How to Cook Flawless Fish with Le Bernardin Chef Eric Ripert | Cook Like a Pro

It's not rocket science. Use techniques, learn, practice, do business. I am Eric Ripert, the chef of Le Bernardin in New York City. So Le Bernardin is specialized in seafood, mostly French techniques and the fish is the star of the plate. As a young child I was obsessed with good food and then I was such a bad student. At 15 I had to leave the school and go to a vocational school which for me was like yeah heaven, culinary school. So now I am going to show you some French techniques and we will demystify the process of cooking fish and if you follow those tips you will cook like a pro. Let's go to the kitchen. Hello guys. So today I will teach you how to make crispy skin on the snapper and then of course we are going to finish the recipe and make some mushrooms, asparagus and we are going to make the sauce. First we are going to start with the asparagus and I'm gonna cut the mushroom. So the morels are in season. Always split them in half because you never know what happens with those morels. Sometimes some insects decide to live inside. It's not really good to cook it and then have a couple of guests on your plate and it is very important to have anything you cook the same size. Now I'm going to use a little bit of thyme. You take the leaves only and you go like that with your fingers and very often what the cooks do to go faster they go like that and then you have all the wood mixed with it and that's not good. Of course I catch them. So when I catch them I burn their hands on the fire. No we don't do that. So as you can see I'm very organized and clean. Almost OCD. Even if I create a picnic while the bread is here, the water is here, the knives are here, the wine. I mean it's all organized. So if you follow my tips become very very OCD you will succeed. Now we have the snapper. I have some white pepper, some fine sea salt, some five spice. We're using Chinese five spice because they have a little bit of anise. It also is going to help for the crust to form on the fish. So with this you will always have crispy skin. So we are going to cook the fish, cook the vegetables and make the sauce at the same time and it's going to take a few minutes. So the sauce is very simple. It's three ingredients. Pork, sherry vinegar and butter. So what we are doing we are going to use more or less the same quantity of pork as sherry vinegar and I'm going to caramelize the pork. When you are cooking you don't need 20 ingredients to make a great recipe. Very often in restaurants our recipes are simple and that way you can do that at home. I'm going to add the vinegar on it. So the same amount as the pork. So that sauce if I was testing it now you're going to see my face is going to like cringe like that. Exactly like that because it's very very acidic. So we have to let it reduce. I'm going to integrate some butter in it and then my sauce is going to become a bit thicker, richer and the sauce now is very pleasant. And next I'm going to start to put the asparagus in the pan. Then I will add the mushroom with it. A bit of salt and next I'm going to add garlic butter, thyme and the chives. And now we are going to cook the fish. So when you want to cook the fish with the skin no butter because the butter will make your skin not crispy. Only vegetable oil, not olive oil because olive oil is very very strong in flavor. And when you put the fish in the pan I'm going to put the fish and lay it slowly in that direction. And the reason why is because if the oil splashes it will go this way and not on me and I will not burn myself. And that's a mistake that I have done once not twice. So we are going to put the fish here. You want to hear that noise. That means it's hot. When I started culinary school and I started to cook in professional kitchen, I ended up in a fish station. I like it right away because it involves a lot of technique. It's very delicate and it's an experience. So I'm flipping the fish. I'm looking and the skin is crunchy. You hear the crunch? That's it. And then we are going to plate and then the sauce a little bit like that just around. And then you have a dish and obviously you can do that at home. You don't need too much time to do it. You need good ingredients and you need to follow the techniques and you're done. For more tips from pros like me subscribe to Bon Appetit channel.