the star anise and the cinnamon.

And that really not only give color to the stock, but flavor it also.

So the stock is important.

After it's been cooking long enough, as we have been here, we have to strain it.

And that's an important part also.

Notice what I have on top here.

I have paper towel.

Paper towel is finer than any other towel.

I wet it, put it in there.

And you want to strain this on top first.

There is some of the meat, of course the meat that you have in there, you want to retrieve some of it.

Like I have here, I have a piece of the oxtail and a piece of the shank, you know, and I have more than that.

But just to show you this.

And we want to strain the stock.

So this stock will come here and as you see, it's nice and clear, transparent, and it go right through the paper towel.

Now you see what happen, if there is any fat in it, the fat will stay to the top and will come last at the end.

So just before the end, you wanna remove this and take it away so that the stock, what's left, it's nice and clear and transparent even without a clarification.

That is the clarification is a process by which you clarify stock.

And here we don't do that.

We just have it a clear stock as defatted as possible.

That's what we have here and that's what basically what you want.

So the stock is the most important part of the soup.

I leave that here.

And now with that stock of course, what we have is the garnish and the garnish here.

First is the meat.

I haven't removed all of the meat here, but that meat has to be picked off the bone, you know.

You remove any fat out of it, you see it should fall apart because that stock has been cooking for a number of hours.

You know, like three hours, three, three and a half hours slowly.

So you wanna remove the meat and this is the shank.

So it should be quite moist without basically any fat.

And you can even remove the meat from around the oxtail, which is also going to be very moist and tender.

This is added again, other garnish to our soup, you know?

And so this is the base that I say that type of, that type of soup is the total meal, you know, in itself.

So with this, we have different type of garnish and vegetable serving with it.

We have rice stick here, I have been sprout, which have been blanche.

We have Thai pepper we have a red onion, we have cilantro, coriander, it's called different thing, scallion, Napa cabbage, lime, you know.

So the first thing that we do, I wanna cook this into boiling water here and those rice stick, you know, cook in there.

It's interesting because you can do them also in cold water, you know, for about 15, 20 minutes.

But I do them in boiling water for a couple of minutes is fine too.

And with this now all of the different type of little garnish that we are going to have.

One of the most important of course is the nuoc mam, what the Vietnamese call nuoc mam, which is the fish sauce, you know, which you have in basically any of the dish, all of the dish that you have.

Then we have lime.

You know the lime is pressed on top of the soup at the end, you know, cut it into wedge like this.

That will be part of it.

Of course it makes a beautiful area on your table to have all of that stuff.

We have the bean sprout, as I say, those bean sprout have been blanched and some people remove the end of it, but I don't find it necessary.

Just blanche it.

Two or three minute that is in boiling water.

Now we have of course the cilantro, so-called coriander that we put there again.

So you know, not only is it very good and a complete meal and a lot of vegetable there, it is also very colorful, you know?

Scallion, red onion, all of that stuff is going to be used.

Maybe you'll remove some of the green if it's a bit strong.

You know, I love to do those type of dish or those type of meal, you know, because not only is it colorful, but it's really satisfying.

I mean the winter type of food that we have here, slice red onion, slice it very, very thin because we put it raw on top of it, you know, on top of the soup here.

So we have that again, beautiful array of color.

I have the red pepper, the hot pepper, I have some cut here already because remember this is really hot.

You know those, I mean you can put a couple there for garnish, different color, but they are very hot and that basically all of our garnish that we put in the soup.

Now let's see if my rice stick should be cooked.

They are here.

I'll put them in that bowl right here.

If they stick a little bit together, you can rinse them under cold water.

Bring that here.

I want to use them right away.

So I'll put them in that bowl.

Here we are.

And now I want to bring that in front to show you the whole soup finished, you know?

When we are here, here and there maybe?

What we want to do here before going to the table, this is, you know, one portion at the time we serve in very large bowl.

This one is really large, but basically remember it's a whole meal in itself.

So we want to put the noodle here.

Up.

And I have another ingredient here, which I left on the table, which is the Napa cabbage.

And that cabbage, you know, you shred it coarsely and you can put another type of cabbage of course, but the Napa cabbage is very good.

That will go on top and that will be enough to cook, you know, the hot stock will be enough to cook this.

So now basically you bring your hot stock, we serve that.

You see how clear it is and beautiful on top, it would really be a large portion.

But we are very generous at my house.

So, and as I said, this is a whole meal in itself.

We serve it here.

You can put a little bit of coriander on top, the red onion, you know, the scallion and so forth.

And of course at the last moment you press your lime on top, always put a little bit of nuoc mam with it.

And this is the whole meal itself.

And with this, what we are going to do is a type of oriental salad, also done with cabbage.

Another type of cabbage here.

What I have is a savoy cabbage one, which is the curly end.

This is a bit tougher as cabbage.

So to do a salad, what we do usually is to remove that center, that central rib, you know, which is a bit tough.

Then you could roll that in itself, you know, to cut this into a fine shredded.

Now often people blanch this.

I find that it's not really necessary to blanch it if I have a whole bunch here, if you do it a bit ahead, so it had a time to macerate and the best way to do it is to do it into a bowl like this.

