- I make a great sandwich for lunch with black pumpernickel bread, cream cheese, smoke white fish right on top of it, a bit of cracked pepper on a bed of watercress, with a few black olives on top.

I'm Jacques Pepin, and this is fast food my way.

Happy cooking.

I'm going to do a gratin of hard cooked eggs, and when I do hard cooked eggs, the first thing that I do, actually I try to get organic eggs.

I used to have my chicken, I don't anymore, but in any case what you do, you press it on the rounded part of the egg.

The pressure that you have in there, if you don't do that very often, crack the shell.

Here you can see that when I put that in there all of the pressure is going to be released from that little hole.

You can really see it there.

Four, six eggs.

And, now I want it to come back to a boil, but barely boil.

If the egg white boils too fast, the albumen, which is the egg white, is going to be tough.

So it has to cook about nine minutes this way here.

Well, they are cooked now, and what you wanna do is to pour out the water.

And, you know, you wanna shake the pan to crack the eggs otherwise.

See, the eggs should be cracked like this.

I crack them all around.

Water, water and ice.

We're going to do a gratin with this.

And a gratin with tomato.

Some onion that I have here, so some chopped onion.

Coarsely chopped here.

About half a cup of onion.

Here we are.

You can use butter too, but olive oil's great.

Okay.

There it is.

Garlic in it, and in our case here we wanna do about three cloves of garlic.

Garlic is very strong (indistinct).

By the time you cook it, it gets much milder.

The longer you cook it, the milder it becomes.

The less you cook it, the stronger it is.

And, when you do those kind of mayonnaise loaded with garlic in the south of France, we call it aioli, (speaking in foreign language), those are an emulsion of egg yolk and olive oil with the garlic, and it can be very, very strong.

On the other hand, if you do a stew, 2-3 cloves of garlic, by the time it's cooked for hours, the garlic will get very, very mild.

Here I'm going to use some fresh thyme leaves in there.

And that's basically it.

You can use fresh tomato.

This is nice canned plum tomato, I crushed them a little bit and that's it.

(pan sizzling) You wanna cook this until the juice reduces a little bit, so it will take about 8-10 minutes.

I'm going to put a dash of salt in there, freshly ground pepper.

Okay, and then now I can clean up the eggs, or shell the eggs rather.

Because, I say we crack them in the pan, then they are easier to peel, as you can see.

Otherwise, you do that under running water.

What you have to do is to crack it.

As long as the water go in the second membrane underneath, it goes and it makes them easier to peel.

In our case here, I'm going to cut the eggs in four pieces like this.

Now you can see it doesn't really matter because it's going to be in a gratin.

But, you can see that those eggs, there is no green at all around the yolk.

If I smell it, it smells good, it doesn't smell like sulfur.

And, if I were to eat a piece of the white here, it's nice and tender, it's not rubbery.

That sounds like nothing, but I often will judge a restaurant by the quality of the eggs.

Let's put our egg in there.

So, I'm going to grate the cheese, put on top, and this is Swiss cheese.

This happens to be Gruyere.

(speaking in foreign language) Gruyere, or you can use Parmesan cheese, of course, or even a Gouda.

Something like this is different in taste.

Okay, so this will go on top of our eggs.

That should be plenty here.

Swiss cheese on top.

And, this is going to go in under the broiler because this is really hot.

If that was done ahead, and the tomato sauce is cold, the egg is cold, so you put it in the oven, so it reheat and brown at the same time, but if everything is hot you can put it under the broiler directly.

It's nice and bubbly here.

Okay.

I love gratin, any type of gratin, potato, eggs or whatever.

And with this I'm going to do a rice now.

A rice with mushroom, and to serve with a scallop dish.

So, the first thing that I want to do is start the rice.

And I have a little bit of onion again.

(knife chopping) Chopped onion.

(knife chopping) We start our rice, it's almost always done with onion, at least, unless you boil rice, more in the start of Asian cooking.

Okay, so onion, fresh thyme in it, can do a couple of sprigs like that.

That's fine.

And I'm going to use that round rice.

In Italian, aborio type rice.

And mushroom.

You take them, you put them under water, you wash them and you use them.

It's a fallacy to think you cannot wash mushrooms.

The idea that you cannot wash mushroom ahead, otherwise they start discoloring.

