Jacques Pépin's Chicken Ballotine is Classic for a Reason | KQED

Today we're doing one of my favorite menu, French American fare. Best of both world, you know? And I'm going to do some soft-shell crab, which I always give to people coming from Europe. It doesn't exist in France. I know it doesn't, and it's one of the best thing in the world. I'm going to sauté this and start by putting a little bit of oil in there and a dash of butter for my four crab and show you the different crab I have here. I clean the other one. I have here a male and a female. And you can see the apron, what we call the apron in the skirt. This is the apron of the male, very small like that. Then this is the apron of the female, much larger. These tend to have eggs and sometimes one prefer one or the other. What you have to do, however, is to cut the front of it, which is more a bit woody. I cut the end of the little appendage here, remove that skirt, and basically lift up the skirt, the top part of the shell here to expose the appendage, which has actually the lung on each side. That's not too good to eat. And that's basically the way to clean it. At that point, the little crab, which of course has been shedding its shell, and this is why it's so tender, is ready to be cooked. You can dip it in the flour or just put it directly into our skillet this way. I'm going to do four there. They'll splatter a little bit, but here we are. And you want to put, they will cook a couple of minutes on each side. They'll cook pretty fast. A dash of salt. And what I want to do now is to start on my second skillet with the garnish for the crab and the garnish that we are going to have. I'm going to have some asparagus. Now you see I have asparagus here. If you choose asparagus, choose thick, heavy asparagus with a tight head, like this one here. Not like this, where it's like peeling all over and this is an old asparagus, so you want tight head. We want to peel the lower part of the asparagus because this is very fibrous here, you see. But if you peel that part, now you break it, all of this is edible. What we do there is we cut it in half. Each of the half, we cut them in two or three pieces. And we want to start saute this in a second, first with a little bit of onion in the pan. I shoot a red onion here, which is beautiful. Chop a bit of the onion. Nice color. And we would want to put that directly into the skillet here. With again, a dash of oil. Like this. And we want to saute that for a few second, a minute, if you have the time. After that, you add your asparagus. We want to add a dash of salt, a little bit of water. And you want to cover it to stew it for a couple of minutes. By then, look at your crab. The crab here should be about ready to be turned over. They have a beautiful red color as you can see. And we want to cook them approximately the same amount of time on the other side. Here they are. And while they are cooking, the second garnish that we are going to put on top is going to be tomato. I have a tomato here, nice ripe tomato. And I want to show you that even with a vegetable peeler, you have to saw it a little bit like this, but you can peel your tomato. The firmer they are, of course, the easier it's going to be to peel. If you have a bit of problem as I have, use a knife and you have to saw it here. You can't really press it as you would peel an apple. You peel an apple, you use that technique, but there you will saw it. We remove about half of it would be enough. It has been peeled. And now the seed of this, I'm going to press it, remove it there. And what we want to do is to saute that tomato, cut it into little dice like this. I have a piece in the middle, which is dark here. And now let's see how asparagus are cooked enough. You want to put them in there. Put your tomato in there again with a little dash of oil, a bit of garlic. I'm using half a clove maybe of garlic. It's going to be enough that I crush and coarsely chop to add to it. And a bit of fresh tarragon. I have fresh tarragon here, which I want to cut in not too small pieces. About this way to put at the end. Now the tomato, I just want them to warm up. And they should be about hot enough here. So what we want to do now is to present our crab. Very simply here. What we'll do is to put a little bit of the asparagus on the plate. I could actually use some of the juice that I have here. Remember, I put a little bit of water with the onion. Then my crab that I will put on top. Maybe I'll pick up this one. Again, a little bit of that juice. And finally, the tomato that we can sprinkle on top. Or a little bit around to give you a different color, taste and texture. We're going to do the classic chicken balutin in the French style. And I'm going to stuff it with rice. And this is a red rice, wahine rice, so-called long, very long grain, very chewy, very elastic rice, but very good. I love it, except that it has to cook a long time. So I put half a cup of rice in approximately a cup and a half of liquid and some wild mushroom. I'm not really pre-soaking the mushroom. All I'm doing here is to wash them in case there is any dirt on it. A dash of salt I already put in it. Cover it and that has to cook for an hour. In addition to this, I have a little bit of leek and onion just sauteed with a little bit of water. Actually, there is no fat, just water in there to get them soft. We're going to use that in our stuffing. And the stuffing here, the same one that I have here, which of course has to cook for an hour, I have one which is cooked here. And this is about what it looks like. So I'm going to put this directly into this now with our leek. Now the leek, as I said before, should really cool off for a while, you know? But I don't really have time to let it cool off, so I'm going to mix it with it now. So this is going to be the stuffing of our chicken. And now let me show you the technique to bone out that chicken. My stuffing is here. And now I have a chicken