Dandelion Salad with Pancetta is a Summertime Delight | Jacques Pépin Cooking at Home | KQED

Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin, and I'm cooking at home. We call it pissenlit in France, down lion, you know, lion teeth. And this is really a rite of spring for us in the summer. I want to show you how to handle it. First, I'm going to put some bacon or pancetta. I'm going to do a pretty strong sauce. Here I'm doing it for two, two, three people. I have three slices, three slices of bacon. So, and I put a dash of olive oil on top because I will put olive oil in the dressing. And I'm going to cook that until it's nice and brown. Now, here they come out of the ground. Usually, you don't pick them up when the flowers are there. The flowers are what they do, you know, Italians do down lion wine, and that with the flower or the bud. But this one is small enough, so basically you want to go deep enough into the ground to get the root here because the root, it was nice and white, as deep as you can go into the ground here. And often I split it in half. As you can see, this one here is a bit bigger, so I have a nice bottom here. Cut the black, clean up around. Maybe I cut it in half. Separate it. Oh, I have a bad leaf here. And that's it. This has to be washed two, three times, you know. I wash it when I do it. I let it soak in water, you know, water out of the tap. I have about two, three cups here. And of course, after it's washed, I put them into the machine so that I really take the water out of it. So here, you can see this is cooking nicely here. I have bread in the oven also because we have croutons with that, and I have eggs. So when I do that, for me, it's basically a whole meal. So here, we'll start with the garlic. Crush the garlic here. There. Maybe another little piece. In Lyon, where I come from, down lyon is very big in summer. That's where I say we call it pissanlit, P-I-S-S-E-N-T-I-L. And often, we do that with a smoked herring. So here, for two or three, I have a good teaspoon, teaspoon and a half of garlic. I put anchovy paste or a couple of anchovies that you crush and put that. So here, I will put like, I would say, two good teaspoons of anchovy paste, salt, of course, pepper, a dash of vinegar. Yeah, not much, like a teaspoon of vinegar, you know. That will be the base of my mixture. And of course, the oil that I have here and the fat from the bacon, that's going to go in the dressing as well instead of olive oil. So that's kind of ready. And I have my crouton right out of the oven. When I do crouton like this, I cut bread, like coarse bread like this, and I sprinkle a little bit of oil on top and put it into the oven. So that's one of the best way of doing it. So here is the rest of my dressing. So we'll mix it here. Remember, the anchovy paste, you have to crush it a little bit. Sometimes, you know, I only put the fat of the bacon here and keep the bacon to sprinkle on top. I could have done that. I forgot. And here I have my dandelion here. When I say when I do that, it's basically a whole meal for me. So we mix this. My father was very big dandelion. I learned with him when I was a kid. You always say in spring, you have to eat dandelion at least three, four times to clean your blood. I was cleaning your blood. Okay, highly seasoned. And I will serve that into a plate like this. A big, yeah, a big portion. I love the bacon. I like to put the bacon on top. Here it is. And then the crouton are going to go there. And finally, the eggs. And those eggs are cooked seven minutes. Drop them in boiling water. Bring back to a boil seven minutes. And then I cool them up too. So as you can see, they are still just slightly wet in the center. And this is right the taste of my youth. Dandelion salad in the spring with the crouton, the eggs, and so forth. Happy cooking. ♪