And I have a whole area of oriental seasoning here because in French cooking we don't really use munch bottle.

But in oriental cooking you use a great deal.

I have some oyster sauce here that we put some of it.

I have soy sauce, a bit of Tabasco, you know, and rice vinegar.

This is going to be the seasoning in there, you know, with of course a dash of sugar, garlic, and I have shredded carrot which give texture, you know, a bit in a type of oriental cole slaw if you want to give also coloring in it.

Then we put that directly into that, into the plastic bag.

You know, it doesn't mess up your refrigerator like this and it is the best way really to marinate it.

You can close it and really shake it here to mix your ingredient together, to mix the sauce.

And this of course should marinade or macerate for a couple of hours at least, you know, and as I said, you know, we do use a great deal.

I mean you have a whole area of different type of bottle that you can choose from when you go oriental cooking and you can use it anywhere.

In America we use mostly ketchup and barbecue sauce.

But there you have sesame oil, hoisin sauce, fish sauce, hot sauce and so forth and all of that.

You know, it's a great addition to your kitchen cupboard because when you want to use it, it's there and you can create sauces and you can create a lot of thing with that.

Now to serve our salad here, all you have to do is basically put it in your bowl, you know?

Right there as I say, you know, if it marinate for two or three hours, then that salad is going to get a bit wilted and the way it should be really, if you want as an addition, you can put little pieces of tomato on top, you know, maybe a little sliver just to give a bit of different color on top.

And that crispiness and that taste is going to go terrific with our soup.

And now the dessert, we are going to do a very French dessert and the French dessert because in Vietnam, very often because of the French influence they do use bread, French bread, you know baguette, they use wine very often with meal and they do french dessert.

What we are going to do here is a little tartelette with banana.

And for that first we're going to do a dough and very easy we're going to do it in the food processor.

Very easy dough with half a cup of flour, gonna use three tablespoon of butter and maybe a teaspoon of canola oil in there.

Then a little pinch of sugar, about half a teaspoon.

And then we mix that together for a few second until the whole thing is kind of mealy and all of the butter is incorporated.

Then we put our milk and I have a butter tablespoon of milk here, see whether it's enough.

It depend also on the moisture in the air, you know, to that form of ball here it's fine.

So this is a really a small amount of dough that we are going to do here just enough for our the dessert.

So I have here the dough as gathered together.

You don't want to work it out too much, otherwise you're going to develop the gluten, which is the part of the protein in the flour, which give you elasticity, you know, but this is the type of a sweet, not really sweet dough, but I mean a dough that I'm going to actually roll directly between plastic wrap like this, you know, again an easy dough to do and you don't mess up the kitchen, which is good.

Okay, so we have the do on this and because haven't worked the dough too much, I haven't developed the gluten, that is the elasticity, I can use it right away.

So I put another piece on top like this, I can practically press it with my hand, you see and I use a pastry roller here and you know if you want the dough cold, you could actually just roll it this way and put it like that in the refrigerator, you know, it'd be perfectly fine.

So this is pretty thinly rolled, you know, maybe 16 of an inch or whatever.

So we have it here and with that we are going to bring the tartelette that is our mold that we are doing that in.

And I have some nice one as you see here.

Those are nonstick, you know, nice tartelette what we call tartelette, the round one.

If they are oval we call it barquette, barquette mean little boat, you know?

So this is the round tartelette.

We are going to do four for our menu and I'm gonna put them right in the center.

Here is what you do.

And remove of course that from the top, turn that here to put it directly on top of it, you see.

Then I may want to press, use this maybe to press that into it before I remove that thing.

If the dough is rested a little bit, my dough is really soft here, it probably would help a bit, but it's fine.

I can still use a bit of that to press the dough inside if I want.

Or if you see it stick, it's starting sticking here.

I may use a little bit of flour, you know, in my hand, one way or the other, I'm going to carry it either with my hand or rolling it on top with your roller so that you have your tartelette.

Now look what happened here, you know?

I did half a cup of flour and even though the calorie in the book is calculated to that half a cup flour, I have at least half of the dough left here, you know, but I could do more.

But there is no way that you can do the exact amount of dough when you do barquette, so maybe I'll use my hand now to press that dough in the corner here so that it's nicely feeding the side of the mold, you know, that we call barquette and what we want to do now on top of this is to put a weight so that the dough hold its shape while it's cooking.

Sometime there is little air bubble in it that you have to press out, you know, so there is different way of doing this.

What we can do is to take some of the barquette and put them in it and press it, you know?

Now I can cook it this way, I can do another one this way and I can cook it this way upside down, you know, so that the gravity pull it down.

Now another way I'm going to use I think parchment paper and of course we put that on top.

Those little gravel, often people put beans or rice, you can use any of those.

But if you live by the beach or you have little gravel like that, you can have them for free and it's heavy enough to hold the dough in place.

What we can do here is to fold the paper into fourths and after in little triangle, cut the end of it and fringe the end of the paper like this so that it fit.

This is the classic way of arranging this, you know, in the middle of this, this way.

The other one, I can do it again with this.