approximately three, three and a half pound here. And the technique to bone it out are relatively simple. The first thing that I'll do is to remove the two wing on each side. And then the wishbone. The wishbone is that triangle right in the middle here. You want to go with a knife on one side, the other side, and pry it out with your finger to get that triangle thing that we call the wishbone, which is actually here. And a real pain in the neck, texturally, when you start carving, you know? The second thing that I do, cut the skin of the back. And now you want to cut the joint of the shoulder. The joint of the shoulder is right here. I can feel it with my finger, put the knife here, cut the joint there. Same thing on the other side. The joint of the other shoulder. That's it. Now I grab the whole wing, my finger through, and I pry in and out until I see the little oyster here. The same thing on the other side. I pry in and out. And now the front of the chicken, the sternum, don't worry about the fillet. Put your two finger on each side and start pulling it down this way. Just like if you're taking his pyjamas. So now the leg here, there is the little oyster. I cut the oyster, bring back the thigh bone and crack it open. It has to crack to expose this little sinew. I cut the sinew, then pull it out. Same thing on this side. You cut the little oyster, break it open, cut through the sinew, and pull out. This should not really take you much more than a minute to do your chicken, at least to that extent. All I have left on it now is the two fillet. I run my thumb, as you can see, along the bone to remove that fillet and that fillet. And basically, most of the chicken is now bone out. To remove the bone from the leg, cut around to hold the end of the thigh bone, and you scrape. As you see, there is much more scraping and pulling than cutting. Now the thigh bone is exposed. Now I have to cut all around the articulation of the knee, if you want. And now I start scraping again. This is the drumstick. Now notice here that I am about here. I don't really want to cut that. If I cut that, it's going to shrink. Use the back of the knife to break it. Remove that bone here. Repeat on the other side again, the other leg. See, the boning out of a chicken is very important because if you know how to do this, then you know how to bone a duck, a quail, a pheasant, a goose, a turkey, all the morphology is the same. You know more than that. You know how to carve in the dining room because when you carve in the dining room, you cut exactly through the articulation that I did there. You know how to cut a chicken in other way. Again, breaking this for a stew, for example. And now I can remove those bone of the wing, which I didn't. I hold it from underneath here, cut all around and push it down this way to remove it. Same thing on the other side. And when I finish this, the chicken is totally bone out there to do what we call a balutin or a galantin. The balutin is hot and the galantin is cold. I have the filet here that I'm going to rearrange. We can even remove the little sinew from the filet, which is right here. And if I hold it with the end of my towel, I can scrape it out, you know, and here come that little sinew from the center. I put this there. I can put a dash of salt and freshly ground pepper there and our stuffing. Now the stuffing, you want to put some in the leg here, on the other side in the same way, in the leg. Remember, this is a cooked stuffing, so you don't have to worry too much in the center to have uncooked stuffing because it's pre-cooked. That's probably enough here. You want to spread it out flat, work neatly. And that's about it. You want to bring now the side back on, on each side, the skin of the neck back on top of it too, and gently grab it and turn it this way to have now the chicken totally reconstituted. And we want now to tighten it. And I do it with kitchen twine. This is a thick, heavy cotton twine. You slide it underneath, attach it here with a double knot. And now you use that technique, which is a half inch to half inch technique this way, and you slide it underneath, and you pull it up gently. Again, pull it up gently. Repeat two, three times. That technique is very useful to tie up a lot of things in the kitchen. Cut a piece of extra wing, turn it gently. Do the same thing in the back. Then you add in the front. Again, turn it. And now we are back where we started, attaching it with a piece of string where I started. The chicken now is totally worn out. I did it on that towel. Bring it in there. A little bit of salt on top. There is plenty of fat. I don't need to do anything like this. I'm changing board now and washing hands after the chicken, which is always a good idea. And all I have to do is now to cook it. 400 degree for a good hour. You would want to put it in a very sturdy saucepan like this one. It goes into the oven. And here comes another one which is cooked. As you can see here, beautifully brown. So what I want to do here is we're going to serve it in that large platter. I'm going to go here for the time being. And the chicken here, I want to remove it first. That is stuck underneath. You can use a spatula or something to destock it. And now I want to put it on my board here. And what if you can see inside here, I have all the fat which has been reduced, you know, which has been coming out of the chicken. I want to get rid of all that fat. I have like half a cup of fat, but I want to keep, the crystallization is very important here. And the crystallization is going to give me taste. And the taste, I want to do that. I'm using a cabernet here, a deep red wine. I want to deglaze that with it. And what you want to do, of course, a little bit of water even. Dash of water here. And you want to use, again, a flat, preferably wood spatula to melt all of those solidified juice. You know, that's where you have the taste. And bring that back to a boil. Mix the juice. Take your