- One of the greatest first course you can do is smoked salmon.

You buy it, serve it on a beautiful plate with buttered bread, put diced cucumber on top, capers, red onion, a little bit of extra virgin olive oil on top.

Cracked pepper.

This is a terrific dish at the first course.

I am Jacques Pepin and this is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking.

I'm doing a puree of broccoli today that is with the floret of the broccoli.

And with the stem that I'm peeling here, I'm doing a special relish.

My wife love those relish and she learn how to do that or how to love it rather in a Chinese restaurant.

So the first thing that I want to do is to put those to cook the floret that is.

Those as you can see are very nice and firm.

They're very tight together.

An important part with broccoli, you know when they're in the water, when they finish cooking, don't leave them in the water.

If you leave them in the water, they will taste like cabbage, and very strong.

You know, so you have to remove them from the water.

So there we use.

I'm gonna cover them, the floret.

And the stem here, you peel them.

Sometime, you know, the peel, just peel out this way.

If you take some and you pull it out as you can see.

Sometime if it doesn't, then just peel it up.

I mean, one way or the other, the outer is quite fibrous and tough and unfortunately people don't realize that if you peel it up, in my opinion, this is better than the flower, I mean, the top of the broccoli.

This is really nice and tender, you know.

So use this.

I'm gonna use it in another recipient later.

This you cannot use.

But first, I want to start an asopao.

Kind of asopao or asoparo.

Again, kind of Spanish origin.

It's kind of soupy.

It's a soup.

They do stew like that.

In that case, I'm going to do rice, which is kind of light and a bit liquid, you know, a bit like a soup.

So we'll start like a risotto in a sense with, we start with onion.

And I need about four, five tablespoon of onion here.

And first, of course, some olive oil.

Here we are.

That's it.

Okay, my onion.

Garlic.

I have clove of garlic here and I think like two clove would be enough.

This is large clove of garlic or fairly large.

I can even open the center.

Sometime, you know, in the center of it, you have the germ, you know a green sprout coming in it.

Very often people say you have to remove that 'cause it's tough and it's very strong.

I probably remove it about 30 years of my professional life.

I've been a chef 55 years now.

And after like 30 years, I said, that thing is really tough or strong.

I open it and it turned out to be probably the best part of the garlic.

If you go to China, you know, they have those things sprouting out of the garlic, and they cut it out.

It's like chive.

It's not the flat garlic chive, it's something else.

It's the sprout of garlic.

But it's similar to those, and they use this, and the garlic itself, there is nothing left in it.

That's what happened in spring when the garlic goes up.

So this happened to be very tender.

So now I don't throw it out anymore.

I will mix this.

Soften it a little bit.

And rice.

The rice that I use here is a flat rice, and arborio rice, a round rice from Piedmont from in Italy.

There's different type of rice.

I use oriental rice for that to which work quite well.

But you do, you pull your rice directly into the onion.

And then the conventional way of doing a risotto, this is not really a risotto, is to put tablespoon or half a cup of so of the stock at the time.

I know that I have about a cup and a quarter of rice here and it will absorb at least five cup of liquid.

So I already, even when I do a risotto, I do the same technique.

I start with much more liquid than conventionally done.

In that case, one, two, three, four.

Four of those six-ounce ladle, that's three cup.

Three cup of liquid.

'Cause I know one way or the other, I will need much more than that.

What I do, I cover that and cook that for about seven, eight minute.

Time at which it's time to add more liquid.

So this is the first step.

Well, my broccoli cooked about now.

It's about five, six minute.

This needs a little longer.

So I'm going to puree the broccoli now.

Directly in the food processor.

You know, very often the broccoli in florets served like this, perfectly fine with a bit of melted butter or with olive oil or stuff like this.

But the puree is a bit different.

Occasionally I like to have a puree depending what the main course is, but that goes with a lot of game and chicken, even fish actually.

So I'm gonna put a little bit of that liquid in there.

About four or five tablespoon.

And that's it, let's see.

(food processor whirs) You don't want to make too much liquid in it, but what you want to do is a piece of butter and I could put a piece of butter as such.

But what I want to do is a beurre.

We could do a beurre noisette or a beurre noir.

That is a butter, hazelnut butter.

It cooked to an hazelnut color and it had a strong taste of hazelnut.

And that's what I want to add to my broccoli.

I have to put salt.

Yeah, a bit of salt and pepper in there.

Anyway.

See, I have a nice brownish color here getting there and that the color that I want.

Okay.

Nice color.

(food processor whirs) Good.

This is it.

Well, this is just about right now.

I think I'm going to check the rice should be about the way it should be.

Now as you can see it here, it's nice in the bottom.