And now the weight on top, whatever weight you want.

In that case here we are putting those little white pebble which are heavy, you know, and this is going to go into the oven for like 10, 12 minutes until the dough set and doesn't shrink anymore.

At that point it can be removed.

And I have one here which has been done.

You can see I did this one with aluminum foil.

So you remove the whole thing with the pebble here, this one is done this way and those here and now you put them back in the oven to continue browning them a little bit to finish them up.

And that can be served just as is, you know, that is you can fill them up with the fruit and that's it in our case here.

What we want to do in addition is a pastry cream.

Now the pastry cream, we are going to use one egg yolk, which I have here.

I break it, I could actually use the whole eggs.

But you have to realize that conventionally we used to do cream with that and we used to put three egg yolk per cup of milk or per cup of cream or per cup of liquid, you know, two tablespoon of sugar, a dash of vanilla and about a tablespoon of corn starch here that I put in there.

So this is a pastry cream.

The pastry cream is going to be different than the custard cream.

The custard cream doesn't have any starch, you know, and the custard cream without the starch, you have to be very careful if it goes above 180 degree, you have scrambled eggs.

In our case here I have a cup of milk and I could actually use even skim milk if I wanted to cut more.

So I put a little bit of a little bit of this to dilute the mixture, then add it back to it and that should come to a boil.

Now I want to pick up all of it here and now I wanna bring that to a boil right on top of the stove.

My milk was hot.

And you see what you have to be careful when you do this, it's going to start boiling on the outside.

So you use your whisk this way, the palm of my hand, you see it in front and turn around like that to drive it in the corner, you know?

It's coming to a boil now and you'll see it'll thicken.

So it come to a strong boil and there the egg doesn't curdle.

Why does the egg doesn't curdle?

Because I have starch.

Starch will stabilize the egg and prevent curdling.

Now it come to a strong boil, it's thickened.

You can see, and now basically it's ready.

So it's ready, we put it in there.

It'll of course thicken much more by the time it's cold.

I cover it with a piece of plastic wrap so that it doesn't form a crust on top.

You push it directly into the cream this way.

And that goes into the refrigerator of course to cool off.

I have another one which is cold here and now we are ready to finish our tarte.

You see it's thickened here and I have my little tart here, my little shell cooked, and I have a beautiful serving platter here with some edible flowers that we can put around.

So this are going to go directly in there and be filled up with the pastry cream, which now is cold, you know?

Remember as I said that the pastry cream is relatively much less calorie than what we used to do.

I have a cup of milk, regular milk, but I could have used a cup actually of skim milk if I wanted to, or as I said before, you could even use it without anything.

As you can see also, I have plenty pastry cream left with one cup.

So you could probably see, serve of six or eight.

Want to arrange them nicely.

And then we do banana there.

Now I have a banana here.

One banana is probably enough for the whole thing and I want to cut it in there.

You can cut it directly and of course you could use any type of fruit that you want, you know?

The classic type of thing.

I could even if I wanted put a bit of lemon juice, if I'm going to leave that for a while, I'll put lemon juice so it doesn't discolor it, you know?

We want to put our banana on top here, about four, five slice per person.

And now here we are.

I love banana in cream like this.

And we're gonna glaze that with an apricot sauce.

The apricot sauce is only plain apricot jam.

The best possible quality apricot jam that you have, that you strain, you know that I have here.

And this is diluted with a little bit of Kirschwasser.

Kirschwasser being a cherry brandy so that it has a nice smooth thing and we want to glaze it on top directly this way.

Don't worry if some of it fall on the trays, it's nice and appetizing.

You could do it even directly on your serving platter.

About three quarter of a tablespoon here I put on top.

We could even decorate that with fig, you know?

That with dates rather, we have dates here and a little bit of those beautiful flowers to finish our dish and give it some class, you know, some zap here.

And here we are, our beautiful dessert for the Vietnamese meal.

Our banana tartelette there make such a beautiful finish to that meal and it goes very well together.

Remember that the soup that we have is really a whole meal.

We do something in French that we call pot au feu, which is a boiled beef with carrot and cabbage and all kind of different vegetable, potato in it.

And it's a little bit of the same idea here.

The importance again is the stock, you know, very strong stock, very clear, defatted.

So it's very good.

And the meat also in it.

Now we have all of the different garnish.

You can take as much as you want.

Some want a lot of pepper, have it hot, I like it medium to hot.

With that, of course we have that oriental salad where I call oriental salad.

Another type of cabbage is a cruciferous, you know, it's very good for you.

Seasoned with the oriental type of bottle, the dessert, which is very French, but very tasty and rich, you know, is going to go well with it at the finish to that meal, which is relatively light, you know?

And with that, rather than wine, maybe we should have a beer.

And I have different beer here.

I have Tsing Tao, you know, Chinese beer, an American beer.

And here a Strasbourgeoise, a beer from Alsace, the northeast part of France, which is rich and very a bit smoky like.

And that's going to go so well with our meal today.

I enjoy making it.

If it's a cold winter day, you know you should try that meal and I'm sure your family and you are going to love it.

I enjoy making it for you.

Happy cooking.