- This is a great summer first course.

Take the top of a very ripe, big tomato.

Take the center out here.

Mash the center with salt, pepper, and a little bit of olive oil.

That created a sauce.

(bright piano music) And then do a mixture from your pantry.

I have tuna, I have anchovies, scallion, olives.

All you have to do is to pile it up into your tomato, right there, a bit of your sauce around, and you have a great first course, which is for any great dinner.

(bright piano music) I'm Jacques Pépin, and this is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking.

- Well, today I'm going to do a beautiful first course for you with salmon, a salmon tartare.

I start cutting it here.

And you can see it's a beautiful piece of salmon, fresh.

It's glossy and all this.

Nice and clean.

No skin, no sinews.

But for the tartare that I'm doing here, it's very important to cut it with your knife.

Often people do tartare and put it in the food processor.

It make it mushy, it make it pasty.

And it's a good, big difference if you do that fish with a knife, which is what I'm doing here.

So you chop it about quarter of an inch, half an inch big.

What we wanna do with it it's salt.

Fair amount of salt.

Pepper.

Always a lot of pepper.

Okay.

I'm putting some capers with it.

I love capers with this.

A bit of red onion.

Doesn't have to be red onion necessarily, but red onion is mild.

And got a quarter of a cup or so.

All of that goes inside.

Olive oil and a little bit of acid in the form of rice vinegar.

The rice vinegar is pretty mild, you know.

I don't want too munch of it.

That's it.

Or maybe I put a bit of Tabasco.

I like Tabasco in my tartare, you know.

Okay, so here is for the tartare.

Now, you know you can serve that by itself.

It's perfectly fine.

You don't have to add anything to it.

And it'd be absolutely delicious if your fish is fresh.

But I'm making it more complicated.

We're going to serve that with cauliflowers.

And I have some cauliflowers floured at here, just barely cooked.

And I want to mash them here with a little masher, which make it pretty coarse.

Again, a little bit of red onion.

This time maybe I'll slice the red onion, rather than chop, to be a little bit different.

Here we are.

French mustard, French-type mustard, you know, Dijon mustard, I love in it a good (indistinct) of it.

Olive oil again.

Vinegar.

This time we're using a red wine vinegar, which is a bit stronger than the other.

And that's basically it.

We have the two base.

And that combination is quite nice, actually, of the salmon and the cauliflowers.

Another thing we add to this is chopped eggs.

It's a great match and you can cut it in the four piece like that or in slice.

And for us, I'm going to cut it in slice.

Put it across to put it into dice.

Here we are.

Again And I'm gonna put chives with it.

Do the chive.

Cut very fine.

(knife thudding) Give me some taste as well as some color.

Okay.

Here I am.

Another spoon, and I mix this together.

You can prepare, of course, all of that stuff ahead, you know.

Now it's time to put it together.

So first you put that.

See, when you want to do a ring with that, don't try to do your ring.

You're gonna mess up the side of your plate.

Put it in the center.

Use the bowl of your spoon like that to push it outside.

That give you a clean edge, you know, here.

That's it.

And then you can use a spoon to put that in the middle, but often in the type of cuisine we do now, this looks a little neater.

So I have a bed of cauliflowers here underneath.

You can see you can press that bed of cauliflowers in it.

And we put the tartar on top of it.

Now, here we are.

Couple of the capers on top, the red onion.

Here we are.

And that's it.

You can remove this.

A little bit of olive oil around.

(bright piano and bell music) And this is our first course.

(bright piano and bell music) This is a testy, elegant dish.

And now we're going to do a ragu of chickpeas.

I love chickpeas.

They come out dry, and very often it takes hours and hours to cook them.

Or then you can use them in can, that I'm going to do today.

And what I want to do is to start by sauteing a little bit of onion.

The onion don't have to be too thin for that.

Pretty coarse type of dish.

Scallion.

(knife thudding) Now, olive oil here.

And my onion and scallion.

Start sauteing here.

Put a bit of garlic in this.

Crush your garlic.

(knife thudding) Bring it together.

(knife thudding) Chop it nicely.

That will go into it.

And tomato.

You don't have to worry about taking the stem out of it or the seed or the skin or any of this, you know.

I took the stem.

Now you can't cut it fairly coarse, you know.

One inch, one and a half inch.

Basically, your tomato is going to break down into the stew.

Here we are.

Okay.

Tomato.

(pan sizzling) Okay, right there you have a beautiful, beautiful mixture of vegetable.

Salt.

Pepper on top of it.

You can put a bit of Tabasco.

You could even put a serrano or a hot pepper, if you like those here.