time to really use the glaze, what we call the glaze. And the process of deglazing is to add liquid to those solidified juice that we call glaze. And the deglazing will release those juice. This is what I'm doing here. Then, after it's more or less removed, what I want to do is to strain it. I have a dark, rich juice. And as you can see, basically fat-free. I've removed all the fat here. I could, if I wanted, re-add a little more fat from the one that I took out that I have here, but I don't think it's necessary. In that juice now, I want to add some flavoring vegetable. I have carrot. I have onion. I have celery. It will give me some color and some taste. And this has to come to a boil so that we can thicken it a little bit. Need a little dash of salt in there too, I think, that I'm going to put. And now let's look at our galantine or balutine here. The first thing, of course, that you want to do is to remove all of the twine here that you have. Gently. And at the end of it, remember, I didn't cut the end of the bone because I attached it at the end. This is now the time to cut it. The end of those bones. And remove all of this. I could, remember that I cooked that with the skin. I could remove, leave the skin now and arrange it directly on my platter. And I could, even now, if I wanted to be, to cut down even more so, remove the skin from the outside. But I wouldn't want to do it before. Don't do it before because if you do it before, the skin is holding things together. So this would be the time now that you would want to remove that skin. Remember, however, that a great deal of, a great deal of the fat has melted away from here. So I have my galantine here ready. This is boiling nicely. What I would want to do is to put a little bit of potato starch. This is potato starch with a dash of water to melt it. I could use, I have a little bit of soy now. Sometimes this is not dark enough in color, then I add a little bit of soy sauce, which I don't need now. I will stop the heat. And now this will touch there. It will thicken on contact, right there, to give me just a little bit of viscosity that I want there. And that basically, of course, you would want to cook your vegetable probably a bit longer than that. But look at the dark, rich sauce. I think that I can add a little bit more water here to it, or a bit more wine, have the wine around here, just to give it that intensity of taste. Now I put that in there, just on top, serve a bit of sauce separate. Maybe you can accent it with a little bit, little bunch of parsley at the end here. And this is our beautiful balutin in our menu today. And now we are refreshing this pear in grenadine and red and white wine sauce. This is what we are going to do to serve after the balutin. We have here a Bosch pear, and this takes a long time to cook. What I want to do first is to show you how to peel it. And you see when I peel it, I try to keep a little bit of the head here. And after that, peeling it this way, and this way, this way, to end up with a cap, you know, with different shape like this. Not a complicated thing, but it give it a bit of distinction. We finish peeling it. Remember that often people tell me how long it takes to cook a pear. I say from about a minute to an hour. And I know it's a trifle vague, but if you cook an anjou, which is very ripe, you put it in boiling water or in boiling stock, and that's it. It cooked after one boiling. Those, if you cook a Bosch or sickle pear, for example, may take over an hour. So we have six pear here, have a cup of water. I have lime or lemon juice you put about a third of a cup and sugar, about a quarter of a cup of sugar. We have a cup of a dry white wine here. We have a wine from the South of France, which is kind of very citrony and all that will go well with it. And about a third of a cup, quarter of a cup of grenadine syrup. Your pear, whatever show of the pear is going to discolor and turn black. So you put a layer of paper towel on top of it and press it so that it gets wet there. And you cook them this way in the syrup so that it doesn't discolor. And after those have been cooking for like, well, see, they are very tender. They've been cooking about 45 minutes. What you want to do now is to put them into a bowl and reduce the liquid because the syrup, you have too much syrup here. And that's basically what I have here. The liquid has been reduced. So you want to put them into your presentation plate if you want right there. And as you can see there, I have approximately a cup of liquid left. This is nice to present this way. You can put little leaves that I have in there. You can use basil or whatever. In that case, I am using that beautiful sage and you can put on one of them or a few of them. And then you serve that with a cookie and a delicious, light, refreshing dessert. Prepare a beautiful finish for our French-American menu that we're doing today. Remember that we're starting today with, to me, the quintessential great dish that I give to French people when they came to America, soft-shell crab. We have a little bit of a twist here. We put asparagus around, tomato, and so forth. And then after that, our balutin, the classic balutin, born out in the French way, but again, stuffed in a much modern way than we would have done years ago. And then a salad. And finally, the beautiful pear for dessert, very refreshing. And with that, I think we have a reserved chardonnay from the Santa Maria Valley here. And this is a very full, complex, rich one, which is going to be a perfect complement to that type of menu. I hope you're going to try your hand at burning out a chicken. It is not as complicated as it looks. It's purely a question of technique. So try a few chicken, burn it out, enjoy it, and do it with your kid, or do it with your husband, or your wife. I'm sure you'll have a bone in the kitchen trying it out. I enjoyed doing it for you. I hope you learn how to do it well. Happy cooking to you.