Jacques Pépin's Seafood Lovers Recipes | KQED

We have a seafood lover delight for you today. Fish. Now people eat much more fish than when I was a kid. I remember it was once every blue moon that we ate fish and now we eat it sometimes two three times in the same meal. And I'm going to start with a shrimp dish. The first dish is going to be a thimble of shrimp and spinach. And the first thing that I want to do is to start cooking the spinach. Put a little bit of oil in there. I have a canola oil here and we're going to flavor that with garlic. I have three cloves of garlic here. I may have a bit too much. You want to crush the garlic to release the essential oil and probably have enough with that and chop it into a fine puree. This is where the garlic is going to be really strong. Done this way. What you have to be careful too is this way you don't want to burn it. If you burn it this way it is going to smell and taste acrid you know. So when the garlic is peeled very very fine like this you don't want to burn it. You want to spread it out and you start right away with the spinach. Those spinach are still wet from washing and that's what you want. You see what I do first I mix that in the garlic then turn them upside down so that the garlic is on top now. And the rest of the spinach I put a little bit of salt on top of it and there will be enough moisture for the spinach to fall down and just get wilted which is what I want. And the best way is to put a lid on top of it. The lid will give me a bit of moisture inside. And then while this is cooking the second thing we want to do is to peel our shrimp. And I have shrimp which are peeled here and some which are not. One of the classic way of peeling shrimp is to take the shell out with your hand this way and you may leave or left that little piece inside. If I leave it I can press it and pull it out now to get the end of it you know. But then at that point when you do this you also have to cut it to remove the vein if there is a vein and clean it up here. And this is cut in our recipe in three pieces. Now there is those little plastic gadget here which are really nice. There is different one just a long thing where you insert this inside at the end and keep pushing and that will remove not only remove the whole shell as you can see but at the same time it takes the vein out of it. So this is a nice little gadget. It's just a piece of plastic. It's really not expensive and you can get it usually in your fish store. So again you know you just go like this you can to extend the shrimp first run it along the back up to the back up to the opening here and again take the whole thing out and at that point you can as I say if you want leave the back in decoration. The shell you can freeze them and keep them to make stock. They make very good stock too. What we want to do now again is to cut this in three piece for our recipe right there and now I want to check if my spinach are close to done. You see you can see here that some of the garlic burn a little bit underneath. Should have stir it more but it's okay I'm going to stir it and hide it so no one will see it. The spinach are basically cooked enough here. I want to put it this way and then right away I'll put the shrimp to cook in the same skillet. Again maybe a little dash of oil a bit of salt and this will cook in like a minute or so you know quite fast. See they start getting red almost right away. So again I cover this and while this is cooking another garnish that we want to do is the tomato. I have tomato here. I drum that tomato in boiling water and you dump it in boiling water for about 10 seconds and that releases skin. See the skin again can be kept for stock because I do all the time. Then this one has been peeled also you open it this way so you can press it and remove the seed and the the juice from it and all of that again can go into stock. This is a garnish so I have enough with that and this can be cut into little dice or little strip however you want it. What I want in this you know not only the color of the tomato but I want the raw taste of the tomato which I like and I have basically enough for what I want to do here today. So my shrimp is basically cooked enough here. It didn't cook very long as you can see and finally the last thing I add my tomato and the tomato I don't even want to cook them. Remember that I use that that skillet two or three times you know all you want to do here is to warm it up to take the shield out of it and I put it in there that's it. So now I don't need that anymore what I want to show you and sometimes you may want to wait a little bit for this to cool off is to build your timbal. The dish that we have here you can of course serve it as is but if you want to make it you know a bit different you built it into a timbal and what I have here is a little piece of plastic wrap on top of those you build we have about three four shrimp per person there right so you built your timbal of shrimp and shrimp and spinach more spinach on top this is hot and that you know could be done ahead I'm going to do just one to show you how to do it it's relatively easy and at that point you can close it and this you would want to keep that warm you know you can keep that warm and at the last moment if you re-warm them you you wouldn't want to do that too much ahead you know all you have to do is really to open this and invert that on your plate you put it on the plate to invert it like this and it has to come out because we have this around you have that little timbal and you can arrange a little bit of the tomato around for color you know and maybe even if you want a little piece of tomato on top and that's a nice a bit different very fresh type of presentation and with that now what I want to do is to start the second dish which is really a salmon and the salmon I want to poach it in a vegetable