- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

I don't think there is a place in the world with more variety of flavor and more love of cooking than the Mediterranean.

And though the taste of the Mediterranean are robust, the cooking is very healthful.

Look what I'm making for you today.

From Italy, a carpaccio of fresh tuna on a bed of cucumber.

And the classic paella, the national dish of Spain, a medley of chicken, sausage, and seafood mixed with saffron-scented rice.

And a dessert from Portugal, figs in a spicy port wine sauce.

So join me on my culinary cruise around the Mediterranean.

Coming up on Today's Gourmet.

(upbeat music) There is a special flavor to the food of the Mediterranean.

All around the basin, Mediterranean basin, whether I am in Provence, whether you're in Italy, whether you are in Spain, Portugal, there is a flavor to that food which is not like anywhere in the world.

And this is what we are going to do today, a little trip around the Mediterranean to do a complete menu.

And the great main dish that we are doing today is a paella, which comes from the pan itself, which is that type of pan, which is a real paella pan, a kind of large black iron pan that people used to cook outside with and still do.

I mean, you do picnic and the fish that you caught, chicken and all that, you cook that in that pan.

It is a relatively complicated dish because it has many steps, but it's not complicated to make.

We have a lot of things in it.

We start with those chorizo, which are a type of spicy Spanish sausage that we have here.

And here, actually, this is called pancetta in Italian or lard, L-A-R-D in French.

And it's just cured pork, you know, unsmoked bacon, if you want very, very lean, which is rolled.

So we do little cube of this with the chorizo to saute that first.

Then we have poultry in it, which is chicken saute eventually.

Then we add rice to it.

And the rice is flavored with that famous pistil of crocus flower that we call saffron, very expensive type of seasoning.

And eventually onion, garlic, pepper in it.

Then when it's three quarter of the way cooked, we add shellfish and we have mussel.

We have squid and we have shrimp.

And at the end, some fresh vegetable, like asparagus and peas.

So it's a really complete dish.

Your ideal complete dish, very high in protein, very high in fiber, in everything.

And this is what we are going to cook for you today.

So what we'll do first is start, right I have here, I have the chorizo, the sausage and the pancetta or lard, lardon actually we call in France because the whole piece of meat is called lard, L-A-R-D, which in English, of course, refer to the back fat of the pig.

In France, lard refer to that cured pork without being smoked.

And the little pieces cut out of it as we have are lardon, L-A-R-D-O-N, that you often see in recipe.

So to this, we're going to add chicken.

And the chicken here, we use chicken leg.

We'll cut the end in two and remove the skin here.

Of course, we have plenty fat already from the sausage and the lardon.

And in that type of dish, of course, if you want it to cut down as we do in our cooking, then you may want to remove some of the fat after you render all of your lardon and chorizo in it.

Now the chicken has to cook here and brown for a few minutes.

And while the chicken is browning, I think I'm going to discuss with you the dessert that we are going to do today.

Today, again, we do a very simple, delicious dessert with fruit.

And those dried fruits are fig, as you can see.

Those are nice, soft, juicy.

Those dried fig are called calismyrna, calimyrna, actually, which is an acronym for California.

They are grown in California.

And Smyrna in Turkey, where a lot of those dried fruits come from.

And those, we're going to cook them first in water, which I have here.

This has been boiling for about five minutes with a little bit of plain water, that's it.

And to this, we're going to flavor with another flavoring of the Mediterranean, which is Campari, that Italian bitter sweet, quite bitter liqueur, which goes well with it.

We put some in it, and a bit of port wine, and that will be from Portugal.

Of course, and a bit of spice with cayenne, you know?

We put some cayenne on top.

This has to come to a boil now.

So it cooks for five minutes in the water.

We put our seasoning, cover it, and let it boil another five minutes.

Then we're going to thicken it with a little bit of cornstarch, dilute it with water to get a bit of viscosity to the sauce and serve that with yogurt or maybe sour cream.

And while this is cooking, we're going to go back to our paella.

Keep the chicken is brown on one side and prepare the vegetable for it.

Okay.

So the vegetable that I have now, onion first, of course, that we put in there, chopped onion with our nice yellow mild onion, coarsely chopped.

I have done paella in France, I've done paella in Spain, I've done paella in Connecticut, where I live, and you use the product of the area.

