- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

I live here in the country, but I spend a lot of time in New York City.

I love the pace of the city.

There is a certain excitement in the air and in the cooking too.

Today, I'm going to show you how to make the kind of dishes you'd find in a classy New York bistro, Saute eggplant wrapped around cheese and mushroom with a tomato vinegarette, filet of red snapper dressed up in a potato jacket on a barrel of fresh zucchini, and a light apple tart for the dessert.

It's sophisticated food you can do at home coming up on "Today's Gourmet".

(smooth jazz music) I am cooking one of my favorite vegetables today, eggplant.

We have a New York bistro theme.

What is a bistro?

You know, a bistro in France is a little neighborhood cafe, you know, very simple that you eat, come with the family and so forth.

You know the owner.

In New York, bistro is a bit more chic, you know.

It's a mixture of, like, country style and a bit trendy novel cuisine with new ideas, so it has that type of excitement and all that.

A lot of terrific new bistro in New York.

Actually, the word bistro is Russian.

It come from the Russian for fast, and during the Franco-Russian War at the beginning of the 19th century, the Russians who came to Paris used to run to the little cafe and say, "Bistro, bistro, bistro," which means fast, fast, they wanted to eat fast.

So bistro is probably your first original fast-food service, fast-food restaurant.

We're doing eggplant today that the Russian loves too, and with eggplant, we're going to roll them.

Eggplants are terrific in vitamin A and we're going to saute with a little bit of peanut oil.

You want to take eggplant without too much seed and the ones which don't have too much seed are usually the male eggplant which in that skillet here, I'm going to put a little bit of peanut oil to saute it.

And the male eggplants are usually the one with the long things at the end, like this one had here.

This is usually the male eggplant and it has less seed than the other.

Still, the eggplant absorbs a certain amount of oil.

So what you want to do, you don't want to put too much oil to start with.

If you put more oil, it will absorb it, so put just what you need and cook them this way.

We want to use those slices of eggplant, which has to cook about five minutes, and stuff them and roll them and finish them in that type of lukewarm, you know, dining-room salad in the style of what is done now, especially in the bistro, and for that, we're going to take a little bit of onion and garlic.

I will put a little bit of olive oil in that skillet.

I'm starting now our stuffing here, you know, and the stuffing, again, onion.

I'm going to saute in it and we have next to this garlic.

I have mushroom and this is the first part.

The first part of it is the garlic.

(knife knocks) That we're going to saute in there also and the garlic, mushroom and all this.

Now, I'm not going to do all of it, just saute a little bit to show you, because actually I have another one on the side here which is ready for me, and here, this has been cooled off, because after I finished saute that first part, it has to cool off and that's what I want to do.

Cool it off and put it in a bowl like this.

(pan knocks) To put the rest of our stuffing in it and the rest of our stuffing, I have it here.

I have Worcestershire sauce.

I have beautiful golden raisins here, high in fiber.

I have Monterey Jack.

You can use a bomber.

You can use another type of cheese, and of course if you don't want to use cheese, if you cut down on your calories, then don't put the cheese in.

It is perfectly fine.

Here, I'm putting some of it, the beautiful golden raisins.

Again, the chives have beautiful color, as you can see, a bit of the Worcestershire sauce, cracked paper in it, and there I have a nice stuffing here and that stuffing, I'm going to put it into those eggplant slices.

I have some extra eggplant slices which are already done, because we won't have time to finish those, and I have already some which are rolled.

So the idea here is to mix the stuffing together, of course.

Put a little bit, about a tablespoon or so, into your roll of eggplant, and to put it there.

It will have a tendency to break down, you know.

Tighten it a little bit.

Remember that you can do that way ahead, you know.

You can put all the type of stuffing.

I like to put herbs in it.

Here it is.

This is a nice roll.

Take it gently.

You can arrange them on a beautiful platter like this.

Maybe I'll do another one again, and again, rolling it.

Sometimes, it crack like this one just cracked on me and it come, because sometime you do the slice of eggplant too thin, you know.

I won't use it then, because it's cracked.

When we're at home, I'll probably use it anyway.

I'll put it underneath so it doesn't show, because the amount of stuffing that we have here in can do quite a lot of eggplants, you know, 14, 15 slices of eggplants.

So you fill up different tray and now we're going to do a tomato vinegarette to put on top of it.

