Recreate Bistro Recipes at Home with Jacques Pépin | KQED

You know, I love to eat at home, but eating in a restaurant is very nice also, and sometimes you want to go out to have dinner because there are things which are a bit more difficult to do at home. Not even more difficult, but sometimes a bit more esoteric, or you don't even think of doing those type of dish. And this is what we have today, you know, a kind of corner bistro where, you know, the restaurant at the corner that you know everyone and you go and eat occasionally, you know, and that exists a lot in France. And I'm going to do a fennel and pear salad. This is fennel, and it comes with those long, beautiful hands. It is the same family as the dill also, but there is a big bulb in the bottom, and that's what we use here. This, of course, can be used for decoration, it can be used in many things, and it does grow wild, you know, in the different part of the country. What happens very often in those wild ones like this, they dry it out, and you can buy it in pieces like wood, and that you use to flambe fish. For example, there is a fish in the south of France that you grill, and after it's grilled, you put those dry pieces of fennel underneath and burn it, you know, and it has a taste of anise, which is very good. So here what we are going to do is really slice that in very thin slice, you know, because we want to blanch it, otherwise it's a little bit too tough. I mean, you can use it also uncut, but it's a bit more tender if we do it this way. So what we'll do, I have already some here blanching, and we'll put that directly in boiling water. There is nothing in that water, no salt, nothing, and it will blanch it and also prevent it from discoloring, because if you have it this way, before you put it in the dressing, it will tend to discolorate, you know, get brown a little bit. And with this, what we're going to use is dry tomato that I have here. As you see, those are dry tomato, of large tomato. You can see the seed here, which are usually reconstituted very fast in water. They can be used as such. Those happen to have no salt. Sometimes they have salt, sometimes they don't. Those are plum tomato, you know, a thicker wall cut in half and dry out in the sun or in the oven or in a dehydrator sometimes. Those are the same ones that reconstitute in water, so they are soft. And sometimes they take longer than some other time, depending on how long they've been dry, depending on how thick they are. And finally here, we have pumpkin seed. And the pumpkin seed, those are fairly round, it depends on the pumpkin. Sometimes I get them, they are flat and larger, but always green like that and shelled. Those are very good addition to different salad. The crunchiness, the taste of it, it's high in iron and fiber. It's very good. Then we have pear. And that's what I'm going to do now, peel a pear. As you can see, I have a red bartley here, and that's going to be part of our salad. An interesting mixture, you know, of pear and fennel. Remember that sometimes, you know, you say, look at that beautiful red bartley. By the time you peel it, it's white. And you look at a busk, you look at different pear. Ultimately, you have to think in terms of that when you do fruit salad or you use fruit, that by the time they are peeled, they may be all exactly the same color, you know? So here, this is a fairly firm pear. I'm sure you can hear it. And we want to take the core of it and cut it into little dice. There is a certain sweetness, you know, to this, which is going to go well with the salad. It's a bit of an unusual salad, pear and fennel. But again, you can use another type of fruit. And the fennel can also be replaced with something else, an addition of dill. Now, if I were not going to use that right away, then I would put lemon juice on top of it because it would discolor it. But we are going to use it pretty soon. So I have a bit of cherry vinegar here and a bit of oil, peanut oil in there. Dash of salt and pepper. And that's basically the extent of our dressing. We put that in there. That won't discolor it like this. And I can put my dried tomato in it also. Those have been reconstituted in water. And the pumpkin seed. Now, another thing that we want to serve them to make it maybe a bit more interesting is to use a Wonton wrapper like this. Of course, I've used that several times. I use them at home to do pasta or do different types of things. The Chinese, of course, use this a lot, all kinds of different dumplings. And my friend Martin Yan used it, but I don't know how to fold it to do those little things like the Chinese do. So what we do here is simply use that other wrapper. And I can cut it this way. I can cut it in triangle, you know, this way. And any of those you can put in the oven. And what you do, you brush it with a little bit of oil, you know, on top. Turn it on the other side the same way. Not much, you know, just a touch. And we put that in the oven. And that makes a terrific wrapper for hors d'oeuvre or things like this, you know. Now, we're not going to do hors d'oeuvre with that, but I'm going to put it in the oven. I have some here which are dried. And as I say, you know, if you do a puree of chickpeas or things like that, the hummus of chickpeas, and you use that, this is terrific. Now, our fennel is basically cooked enough. I'm going to drain it. Drain it well. Put it in there. And stir it to finish the salad. See, that's an interesting combination, mixture, unusual taste, you know. And that we will arrange on our plate. We can put one of those underneath if you want to do like a little sandwich. Some of that on top and around, you know. Don't forget the seed. The seed are beautiful, those green