And a bit of chicken stock.

(pan sizzling) (utensils clanking) That's it.

So now chickpeas here, which I'm going to drain.

And this is it.

This we're going to add to it.

This has to come to a boil.

And it should boil 10, 15 minute.

(metallic clanking) And now we're going to do the main course, which is a filet of tenderloin or filet of pork, very thin that we're going to pound into scallopini, bread, and saute with a mushroom sauce.

As you can see, those are very, very lean, totally clean.

And what you do with them, cut them into about two ounces, little tournedos or like the filet mignon, you know.

And this actually can be cooked this way.

I cook those sometime with prune, you know, dry prune and Port wine, and that goes very well with it.

In our case here, we're going to pound it.

And use a ponder like this one.

(pounder thudding) Sometime, if it sticks what you have to do is to put a little bit of water.

(pounder thudding) The water make it slide, you know.

In our case here, it's maybe better not to use the water because we putting a mixture of eggs on top.

Then next we're going to do the breadcrumb and the dressing.

And I have a nice soft bread here, and this is what we're going to use for that.

There is a big difference between dry breadcrumb and fresh breadcrumb.

I have a slice of bread here, which is about an ounce.

You will see that with one slice of bread I do about one cup of breadcrumb.

If I take that slice of bread, cut it in into tiny cube, put it into the oven to do dry cube, put it in the food processor, I'll have about three tablespoon of breadcrumb instead of a cup.

So a slice of bread dry and a slice of bread fresh will give you totally different amount of breadcrumb.

Now, it is important because, when I put that meat into the breadcrumb, it'll absorb a certain amount of breadcrumb to cover it, maybe a quarter of a cup on each side.

If I have a quarter of a cup of fresh breadcrumb on each side half a cup, it makes about half a slice of bread.

If that piece of meat end up with a half a cup of dry bread crumb, it's like four slice of bread.

Totally different.

You put it in your skillet it absorb all the oil, the butter, whatever you have in it, because it's dry breadcrumb.

It's not that you cannot use dry breadcrumb, you just to be aware that dry and fresh are quite different.

So here, (food processor whirring) you can pulse it a couple of times if you want.

(food processor whirring) But within second you'll have your fresh breadcrumb.

So here I will have plenty with this.

I'm going to put some Parmesan cheese in it, grated Parmesan cheese.

Mix it a little bit, Even, in fact, a little bit of salt and pepper.

And I have my mixture ready here.

First, however, we want to dip it in eggs.

And I have an egg here.

Again, a dash of salt, dash of paper.

You want to beat your eggs.

Some people put cream in the egg.

It's fine, you can do it.

Plain egg is perfectly fine, Okay.

Be sure to bid it so that you don't have long string of egg white still attached to it.

Okay.

Now we're ready to saute it.

And I'm going to put some olive oil in there and a little piece of butter.

Okay.

Now the idea is to take your scallopini, have a little bit of salt, little bit of pepper.

This on one side.

And then you dip them into the eggs and in the breadcrumb.

Again, another one into the egg and in the breadcrumb.

You can see that my one egg here could be enough to do like about a dozen of those.

And turn it, pad it so that it absorbs some of the breadcrumb.

This can be done ahead also.

Not too, too much ahead.

Not like five years ahead or things like that.

But maybe an hour or two ahead, it's fine.

Okay.

You want your butter to be fairly hot in there.

It's not quite hot enough.

Let me check on my ragu here.

And it's really boiling.

(pan sizzling) Now what I may do is to leave it up and to absorb some of that liquid, reduce the heat a little bit so that there is half of that liquid evaporated.

It concentrate the taste.

We are ready here on this one.

Scallopini there.

This cook minute, minute and a half on each side, and it's more than enough.

Okay.

Fish, done the same way.

A filet of fish should do it exactly the same way.

Okay, this will cook a couple of minutes.

(pan sizzling) Before we serve this.

I have some mushroom here, some chives, some onion, and that's going to go in there to create a sauce with it.

So maybe I'll chop the onion right away to be ready.

Have enough here.

(knife thudding) About two, three tablespoon of onion, quarter of a cup.

That's fine.

And enough chives to put on top.

(knife thudding) That's it.

Good.

Let's see.

Now, this should be about fine.

It's browned nicely on the other side.

You can see.

(pan sizzling) And of course, people don't realize the filet of pork, totally clean up as I have here, have no more fat and cholesterol than a breast of chicken.

So it's a very good meat to have.

So to open my bottle of wine here, if you have a beautiful bottle of wine and you wanna be a bit fancy, what you do, you cut the top like that with a knife.