My stuffing on the side here and let's see where my eggplant slices are here.

They are pretty nice and brown.

As you can see, I can turn them on the other side to have them brown.

Of course, they have to cool off.

Now, I have some fresh tomato here and the tomato, I dip them in boiling water to take the skin, cut them in half, press the seed out of it, and I have tomato flesh cut in little cube here.

I like to do dishes with this fresh onion also.

I put a little bit of fresh onion there and what we are going to do with this is to put some vinegar.

Red wine vinegar is good, a bit of salt and cracked pepper.

(pepper crunches) Good.

Olive oil.

Again, you can use of course another type of oil.

I used peanut oil here and peanut oil as well as olive oil is a monounsaturated oil.

This is what I have here and I can put that all around and on top of my eggplant are the first course.

Not only does it have a great eye appeal, you know, it's beautiful, but it's terrific to eat, which is really the most important part of it.

I have a beautiful sprig of basil here.

I'm going to put that right in the center to finish the dish and that's really one of my favorite.

I wanna show you how to make dough, to make one of the real french desserts you have in a bistro and this is what we call an apple tart.

We call it in France a tarte au pomme and the tarte au pomme is the quintessential French dessert, you know.

For that, you have to make dough and dough can be tricky for some people.

Basically, dough is made of flour, water and butter.

If you take flour and water together and press it together, the water will swell up the protein in the flour.

The protein is also the stuff we call gluten, which make your dough elastic, you know.

So if you have just water and flour, you will have a dough very high in gluten and the more you work it, the more you develop the gluten.

This is what you do for bread, a very elastic piece of dough which is like rubber, water, flour.

If you take that same flour and take butter in it, crush that butter into the flour and mix it and use the butter actually as a moisturizer to wet the flour, anchor it together, the fat will coat the protein or the gluten in the flour and it prevents the development of gluten, so you have a dough which is mushy.

You spread it.

It's like modeling clay.

You grab it, it break.

You pull it out, it crack.

This is what a cookie dough is, but between the cookie dough of fat and butter and the bread dough of water and flour, you have the two extremes are there.

What I'm doing now is a pie dough and it's a mixture in between.

I want some elasticity that the water gives me, but I want to have some of the quality that the butter gives me too.

And again, even there, the important part is that I will roll it very, very thin to have the limited amount of butter in it, in the dough.

So I have three quarters of a cup of flour here and I have two tablespoons of butter and those two tablespoons of butter, I'm going to cut into little pieces there directly in the food processor.

You can of course do that with a knife also.

It works very well, but you can do this with margarine of course, if you cannot use butter.

It won't have exactly the same taste, but it'd be quite good.

Now, I want to incorporate that together, maybe four, five, six seconds.

I still want tiny little pieces of butter in it and that's very important, because those tiny pieces of butter will melt in the cooking process and gave me the flakiness of what I get in what we call a puff paste.

Puff paste is the dough that you do Napoleones, vol-au-vents, very flaky, flaky dough.

Here, I have ice-cold water, so about two to three tablespoons.

It depends on how dry the area where you are in the country.

You need more water, less water depending how dry the flour is.

You turn it, check it again.

You should be able to form it into a bowl here.

(food processor whirs) You won't let it turn long enough to form it into a bowl by itself, because if you do that, most of the butter will have disappeared, so I'd rather not do this.

So I turn it, but I know now, by pressing it, that it will get together.

So what I do next, I can gather it together on the table here, try to get all the dough out, and I gather it together and put it directly on top of a piece of plastic wrap.

Actually, I could have put from the food processor directly into the plastic wrap that I have here and bring back there in the center.

Now, in top of that plastic wrap, this is one technique that I show you to roll the dough.

It's a bit easier and you don't have to worry about it sticking to the table.

So here, I have two pieces of plastic wrap and I use that type of rolling pin like this to roll it into a large, about six, 10 inches, something like this, round.

You know, make it as round as you can.

This is the dough that my wife like the most, you know.

The reason is that I don't dirty this.

I don't dirty the table.

I don't dirty anything with that.

So she like that dough the best.

In any case, after you have rolled it this way, your best way, you can grab it this way and put it in the refrigerator.

It will set very fast here, because it's thin, and that's what I'm going to do now.

So I put it in my refrigerator and grab another one that I have done before here, which is now hard.

I can put that directly on my cookie sheet.

Take the plastic wrap out.