Another fallacy that people will tell you to get only button mushroom, very tight mushroom, and the one which are older like this one where you see the veil in this, the gill.

You know, are usually less expensive.

Well, this has much more taste than that to start with.

So, sometime I go to the end of the market, whether it's leftover vegetables, and I pick up those, and have more taste.

In fact, if you buy cremini mushrooms, the cremini mushroom, which is a darker mushroom than this one, in Europe when you buy button mushroom, so called, you buy them white like this or brown.

So, the cremini is exactly the same thing as those mushrooms, except they let them grow longer so they start opening, so you see the bottom, and then they sell it for more money.

Whoever thought of that one was a good marketer.

Okay, so you chop that coarsely.

Should have enough here in the rice.

That should be plenty there.

So pour your rice in it directly.

You wanna mix the rice a little bit with the oil, you know?

(spoon tapping) Salt, pepper, and stock.

In that case here I have like three quarter of a cup of rice, and I have not much more than a cup of liquid.

That type of rice doesn't absorb as much liquid than a Carolina rice.

However, if I were to do a risotto, do three quarter of a cup of rice will absorb about three cups.

It will not actually absorb it because the idea of doing risotto, you keep it open, and you pour some stock on it, and stir it so everything evaporates, you put more, evaporate again, then you keep cooking this way.

If you were to put three cups of liquid with that three quarter of a cup or rice, and cover it, as I'm doing here, you would have a soup.

Not when you do a risotto, because you keep it open.

Okay, so this has to cook about 15 minutes, 15-20 minutes.

And, what I wanna do next, the scallop, I have beautiful, large scallops here that we call diver scallop, those are expensive but quite good.

One of those scallops, two maybe at the most is enough per person, so they're really nice.

And, those are so called diver scallops where the diver will go actually into the sea and get those, which are over a pound a piece when you get them out of the water.

I wanna do a garnish with this with some garlic.

I think I'm gonna put basil in it.

I have some leaves of basil here that I'm going to use the garnish to stuff the scallop, and I'm going to do pine nuts with that.

Okay, this and a little bit of garlic also, maybe one clove of garlic, not too much.

I crush it, take this, put that in water with a bit of the pine nuts.

And I blanch it here because otherwise you're basil will end up turning yellow.

It's like when I do a pesto, a lot a basil in my garden at the end of the summer, I pick up all the leaves, I drop them in boiling water, blanch them that is, and then I cool them off under cold water.

And as soon as they are cold, I put them in the food processor with salt, a dash of oil, not much oil like a pesto, maybe a tablespoon for the whole food processor, and I make a puree of that.

And I do little package with plastic wrap in the freezer.

It's the deep green the whole winter when I defrost it.

And, defrost it because I blanch the leaves, and the dash of salt you put in it too.

So, here, I want to drain that.

Little water here.

Okay.

And, I'm going to do a puree out of this to stuff my scallop.

So I'll use a tiny food processor here, which is ideal for that, to ground pepper is good.

Put your finger in the middle here when you pour something in it, otherwise it fill up in the center.

Okay, now I have all of it on the table here.

Okay.

And then... (food processor whirring) That's it.

(food processor whirring) You have a nice little puree there.

Okay.

Cut them in half.

And I'm going to arrange them on a plate with the stuffing inside.

This, as I say, could be done ahead.

I'll put a little bit of oil on a plate.

A little bit of salt on the scallop.

Salt and pepper.

Finely ground pepper.

And, then a little bit of that stuffing here.

That's a lot of flavor.

And, of course we can use that stuffing.

Actually, we can use that as a base for a pasta, pasta (speaking in foreign language) would be good.

So, here is my sandwich.

I put that in the oil plate because we're gonna saute that in a skillet.

Just get the skillet really hot, without anything in the skillet.

So, the only oil will be what we have on the scallop here.

That, again, can be made ahead, you know?

My (speaking in foreign language) is finished.

That is preparation, you know what we call the (speaking in foreign language) is the preparation.

In a professional kitchen you have the people who work at the stove, and the people who work at preparing so that you have everything under your hand when you work at the stove.

One is just as important as the other.

I'm rolling it in the oil so that they are wet on each side.

Okay.

So now the pan should be really hot here.

I can check it out by sometimes I take a little bit of water like this, you put it in your pan, you see the way it beads.