Just to... And then there is a little ridge here.

So with your knife you cut on that ridge, not totally completely around.

You leave a little piece undone.

And now you take your corkscrew.

Be sure to place that right in the center of it and guide it with your hands so that that corkscrew goes in the center of the cork.

And then on the side, (cork popping) leave that up.

Remove your corkscrew.

You do that for an old bottle of wine to present the cork.

And remember it was cut all around except in one end here, so that become a little place where you can insert your wine and present it with your cork.

Okay, this is basically ready now.

So what I'm going to do, put that in there.

(pan sizzling) Three, four.

Good.

My onion in the gripping.

(pan sizzling) Maybe deglaze with a little bit of white wine.

I have it here.

(pan sizzling) Get a little bit of a acidity in there.

Good.

Mushroom.

(pan sizzling) Okay.

And those mushroom now we're going to cook three, four minutes for the juice to come out of the mushroom and start browning.

So let me check on this.

This is slightly too liquidy still.

I would say it needs maybe another minute or so before I can put it in my serving dish.

(pan sizzling) Wait, the chickpeas are just about fine now.

So all you have to do, put them in the serving dish.

Maybe a little bit of parsley, if you want on top.

Just a little accent of color.

And that's gonna be great with our pork chop.

Right here.

Now my mushroom are ready.

As you can see, you can hear them.

First the mushroom, the liquid come out of the mushroom, you don't hear anything.

Then when it starts sizzling, most of the liquid from the mushroom is evaporated, then it start browning.

(pan sizzling) And this we'll put directly on top of the scallopini.

A bit of chives.

And that's it.

All we have now to do is to taste the wine, which is going to go with this.

And this is a very assertive wine.

A Zinfandel is certainly going to go quite well with that.

(bright piano music) Wow.

Good.

I am going to show you how to make a peach in caramel and cream sauce.

Really easy and quite delicious.

So the first thing that you do take a peach, a can of halved peach, like that in heavy syrup, and pour the syrup into a skillet like that.

Now, this has to cook about eight, nine-minute cooking until it start turning into caramel.

Then when it turned into caramel, then you continue with the peach.

You can see now the juice is practically all (indistinct) into a caramel.

And the caramel basically is indicated by a color.

See, this is a darker caramel color on the edge.

You can let it as dark as you want.

You want it fairly dark so that you have an intensity of taste.

On the other hand, you don't want to burn it, of course.

But this is about right now a caramel.

So what you do at that point, place back those peach in it.

(pan sizzling) That will soften the caramel because there is still a little bit of liquid on those peach.

(pan sizzling) And then we put some cream in it to create the cream caramel sauce, you know.

(pan sizzling) Okay.

(pan sizzling) Now you can cook that right on top of the stove, or you could cover it until again it start getting thick, and that's going to take one or two minute.

But it goes quite fast.

As you can see, the juice around is getting thicker of a beautiful color.

You know, a beige color, very creamy and so forth.

And of course, the darker your caramel is, the darker the sauce is going to be the color.

Now, the sauce is relatively thin at that point.

Believe me, when it cool off, it's going to get thicker.

I think another minute or so it's going to be ready.

Now, you can see it's creamy and beautifully thick.

What you can do with this, you can put a little bit of pear brandy or a little bit of lemon juice in it, to give some acidity.

Pear brandy or cognac, you know.

Or if you don't want to have any alcohol, it's fine too.

And that basically ready.

Now, you can let that cool off a little bit and serve it lukewarm, or you can serve it cold.

Conventionally, it is served cold.

And I have one here, which has been cooling off for a few hours.

See, the sauce is thicker.

I'm going to arrange those on top here.

I like them on this side.

The peach.

This is yellow cling peach.

Those type of peach will go for that recipe.

Like white peach, I love white peach, but it wouldn't work with that.

The white peach fall into pieces, you know.

And here we have this.

And of course, our caramel sauce here.

Up.

Now a little bit of decoration, if you want.

Put some... Anything flat like that, a little skillet.

We can do some pistachio nuts here on tap.

And this is a great dessert.

You serve that with a piece of pound cake, with cookie, or then with a piece of brioche like that.

I love brioche, you know.

That is toasted brioche.

And that will go well with it.

That will absorb, kind of absorb all of the juice.

You can put that around in one way or the other.

(bright piano music) Just about enough to go around.

That's it.

Here is our peach in caramel sauce.

This is great, you know.

And that can show you, this is maybe the perfect dish to show you how easy it is from your pantry to do a beautiful dessert to impress your guests.

Happy cooking.