Actually, it should be even a bit softer than that.

What I want to show you here is the little pieces of butter which are still through it.

You can see where it's white and all this and that will give me flakiness in the puff paste.

So I turn it on the other side and you see I don't lose any dough here, because I don't put it into a special mold for a tart.

This is a type of free-range galette, you know.

Often, we call that a galette in France.

A galette refers to something very flat, you know, like a pizza type that you cook in big oven, you know.

All French people have their special apple tart that they do, you know, and each one of them is the best, of course.

This one happened to be the best apple tart that you will ever do.

We do the big apple and I like to use the Golden Delicious here.

Use your thumb as a pivot here to remove the center of the apple.

Very often, I use this as a decoration, when I do something with apple.

It's nice.

Do it the same way on the other side, and now I can peel my apple.

Notice that, when I peel an apple, I use the point of the knife and the left hand is really pushing the apple into the knife, certainly just as much as the right one is turning around the apple, so this is the technique here.

All around, you turn it.

My grandmother used to dry out apple skin like this to make tea with it.

She said it was very good for your kidney.

I'm not sure, but it is cheap.

Now, with your thumb, you can take, again, the seed from the center.

Okay.

Now, in that particular recipe, what I have done, taking a spoon like this or even a knife, I empty the apple a little more and I keep those pieces of apple here, and after I empty my apple this way, I'm going to stuff them with a little bit of jam, yeah?

And for that, I use apricot jam.

It's really what I like the best, so I have a little bit of apricot jam here.

I put it in the center of my apple, down here, a little more here.

You know, I could cut those apples in slices, which is the conventional way, but I like to do, it's a change, you know, to make all half apple like this.

Now, I have the trimming of those apples that I'm going to use on top of it.

I never lose anything, you know.

(knife knocks) Here we are.

I sprinkle that on top of it and around.

You know, you don't wanna do anything from about a good one inch, one and a half inch from the side, you know, here.

And then, now, very simply, you bring that around back.

You could trim it, if you want, but you don't have to.

So this is a galette.

You can do big galette like this.

You don't have to do apple.

Sometimes, I do cherry with it.

I do peach.

I do all kinds of things like this with it.

Now, remember, however, that if I were to do one with cherry, I put a little bit of flour in the bottom of my dough.

Otherwise, the cherries are going to give me too much juice and I'm going to have problem.

Now, I have just a little bit of butter here, barely a tablespoon, a bit of sugar on top of it.

I put it on top and even on the dough a little bit around so that it crusts.

That goes into the oven, like, 45 minutes at, like, 400 degrees.

I want a thick, nice crust.

And after that, this is our dessert now, and I like to have that dessert kind of lukewarm.

Those big apple tarts you have in France, lukewarm are the best, and while this is cooking, now we're going to do the main dish and the main dish is a very interesting way of cooking fish, cooking it between layer of potato.

Call it a filet of snapper or another type of fish into a potato jacket and to cook the potato, or rather to cut the potato, I have that strange-looking instrument here that we call a mandolin in France.

You put the thing in the middle and use it.

This is the guard so that you don't cut yourself.

Actually, as a professional, you know, I don't use the guard, but if you're not familiar with it, I think it's better to use the guard, if you don't really know how to use it.

There is a thing here which makes it go up and down for the thickness of my potato, which I go here, and as you can see, I have a lot of nice sliced potato out of this.

I don't really need more than that to do my potato, my fish in potato.

And here is what we have here, a black sea bass.

It's a very waxy, red flesh.

The Chinese use that a great deal.

I love that type of fish.

I do ceviche with it and so forth.

And those little packages that we have, I have the filet here.

The package can be done ahead and put in a piece of plastic wrap of this one here that's ready to be put in a skillet.

I have started one cooking, actually.

What you can do, you can arrange those directly on your spatula.

If you do them on order, you know, this way.

Put your filet of fish.

I probably need, like, six slices of potato.

That covers the whole spatula there on top, you can see.

Put a little bit of butter on top, a little bit of salt, rather, a little bit of pepper, then more potato to cover the top nicely this way.

And I have tip we use in older cuisine to, of course, and I slide it into there to cook.

I have one cooking which is a bit smaller there, which I think is ready to be turned over.

You can see the fish right through it, you know.

It's very light and delicate.

In older cooking, we used to do that of course with dough, you know, other things, and now, in a more modern cooking, we use potato in a crust, like you would use the dough.