There you see the beads so that's really hot.

You think it's too smokey in your kitchen, do that recipe at the neighbors, you know?

Any kind of the blackened fish and whatever, my wife sends me somewhere else to do it.

I'm gonna do six here, it's all I have space for.

So, this should cook about a minute also on each side.

What I wanted to do was a salad to go with it with the type of dressing that my mother used to do, a dressing with heavy cream.

And you'd be surprised this is less calories than doing a dressing with oil.

I put, let's say about one, two, like three, maybe four tablespoons of heavy cream at the most here.

Four tablespoons of heavy cream.

A tablespoon of heavy cream is about 45 calories.

Tablespoon of oil is about 130.

By the time I whip that up, it will almost double in volume.

You don't whip it much because you see when it starts foaming, just as it is, it start foaming.

It almost ready.

I'm gonna put salt in it, pepper, and a bit of red wine vinegar.

And the red wine vinegar makes it thicken even more.

If I feel that it's too thick actually, I'm going to put a little bit of water in it.

You can see, so I expand it.

And the vinegar that I mixed into it.

I've got to turn my scallops now, I think.

A spatula here.

That pan is really hot still, and I'll tell you one thing, at that level I'm not going to cook it more.

I'm gonna shut that off because the residual heat, the heat that I have in that pan is going to be enough to carry cooking that for the 3-4 minutes before I plate it.

That's great.

Beautiful Boston lettuce.

(lettuce crunching) Okay.

And I can toss it with this.

(speaking in foreign language), cream salad just like my mother used to do as a kid.

Okay, it's beautiful.

Then maybe we put it in there.

Right there.

At home I probably would not change from here to there, serve it in there, but we're doing fancy stuff today.

So here.

The rice, I know, is ready, so what you wanna do with that rice is to finish it up with a little bit of olive oil or butter.

And, some Parmesan cheese.

And, then I can mix my rice gently.

See, it's basically like a risotto.

Now I know that the rice is cooked here.

Mm, that's good.

My spatula.

Here we are.

The stuffed scallop.

We have a lot of basil in it, so maybe I'll put a little piece of basil for color, and there is the stuffed scallop on a bed of rice.

(gentle music) I'm doing a pineapple in caramel sauce on a dessert today.

The first thing you wanna do is smell your pineapple to know whether it's ripe or not.

Some people say you can pull this out, and that indicates if it comes out easy that it's ripe, but I've never found it really to be the truth.

What I'm doing here, I'm cutting it into eight wedges.

That's it.

This way.

And some people keep the core, for example, the center core, which is tougher here.

My wife loved that, what she'd eat first in the pineapple, I don't like it, it's tough.

So, you remove the wedge, I mean, that hard part, and cut your wedge like this.

I'm gonna do that in a gratin dish here.

So one after the other.

Now a couple of tablespoons of butter, about a third of a cup of brown sugar, and about half a cup of orange juice, and then you wanna cover that, and bring it to a boil.

You cover it, and you boil it about seven, eight minutes, to get to about where I am here.

I can see that it's tender here, and I can see already that it starts caramelizing.

And, now, I'm going to cook that on top of the stove, and you watch it until it turns into caramel.

You can turn those slice into the caramel.

It would probably be easier if I use a fork here, make my life complicated.

So you can see the caramel color.

So keep cooking it until it caramelizes.

And, of course, as it colors it gets thicker also.

So we finish it with a little bit of rum, and some crushed pistachio on top, or a cookie, or a bit of sour cream or anything like that.

I'm gonna take a couple of minutes more.

Look at the bubble outside.

When you'll really see thick bubble of caramel, then that's ready.

Now, of course, this is boiling hot, but if this was allowed to cool off, that caramel would get at least double in the, I mean, double the thickness it is now.

So, I think we can serve it as such.

Put some crushed pistachios on top.

And, of course, what goes very well with that is dark rum with the caramel.

Put a flame now.

We have nice pyrotechnic cooking.

But, one way or another, whether you Put a flame on that, the alcohol do evaporate.

Okay, here we are here.

You can see that the edge is caramelized here.

Look at that slice.

Yep.

And a thick dark syrup.

So that could be served with a cookie, a bit of sour cream, or just like this.

(gentle music) It is always a great joy to cook for a friend.

Come see me again, happy cooking.

(gentle music)