This is always the best way to cook.

So a little bit of chopped onion that we put across here.

Can be cut coarsely, you know, this is the type of rough dish that I like to do.

This, saute the onion.

And we are going to put a little bit of garlic, of course, in there.

Take the end of your clove of garlic, oops, don't lose it.

Crush the garlic a little bit to remove the skin, as you see.

Then crush the garlic to release the juice.

Actually, the essential oil, that's where you have most of the taste, a lot of garlic in there.

Garlic is good for you.

It's good for high blood pressure.

We have hot pepper in it, dry mushroom, and the dry mushroom don't have to be reconstituted.

You can put your dry mushroom directly in there because we're going to put water for the rice.

The whole thing is going to cook together.

Then we add some red pepper.

Of course, you can use the green pepper.

The green pepper, as well as the yellow pepper.

I mean, there is so many on the market now.

Coarsely cut, give you different color in it, different texture, different taste.

So this is a great dish where you really have everything, you know?

You have rice in it, you have meat, you have shellfish, all kind of seasoning.

We have here the herb de Provence again, and that's from the south of France.

And this is a mixture of different type of herbs, from thyme to little seed of anise, thyme and those tiny little blue flowers here, which are actually lavender flowers.

And this is a Californian long grain rice, which is the same type used in Spain, really.

Some tomato.

Here we are.

The tomato is ripe.

Nice ripe tomato for the juice, as well as color.

So as you can see, I have a lot of color in that dish.

Actually, I'm going to put a little more tomato in there.

And finally, that very expensive, as I say, pistil of flowers that we call saffron, you know?

The saffron come from the crocus flowers, and the best one come from Spain.

It is very, very expensive.

It is expensive because it needs approximately 45,000 crocuses to do one pound of saffron.

Well, one pound of saffron, you'll have more than you can use in your whole life anyway.

But it come in those little jar, and it's not good to really have an ersatz or something to replace it.

If you cannot afford it, don't put any in it.

But otherwise, the real saffron have the right taste.

So now we mix our rice, all vegetable in there, the chicken.

All we need is the liquid to cook the rice, and the liquid for that is usually twice the amount of your rice, that type of rice.

And that's what we have here.

I have four cup of water for those two cup of rice.

You could also use chicken stock, but we have so much flavor in it that you don't really need it.

And that has, of course, it has to cook for about 25 minutes for the rice to be cooked, covered, preferably after it come to a boil.

And after this is rice, we put our shellfish, and after the shellfish, the vegetables.

So it is not a complicated dish to do.

It's just a question of doing it step by step, organizing yourself, preparing your ingredients, and so forth.

A nice dish for a party, it's an ideal type of dish.

And now let's see if our fig are cooked.

Now they have that nice, bright red color of the juice, you know, because of the Campari.

And since this is concentrated flavor in a dry fruit, you have a lot of sugar in it.

Figs are very high in fiber and in iron.

So with this, the bitterness of the Campari goes well.

You dilute the cornstarch with a little bit of water.

Remember that starch have to be diluted.

If you put the starch in something hot, the protein coagulate, and you have nice little dumpling around that usually you don't want to have in your sauce.

So it has to be diluted in liquid.

Take it off the stove or shut off the stove so that it stop boiling, and add it to your juice directly here.

That will thicken almost instantaneously, you know?

As soon as it touch the hot liquid.

I have enough here.

And that's it for this.

It barely comes back to a boil.

You let it cool off in the juice, slowly.

And when it's cooled off in the juice, you can prepare it.

I have one here.

We put a little bit of yogurt in this one.

Of course, if you want to splurge more, as I say, you could put sour cream, but it's of course richer.

Yogurt is perfectly fine.

The whole dessert here is nice because it will fit into not a completely low calorie, but it's about 250 calorie with the sauce and the whole dessert itself.

And you can place your fig right on top of it.

You know, again, one of the sample dessert that we do with fruit, you can serve three to four fig.

I think this one look nicer than that one.

I'll put this one here.

Bit of juice on top more.

Maybe a little spring of, I have lemon balm here.

Lemon balm is nice and flavorful.

Put it in the center of it.

And here it is, our beautiful dessert for today.

Our first course today is a tuna carpaccio.

Carpaccio from Italy.

And I wanna discuss with you the use of raw fish, raw tuna.