broth and what I have here I have a hot pot next to the hot pot I have water and white wine about half a cup of each half a cup of water half a cup of white wine and I want to put a julienne let's say here a julienne of leek so you take the leek cut it in half and now with this you fold this into two this way and that thing you cut into a julienne the julienne refer to the thinly sliced strip like that we call a julienne julienne goes back to the 17th century there was a woman by the name of julienne darbley we forget the last name now but especially in nouvelle cuisine type of cuisine now a lot of people cook everything in julienne what I have here those are shiitake mushroom cap you can use any type of mushroom I want to put in there I want to put some fennel this is the fennel some carrot see a whole very strong vegetable broth a little bit of chives in there and some lemon see the lemon you can actually just take your peel of lemon and put pieces of lemon peel in there to give you taste you know that I put a dash of salt in this season my stock I think I'll need a little more white wine in there or water that's it then I cover it and I want to cook it five six minutes to really develop the taste of all of those vegetables which are really not only beautiful but full of nutrients and the vegetable stock like that done this way can be used for many things and of course we are going to use it for the salmon here and I have that big salmon which I want to show you this is a raised salmon and what we want to do is to take the fillet out of it you slide your knife underneath turn your knife around so you are flat on the central rib on the central bone of the salmon and start cutting all the way down to cut that big fillet here and of course you turn it and do the same thing on the other side which I'm not going to do and now I have that fillet of salmon again using a long knife you're going to slide underneath here to bring in to get all of the bone here the bone of the front carcass you know all of that is going to go into stock and you have some bone that you want to remove the bone are there directly in there and I want to show you a couple of those bone which you pull straight you see this way and you can go to the end the bone start around here and go up to the end I don't need all of this so I'm just going to cut a piece from here slide it to remove the skin you know which is the proper technique here you slide it and remove the skin I won't need more than that here put that with the rest of our salmon and cut this I could cut that pieces of about four ounces would be about this way I can cut one piece or actually butterfly this way and what I'm going to do is to put that to cook right away into my stock you can see how beautiful the stock is it should probably cook a little longer than what I did to develop a bit more taste but that should be enough here I'm going to put that directly to poach in there this would be also excellent served cold you could serve that cold poach that and serve it cold with a light dressing or something like this you know in our case here we're going to do it this way so there I let it cook a couple of minutes and while it's cooking the vegetable that we're going to do today is a potato a mashed potato type of mashed potato with celery root we call celery root or celeriac it's used a great deal in France this one has been peeled and I cut it I mix it with my potato it depends the time of the year those are pretty tough you know I can feel it and what happens is that you want to cut it you know and see how tough it is I know that this one is pretty tough but I want to show you maybe the center of it if I can cut it open take the skin out of it they come very large and the center end up being quite cottony you know and if it's too cottony that part which is very soft there you want to remove the rest you peel it and you cut it mix it with your potato what I do in that recipe I use a minimal amount of water I have a cup and a half of water that's all here a dash of salt and that's all I want to put in it because I don't want to drain any water at the end I want to cook it this way and when it's cooked it's going to look this way so I know that you see if you put it in a lot of water you have to drain the water and you lose a lot of the nutrients in that case here I don't lose anything I put the water everything in it and I start straining it which I'm going to do here you want to put it through a food mill especially this and the reason is that in a food processor you will tend of course to have little pieces left over especially the pieces of celery if they are too tough and fibrous on the skin you want to that's it so you strain this I can strain basically all of it here we are and this is a fine strainer you know there is different blade on this I'm going to put this in there and I want to work a little bit of milk into this remember there is no richness whatsoever to that present a little piece of butter I put like half a tablespoon of butter in there at the most and then you work it out with a whisk for a very delicate very light puree now if your celery happen to be too tough put a bit more potato a bit less celery you know you can balance it the way you want and what we want to do now is to present that here and I can I can smell the taste of the celery you know which is always very fragrant for me and we're going to serve that with our salmon the salmon should be cooked now it really doesn't take to cooking very long we have a bit of a decoration some thing that I can put in there to give it a little bit of color and my salmon here as you can see is cooked already I want to take one piece of the salmon that I'll put in there and put all of the garnish the different vegetable garnish that you have in there and of course some of the liquid that I have in there the liquid broth