I need the time to continue and now you have to be a bit more careful.

You go slower.

So now about half a cup of stock.

I will still cover it for a couple of minutes with this and then we'll finish it up with more stock, butter, and the peas.

So now.

Here is my puree of broccoli.

This is a really nice puree of broccoli like this.

I think even President Bush father would like that one.

Okay.

Yeah.

Very often the broccoli puree or other puree of green vegetable, you know, we used to do with a lot of cream or addition to this.

And now, you know, we see the puree of the vegetable itself.

It's actually cleaner, you know, truer to the taste of it.

Here we are here.

And then my broccoli stem now.

So what I'm going to do is to cut it.

You can cut it in basically any way you want, but this is, remember, raw broccoli which has just been peeled.

I'm going to put it back in there.

First, you put some salt on it.

The salt is going to cure it.

A bit of salt to cure it.

I have a bit of chopped garlic.

A bit of jalapeno peppers.

This is chili oil, so it's really hot oil, you know?

I like it fairly hot.

A bit of sesame oil.

And this is of course the dark sesame oil that you use in oriental food.

I put a dash of balsamic vinegar.

A dash of sugar.

And that's it, you know?

And this thing, in four, five minute, it's melted, it's nice and crunchy, and you can't keep it for like a day or so in your refrigerator.

Okay?

I put some jalapeno here and there, but I want to put a bit of mint.

Often the mint, you know, it's very clean, fresh taste.

Contrast with the jalapeno and it's a very good contrast.

You do that a lot in like Thai cooking.

So here we are.

If you don't have it, you don't put any, or put a bit of basil.

Okay.

Now I'm gonna check up.

As you can see, the stock has almost been absorbed.

Now I have to start checking.

I take a grain of rice.

Bite it.

It's practically cooked.

I think it needs a little more of the stock on top.

And I would want to finish it right on top now.

Remember it's a kind of soupy rice and I will put the peas in it.

And they will take three, four, five minutes to cook with the rest of my rice.

And at that point, you can see, you can hear it when I'm stirring it.

I can hear that the bottom is starting to stick a little bit.

I'm gonna need more stock in this.

Piece of butter for the end.

Finish it with butter and olive oil.

Maybe I don't put the butter now.

I'm gonna put the dash of olive oil now.

Okay.

And then you cook it and stir it until you reach the right consistency, which is similar to risotto.

Usually a bit softer than risotto, a bit more soupy here.

I've done that with asparagus, asparagus tip, you know, it's very good with that.

Okay.

It's still going to take like a minute or so, you know?

And then we finish it up now with a piece of butter and with Parmesan cheese.

That's it.

It's the type of dish that you do, you know, with friend when you are all cooking in the kitchen sharing a glass of wine or a bottle.

And this is it.

So you see, slightly more soupy than a risotto.

Okay.

This is great with asparagus also.

This is the right way of starting your meal on a cold evening.

Soupy rice with pea.

(cheerful music) I'm doing a little lobster fricassee today in the old style with the lobster in the shell as we used to do.

I have lobster here, you know, from Canada or Long Island.

And actually those are hard shell, you can see that.

And usually winter lobster are hard shell.

Even though we eat a great deal of lobster in the summer, they are better in the winter.

The hard shell and fuller in the meat.

Male or female, you know, this happened to be the male.

You can see the last two appendage here are big and this is indicate a male and of course that male is not going to have any roe in it.

You know, if you want the roe and sometime we use the roe to improve the sauce, you want the female.

You can see the female here.

The two last appendage are almost the same thing than this here.

You know, very small.

I'm only going to do one lobster.

And of course it's always a controversy how to kill the lobster.

And someone asked to kill it somewhere, whether it's the fish monger or whether it's someone else, someone kill the lobster.

And after 55 years in the kitchen, I think that the best way of killing a lobster is to cut the line that you have right here between the eye.

That's where the spinal cord is.

You sever the spinal cord and the animal died instantly.

It doesn't have a brain, it just have a spinal cord here.

So basically you put your knife there on that spinal cord and you kill it and that's it.

So this is the way, in my opinion, which is the most human and easiest way certainly to do it.

We want to keep the tail, we want to keep, of course the juice and all of that for our sauce.

So the first thing we remove this.

(shell cracks) The two leg, you can break them at the joint, you know.

Won't have to worry about it now.

And we open it here.

(shell cracks) Directly and you can see that inside, for example, in the middle here, you have a big sack.

And the sack is actually the stomach here, that large sack.

And you don't use that.

Sometime it's full of gravel.

Sometimes there is nothing in it.

This one doesn't have much in it.

But this is the stomach.

That is discarded.

But the juice, however, inside we keep it.