There is a lot of controversy and some people feel very uneasy about using raw fish or raw shellfish.

And if you really don't feel like using it, it's fine.

When you buy fish to start with, you should be absolutely sure that it's very fresh.

You can look at that snapper here.

Look at the eye, balby and very bright and all that.

That indicate freshness.

The firmness of the fish.

And if you have it whole like this with the gill in it, look at the gill, bright pink.

And that indicate freshness.

Probably more than anything, however, it is the smell.

It shouldn't have any odor, any smell.

I mean, a fresh fish out of the sea, if I go fishing, it doesn't have any odor.

You can look at that yellow fin tuna here, how bright color it is.

I mean, I can see the texture of the flesh.

I know that it's fresh.

The oyster, the same way.

When you eat oyster, those oysters should be alive.

Those are blue point oyster.

And there is a special knife like that so you don't hurt yourself to open it at the inch.

Crack it open and cut the nerve right here, which hold it to the bottom of that shell.

And it is important that those oyster or other type of shellfish that you open are raw.

When you eat them on the half shell, of course, you can cook them.

Remember that those are basically pump.

You know, they open and filter the water.

And by that filtering system, of course, if there is any pollutant, this is what will be polluted first.

But you can consider smoked salmon, for example.

Smoked salmon is also raw fish.

It is not because it's smoked.

The smoking, of course, has some preservating effect, but it is still raw because it's a cold smoke and the temperature in the smoker doesn't go above 85, 90 degree.

And so it goes for airing and sour cream or those type of things.

The fish is cured, but it's not cooked.

But if you have any hesitation about it, then maybe you should avoid eating the raw fish.

And now, before we do our tuna first course, we're going to continue on the paella.

And I can see the paella here is nice and hot.

And we put in there those different shellfish that I have here.

The mussel, as you can see, that mussel, I still left the beard.

Sometimes it come with the beard.

You just pull out the beard.

Don't do it ahead because the mussel is not going to live very long after you take out the beard.

We have those tiny calamari here, which are very nice.

They come, usually you can clean them, but they often come clean this way.

And of course, those shrimp of which we removed the shell already.

So this is the first part, the third part of the dish, where we put all of the shellfish inside, move them a little bit into your rice so that they can cook.

This will cook relatively fast.

A couple of minutes, four, five minutes or so, and this will be cooked and will release their juice right into your rice.

So you cover it again.

And while this is cooking, let's go to do our first course, the tuna carpaccio.

Carpaccio, as you may know, I mean, I have the tuna here and of course the seasoning.

I have shallots, as you can see here, some Tabasco, garlic, chives.

And we are going to do a salad of cucumber with this to put underneath.

Carpaccio refer to an Italian painter of the Carrascuro period, which used to paint in red and white.

So usually the carpaccio was done with red meat pounded like a steak tartare type of thing, but raw, and a strip of mayonnaise on top.

Now, of course, in modern cuisine, we use the carpaccio for anything which is small and pounded.

The first thing that I'll do here, I take a little piece of the salmon, not much, and slice it in half to have pieces of about one ounce of my tuna here.

And we're going to use that on top of the tuna for decoration.

The rest of it, we wanna chop it coarsely.

And I like to chop it by hand, you know.

This is really better than in the food processor.

It goes too fast and it end up being mushy like, and you don't want it mushy.

You want the pieces to be separated.

Actually, you know, I feel myself that a very good hamburger or a very good steak tartare, if you have it cold, should be chopped by hand, you know, so that the fiber are neatly cut rather than crushed, you know, in a machine.

So here, I have about a pound of tuna all together.

I can see that it's super fresh because there is absolutely no odor for that.

The color of it indicate that.

I mean, there is a feel, you know.

For fresh fish, you know when it's fresh.

So this, we put seasoning in there.

Freshly cracked pepper.

A lot of pepper in there.

Salt.

We're going to put in there to cure it.

Then I have white wine vinegar here.

The white wine vinegar, like when you do a ceviche, any type of acid will set the protein in the fish and it become all whitish.

So it is, in a sense, cooked.

Cooked by the vinegar.

You can consider cooking from a source of it, you know, through a caloric source of it, but other type of cooking, even if you freeze something in the freezer, in a sense, it's cooked by the cold, that if the protein change and it become all whitish and burn by the cold, and it's that, if you want a type of cooking.