seed. Be sure you have enough pear in it. Put another one on that on top. And, you know, even if you have those piece, you could put some of those piece on the outside. Very often, you get those fennel bulb at the market without the top. If you can get it with the top, beautiful to decorate with it. And this is our first course for the Corner Bistro Food. Main course, we are going to do a filet of pork charcutier, we call it charcutier in France. It's a place where you buy pate, terrine, all that type of thing. It's someone who deal almost mostly with pork and do all kind of thing with it. We call that charcutier, which is the wife of the charcutier, you know. And for that, with that, we're going to serve gnocchi as an accompaniment. And to do the gnocchi, what I do here is half a cup of water, like one teaspoon, one and a half teaspoon maybe of salt. And we want to bring that to a boil and add flour here. The flour that I have here, of course, is straight flour, that is whole purpose flour. And this is basically what I use most of the time. In addition to this, we're going to put potato later on in it. There is three different type of gnocchi. The first one that I do here with that mixture is what we call gnocchi Parisienne, Parisian style, which is done. That mixture is almost like what you do for pate a choux. We call the choux paste, where you do little choux or éclairs or Napolet, Paris-Brest and so forth. So I put that in there now and you stir it. It has to come to a boil and you'll see the mixture is going to form into a lump. What I do here, I use a wood spatula flat in the bottom because I have a little bit of oil in there. Usually we put butter and as you can see, this forms into a lump, which is almost like modeling clay. So you cook it for a few seconds so it dries out the moisture. If I were to do that with butter and add more eggs in it, it would be a mixture for profiteroles and so forth. What we do now, I bring that here and we put that directly, that little lump, into the processor here. Now what I have here is a potato, almost as much potato as I have here. I'm going to put the potato with it right here. I have two eggs, I have some parmesan cheese. So we're going to process this first, make a paste out of it and then add one egg, a little bit of parmesan cheese. I want to keep some to put on top and the second egg. Sometimes we put herb in it also. I have some sage here, I could put some sage or basil and so forth. Now the gnocchi, what we call gnocchi, are a little dumpling. So as I say, we do it with the pate a choux. Other people do it only with the potato. And it is done in different parts of the world, particularly in Italy and in France. So there is the one with the potato, then there is the mixture. And there is another one that we call the gnocchi romaine, you know, Roman style. And this is done with wheat, you know, this is done like semolina, which is a wheat type of mixture. And it is cooked with milk and it's placed on a tray to cool off, you know, and after cut into pieces. So what we do here, again, we have our pastry bag, we're going to put that inside. This is a plain tube, as you can see, which I'm going to press so that it goes to the end. And this is a large opening, as you can see here. I don't really have to push that in because nothing will come out of this. That mixture is quite thick. But I turn this around so it doesn't get smeared all over. I forget whether I put salt in there. You should put a little bit of salt. Clean that up good. OK, it's a fairly thick mixture, as you can see. And again, I put it in there and use the side to clean up my spatula. Here, you want to pick up everything. Here it is. Now, to form those dumplings here, you fold this here on a pastry bag and you start turning it this way, you know, until it goes to the end. At that point, you pick up that hand here and press with that part of the hand and keep turning as you go in. Now, this is the conventional way. For this, since I need both hands, I'm going to use the left hand. And that I put directly on top of boiling water here, wet my knife, start pressing and cut my dumpling so they can fall into the water. So this is a nice technique. You know, we use the same technique, actually, with a mixture of pate a choux and potato close to this. And that's what we call pomme dauphine, nothing to do with the gratin dauphine. And the pomme dauphine are put into hot oil so they puff up, you know. So here I want to use everything, push it inside and this, you want this to come gently to a boil and doesn't boil too fast. You know, a couple of minutes, they're going to come to the top and finish poaching, two, three minutes. So what we are going to do while this is cooking, we are going to start the meat. And what I have here is my tray with all the meat and what we have is the fillet of pork. Now, you know, a lot of people shy away from pork when, in fact, the fillet of pork, if it's totally clean like this, have about the same amount of fat and cholesterol that chicken have, you know. Again, providing that it's clean. This is the fillet and there is a kind of skin on top, as you can see here, type of, which is easily removed. This is available all over market, you know. And in addition, what you have is what we call the silver skin here, which is a bit tough. It's not fat, really. And you can remove it also. So those you can roast all, you know, the beautiful piece of meat. And as I say, quite, quite lean. Or we can cut them into medallion like, you know, if I want to cook them, I can palm them a little bit or even butterfly them if you want them to cook a bit faster, you know, like this. So depending how long you want to cook them, they're going to cook for about