And you can see there that there is different color.

There is the dark, the darker, the darker color, which is this one here.

This actually will turn bright red.

This is the roe of the animal.

It's a female and they're relatively small, depend the time of the year.

This one here, which is pale green, this is the tomalley.

Tomalley or liver, you know?

That again is going to be great in the sauce.

And cut that in half.

There is a lot of good meat to suck out of this.

This is the type of dish that you do like crab.

You know, in summer when you eat with your finger.

And the tail itself, I'm going to cut it into two or three pieces.

(shell cracks) That's it.

This, we're going to saute all of those piece of lobster.

And the juice I'm going to keep, I'm gonna bring that next to my table and to get all of the juice from inside the lobster of the liquid, you know?

And I'm going to put a little bit of white wine in there and you will see it will discolor, usually turn white-ish, you know?

See the color of it?

That prevent the juice of sticking up together.

Now this, I want to crack it.

The best way to crack it, it splatter a lot.

Put a towel on top of it and break it.

(tool pounds) Yeah, those are winter lobster.

They're really tough.

Yeah, see, these are nice and cracked.

So here is what we're going to do.

Olive oil in there.

This is just saute, you know?

Saute on really high heat.

And I'm gonna use some Wondra flour here.

We're going to dip it in flour and just saute it, saute like this.

Okay.

(pan sizzles) Directly in there.

And they take, you know, minutes to cook here.

(pan sizzles) Very often, you know when you want to do a sauce and you say, "Oh I'm afraid when I do a sauce it form into big lump."

Well, you put that flour directly into the liquid and it doesn't form any lump.

It also make a very crisp outside when you bread something or a piece of meat, a piece of fish, any of this.

So that's it.

Little bit of salt, some pepper.

(pan sizzles) That's it.

And then the garnish with this to make the sauce, I'm going to do some onion that I have here.

Some garlic.

Chives, tomato, all the stuff that you have from the garden and finally I'll finish it up even with the liquid from the lobster, you know?

Okay, maybe one or two clove of garlic or maybe another small one.

Coarsely chopped.

Tomato.

I think now I can hear them singing.

Then when we cook in the kitchen, I can know whether a chicken is roasted in the oven or not.

Just hearing it, at some point, the fat or the liquid coming out of the chicken will clarify it and we call it the (speaks in foreign language).

It's singing.

When it clarify like that, you can hear it.

So this.

(pan sizzles) We can see from the knife.

The knife will cross.

(pan sizzles) So that was a test actually that the chef would do in the kitchen.

He would tell her, "Do you know whether the chicken is cooking or it's cooked?"

And you could hear it, you had to hear it very carefully because at the beginning when the chicken start cooking, the juice come out of it.

It only at the end when there is no more juice and the fat in the tray of the chicken clarify in the oven, then it grizzle a bit like a fryer.

You can hear it.

Then it's cooked.

So my lobster was singing also on one side.

It's not cooked yet.

Okay, tomato.

More pieces.

I think that the lobster should be about cooked now.

(pan sizzles) I'm going to put it in there.

(pan sizzles) See that's a lobster.

Who upon they serve you a lobster for one.

This is great for two.

I'm gonna put that on top to continue keeping it warm while I'm doing the sauce.

Putting the vegetable in there.

(pan sizzles) Want to soften those vegetables.

A bit of olive oil.

(pan sizzles) You know, Chinese cooking will do something similar, kind of stir fry with different seasoning of course, but there are similarities.

(pan sizzles) Want to put the lobster juice.

The tomalley here with this.

This should turn red.

This is the roe.

So the roe here will turn red, but the tomalley here will not turn red.

Just thicken the sauce a little bit.

Here it is.

You can see that that thing is red now.

Okay, we taste it.

A dash of salt.

Put a dash of parsley for color on top.

And that's it.

The little fricassee of lobster.

Simply homemade.

(gentle music) And for dessert, you never miss with ice cream.

Very simple, very good, and so many variation they can do with it.

I still love a good vanilla ice cream.

And in our day of moderation, I think two coops should be enough, two scoop of ice cream.

And on top of this, you can put nuts.

What I love on top is the hazelnut chocolate spread here.

It's the (speaks in foreign language) we use in France with a mixture called (speaks in foreign language) that we do in professional kitchen, which is really, really good.

I love the taste.

What I did, I put that jar directly in the microwave oven for like a minute and a half.

It's perfect to pour it.

A few pistachio nuts on top if you want.

Couple of cookie.

And this is it, a great dessert.

With that, I think I feel a little sherry would be great.

I have a 30-years-old sherry here that I'm going to enjoy with my ice cream.

Thank you so much for spending time with me in the kitchen and happy cooking.