is excellent and this is the way you would want to serve it just portion the broth with the mashed potato and the perfect finish for our elegant meal is a souffle we're going to do a souffle of mango with a mango sauce you know the mango are 17 times as much vitamin A as peach very good fiber and I want to take a little bit of the mystery of souffle out for you what I have here is the flesh of two mango you can see they're about a pound each they have to be ripe and soft and there I peel them take the seed and basically what I want to do is a puree now half of the puree I want to use for the souffle and the other half I want to do a sauce with it I'll measure approximately I have half of the souffle here I'll keep the other one for my souffle mixture and this here now I want to finish the sauce I could I've rolled it to make it a bit finer than that but I put about two tablespoons of Grand Marnier there and to give it a beautiful color a bit of a different two tablespoons of grenadine you know to make it a beautiful pink color so that it's slightly different than the flesh of the souffle if you feel that it's a bit too thick put a dash of water in it I think it's fine so I leave it at this and now I want to do the souffle and beat the egg white I have three egg white here which I put directly into my copper bowl I like to beat the egg white in the copper bowl I have a quarter of a cup of sugar with it and this is three and a half cup souffle mold which have been buttered and uh sugared you know so you start your egg white by beating it fast fast so that the whole thing get loose and then you go slowly see you have to go under the egg white and lift it up to try to inflate it and you should have a balloon whisk as I have here the balloon whisk is important because you know it picks up the whole mixture and lifts it up in one shot if you have a small whisk you're going to have problem with it so what you do you beat it it's almost ready now about 30-40 seconds change hand if you feel too tired the egg white should be pretty firm you know actually it's even easier if you have more egg white like five or six I think this is fine now it can hold a nice peak as I can see now so I put my sugar in it I'm going to tighten it I tighten it and the sugar will stabilize it you know and that's about it and now we want to put the rest of our mango in it remember we have approximately a cup of the mango mixture also here I think I have too much here it is and you start folding it use a rubber spatula gently folding it in like this remember this is the type of souffle that I'm doing here which doesn't have a regular base that is a base of milk cream egg yolk any of that stuff can also be done ahead first it doesn't have any fat in it and it can be done ahead a little more the reason is that whoop okay you see the three egg white will fill up the mold exactly that is one egg white properly beaten give you about a cup of egg white which is what I have here so what we want to do now is to smooth the top up keep that on the side here so you can clean your spatula and I have to go on the side here because I have to hold the end of it and decorate the side just with the spatula this way I have a bit left I put it in the middle here with your thumb here you run it around to create a nice edge and that's it your souffle is ready to go into the oven you can put it directly into the oven or actually put it on a cookie sheet and put it that in the oven it's fine one or the other 375 degree in the middle of the oven it's going to take about 25 minutes to cook but you know you don't have to put it in the oven you can actually put it right there in the freezer I want to show you one that I have in the freezer here which has been frozen for a while you don't put a piece of plastic wrap by the way on top when you have it the whole thing would stick to it but after it's been frozen it get hard then you can put a plastic like and as you see this one is double the size of the other for eight people this is hard now that souffle you would take it out put it to defrost for like 20 20 minutes or so it's not totally defrosted a little bit and right in the oven just as I did the other one and you have a beautiful souffle that you can make ahead now my souffle is ready I can smell it we're going to take it out of the oven whoo it is practically lifting out of the mold you know remember I said we can freeze souffle but I what kind of collapse on itself here lifting out you want to put you don't want to freeze a souffle with a bechamel or a cream or flour base won't work as well remember because this one is done only with a puree of fruit and with egg white you can do that but the other one you probably would not the souffle will tend to collapse a little bit as you can see this one lift up from the bottom of the mold you see a perfectly delicious souffle this way and actually you can let it cool off this way and have it cold like a kind of pudding with the same sauce so today we have a great menu starting with that tamale of spinach you know which is terrific then the salmon in that savory broth with a puree of potato and celery root and finally our souffle at the end remember that sauce made of mango that I'm going to have here and then of course the souffle which is very satisfying for probably more than four people here but I have it is still slightly wet in the center the way I'd like to to have it and we can put a few pieces of kiwi on top here and there for color and for decoration and with that we are serving a sauvignon blanc here it's actually a Pouilly fumé from the Loire Valley in France the 100% sauvignon blanc similar to what we call here fumé blanc and it's going to go very well with our mixture today I hope you're going to try souffle try to freeze it your friend and your family is going to enjoy it I enjoy making it for you. Happy cooking!