two, three minutes on each side to more than that if you decide to cook it whole or leave it thicker, you know. So here they do it this way. We're going to put a little bit of salt and pepper on top of it. I use kosher type salt here, that is the granulated salt, which for me, I like the feel of it, you know. But remember that this is a much lighter salt than the other. What I'm saying is that a teaspoon of kosher type salt this way is going to be much less than a teaspoon of regular salt. So we put that to cook here and this should cook in a couple of minutes on each side. And during that time, we are going to do the garnish, have some white wine to put in there. But I have some scallion, as you can see here. We're going to cut the end of it here. And a bit of scallion is going to go into our dish later on. I have tomato and those tomato have been soaking, the dry tomato have been soaking in water. I'm going to remove them. And now they are soft enough to be used either whole like this or cut into piece. I think I'm going to leave them in fairly coarse pieces, but keep this because that's going to go into the juice. Then red onion, not only it has texture, but it has a beautiful different color also. Here we are. I have a bit of garlic here and I can use maybe two clove of garlic. This is not peeled. I can peel this one, crush it to release the skin this way. And now I think that I can turn my fillet on the other side. I could cover it at that point or continue cooking it. This is fairly thin, so it's going to cook fast. So I have the garlic, it's going to go with the onion. And finally here at the end, I'm going to use cornichons and those are French gherkins. We do them, actually my wife, I plant them, but my wife picked them up. It is tiny cucumber, you know, of a certain type that we pick up almost every day out of the flowers in the garden. And that we brush it with salt, put them in salt for a couple of hours, brush them, put them in jar with vinegar, you know, and that's all. So it's a very sour type of thing. So this is all of the garnish for my pork. So what I want to do now is look, those are finished. You see my dumpling are basically cooked here. What you do conventionally, if you're not going to use them, see they are fairly firm here. You want to cool them off in water and leave them in water if you're not going to use them. If you use them right away, you can take them out of the hot water, you know, and directly season them. Here we're doing a very simple seasoning of cracked pepper on top of it, a bit of salt, a little bit of parmesan cheese. Blend like that and a little bit of olive oil. We want to place on top, just serve them this way and maybe some parsley, you know, that you can have on top that I can cut very coarsely just for the color of it. So you see it as a way of falling out naturally, you know, food for me often fall in a natural manner, which is very attractive. So this can be served just the way it is. What we are going to do now to finish the pork, you see it's nice and brown on the other side also. And believe me, when you have pork like this and if it's cooked at that temperature high and if it doesn't have any fat or anything in it, it will cook very fast and pork does not have to cook to 180 degree internal temperature. The trichonosis is pork is cooked, it's killed rather at 139 degrees. So, you know, very often we cook it way too much. So here it is here. I have my garnish. What we want to do is glaze with like a third of a cup of white wine. This is not going to cook very long, you know. I want the juice, of course, of the tomato that I add to it to create a sauce that would cook a couple of minutes theoretically. And in this I would want to put a bit of Tabasco. I would want to finish it up with the gherkin, those cornichons, you know, that we call which are sour and so forth and mustard. After you add the mustard, you don't want to cook it longer, you know. Here it should cook probably a minute or so more, but I'm going to shut it off at this. And the mustard is used also as a kind of thickening agent at the end, you know, and it's nice and strong. So what we want to do here is to present the filet de porc charcutière, you know. A couple of them like this. They are beautiful, I have three, should be enough here. That on top, as you can see, this is a very acidic type of sauce. I could decorate that with pieces of sage, for example, we haven't used much sage, sage is beautiful. Time of the year I have a lot in my garden, it's free. And I have here, and of course, if you want to serve it with your gnocchi, which goes very well with it, by the way, then you would want to take a little plate, putting a filet, or maybe putting some of the gnocchi first, that you can spread out, you know, this way. It goes so well with it. And a little piece of the filet of pork in the center, your sauce that we have here. And maybe a little of that, and this is the main course for our bistro food. And for our bistro corner food, we're going to have a great dessert today. And this is very easy done, it is a frozen granita, we say in France, it would be granita in Italian, granita in France, it indicates a texture, you know, granulated texture. What I have here is a cup and a half of strong coffee, about three tablespoons of sugar, we put this, and stir it, and that's about all it amounts, we freeze this now in a block. Now, on one of them, we do a café au lait granita, and we put two tablespoons of half and half in it. And you freeze it, so it's slightly different. So you put the whole thing directly into the freezer. And I have some, of course, frozen here. I love cooking it for you, cook it for your friend, they're going to love it. Happy cooking!