And now, with that, have that little bit of a garnish, we're going to do some zucchini that I have here and that's an interesting way of doing zucchini, even to do a salad of zucchini.

You can cut your zucchini in pieces like this, which I have done here.

(knife knocks) Cut them into slices, and the slices, stack them up together, put them.

This is what we call a julienne of zucchini, when they are cut into the thin strips like this.

Very simply, you take some of those strips, you put them onto a roasting pan like this, and you put that in the oven.

Doesn't have to stay long in the oven, about two, three minutes in a high oven.

The zucchini are going to soften and that's all you want.

You can even cut them in slices this way.

Take them out of your oven to do a salad with it, so they don't have that raw taste.

They are just a little bit soft and that's what you want.

Actually, I have some which are ready here, and as you can see, out of the oven, they are just a bit soft and mushy, so we want to season them to put them with the fish, and for that, I am going to season them with a little bit of soy, a little bit of soy sauce, a little bit of peanut oil.

That's it.

Now, a bit of cracked paper into this.

This I love as a salad just by itself.

It's terrific, you know.

Mix it well.

This is nice also, if it can macerate for a while, you know.

It gives more taste to it and we are going to serve that with the fish.

So what I want to do is to put that on a plate, often in the center of the plate.

Then you spread it around, and you know, the bit of the acidity that you have here with the zucchini and the dressing on it, you know, the soy, that will cut down on the richness of the potato there saute and that goes well with it.

I'm sure you can do your own combination, maybe with tomato underneath.

So we'll bring that back here and we can lift up.

Oh, you see this one is browning nicely now.

I could even turn this one, but it's not quite cooked, but as you can see, it forms a nice jacket.

Now, let's see.

The other one is nice on this side.

Maybe it's even nicer on this one.

This is a bit of a smaller filet than the other.

Slide that in the center, nice and appetizing, and maybe as a decoration, today, why don't I put little sprig of rosemary on top?

There is a lot of rosemary here.

This is the time of the year.

I love the smell and the taste of rosemary.

It goes particularly well with the potato.

And now, let's get our tart out of the oven, our terrific apple tart.

(oven hums) Ah, now, as it was cooking, after about 15 minutes of cooking, it start leaking here.

So just look at it.

If it leak, lift it up with a spatula and put a piece of aluminum foil as I did there.

Otherwise, first, the dough is going to burn underneath, and in addition to this, not only will it burn underneath, but it's going to run all over your oven, so you want to avoid that.

Now, this is a quiche pan or a tart pan also and I use it very often at home, but what I use today is the bottom part.

This is a removable bottom and this is terrific as a spatula.

If you have a big salmon or anything big, you take two of those and this is great and this is what I'm going to slide that on here on a board like that.

That's often served on that type of board, you know.

It looks good, and on top of it, to make it maybe a little more glossy, then you can spread a little bit of jam, a little bit of preserve, apricot preserve.

Remember we have a little bit of apricot preserve underneath and that give it some shininess and all that.

My mother does an apple tart.

She never put anything on top and her tart is terrific, but it is good.

So we cut it this, remember, for four people.

That's quite large portions, you know, four like this.

And now, I have my fish and my tart.

It is time to enjoy the food.

Put the tart right here and that type, it's lukewarm, you know, warm.

This is just the way I like it.

I love the dessert and, very often, many dish, I love them when they are lukewarm, you know, not too cold.

Now, we have here of course our beautiful roll, remember, with the cheese inside, the olive oil on top.

I have my New York-style bistro, you know, potato in its jacket with the zucchini around.

It's nice and fresh.

I mean, look at that beautiful apple tart.

Now, that apple tart is not low calorie, of course.

It has a nice browning underneath.

I'm looking at the dough, flaky.

It's about 250 calories, you know, per portion, but it is not nothing.

Of course it is, but it's probably less than a regular apple pie, and if you have an apple a la mode, then it's probably double again, you know.

Remember that the potatoes here are very high in potassium, and with that of course I would want to enjoy a nice glass of wine, like a dry sauvignon.

I mean, the sauvignon is not too dry, but I like it, because it's fruity and I like fruity wine, white wine with this, cold, but not too ice-cold.

And I hope you're going to do that dish yourself as I have done it today.

Didn't really took me that long and I hope you're going to enjoy it.

Happy cooking.