And the same thing with curing with salt or putting acidic agent on fish or meat, it kind of cook the meat.

So, Tabasco in there.

And some chives.

So we have our seasoning, and of course, there is a lot of other seasoning that you can put in it.

I have put those shallots here.

We wanna make this, that will cure it a little bit.

Looks good.

Okay, and that you can have on the side, it is basically ready to be served.

With this, we're doing a cucumber salad.

And I will cut the end of the cucumber, and you peel it with a vegetable peeler in one streak.

This way, all around.

Often I use the so-called English cucumber, which tend to have less seed, you know?

They call them seedless, they still have a certain amount of seed, but less.

Now, what we wanna do with this, you know, very simply is just, as you can see, peel off of the cucumber until you can see the seed.

Then move it, peel it again.

See, you can move it all around like this, and basically you stop when you see the seed.

Into long streak, then turn, do the same thing on the other side.

And that makes a very, in a sense, delicate salad.

Very, very thinly cut, you know, it's easier to cut than with a knife.

And basically you're left only with the seed in the center that you can discard.

And that, of course, we're going to season just briefly with a little bit of vinegar, salt, I mean oil, a dash of salt in it, and that's it.

So, our salad is finished here.

And now, before maybe I finish the tuna, you can see that those oysters are all open, I mean the mussel, rather.

I wanna put a bit of Tabasco.

You can see that the shrimp are cooked, so we put the rest of the fresh vegetable at the end, which is peas and asparagus, you know?

Look how colorful this is.

And now cook a couple of minutes, and that's it.

During that time, we can finish the tuna.

See, the part of it that I wanted to do is to put a piece of tuna on top of that, another piece of plastic wrap on top, and you just do very, very thin layer of tuna like that, that you can do ahead, you know?

So I have four because I have four portion there, and basically to prepare this, you very, take a nice plate, a little bit of your cucumber salad that you arrange to make a bed, a bed of vegetable if you want, in the bottom of this, you can arrange them nicely.

You could have some capers there, capers are very good in this.

A thin, long strip, that's it.

You should have enough for one person here.

So in the middle of this, you do, you can see the color of that tuna, if you come close.

You can see it getting all whitish, all whitish, again, because the protein are coagulating because of the acid in the vinegar, you know?

So you put your portion right in the center of it here.

About that amount is more than enough.

And you can, you could season that a little bit, but it's fine this way.

You have that very thin slice of tuna that you can, if you want, wrap around in a nice way, you know, like a hat on top of it.

And I could have maybe a tiny dish, again, of oil on top.

Maybe a few more of those for color.

And that make really a very interesting and delicious first course.

And now let's enjoy the flavor of the Mediterranean with our paella here.

This is really your complete meal in one, very large.

I mean, you have so many things in there, you know, from the rice to the shellfish and so forth.

But first, the tuna, you know, the first course.

And you shouldn't be afraid of raw fish.

You know, you have to have a very good fishmonger.

I mean, reputable one.

Be sure that you go to that type of person.

Another thing too, which is recommended, you can freeze your fish at at least five degree below for a couple of days.

And that tend to prevent any chance of parasite.

Remember that when you freeze it, you pack it the right way.

You freeze it as fast as you can and you defrost as slow as you can so you don't break the tissue.

And it should be still quite good.

This is really an enjoyable meal, that fish.

And of course, there you really have so much protein and fish in there, you know, with the rice, which is really a filler, you know, giving you a piece of chicken here.

As you can see, a couple of those black mussel.

You have the vegetable in there, you know.

You have squid.

We have shrimp.

Probably a bit more rice, you know, that you have.

You have quite a lot here.

And of course, you can do other type of rice.

Remember, those are the chorizo that I have at the bottom, those sausage here.

So it's really an extremely flavorful dish full of those flavor around the Mediterranean basin.

Of course, and with this other dessert, we have our fig here in that beautiful pool of red, bitter sauce on top of the yogurt.

And with the rich, you know, taste of the sweet fig on top of it.

And with that today, we're drinking a Cabernet Sauvignon from Spain, from the area of Penedes.

And it is a very rich, robust type of wine.

I hope that you're going to make the meal that we made today.

I hope you're going to enjoy it with friends.

I enjoy making it for you.

Happy cooking.