- Hi, I'm Jacques PĆ©pin
and I'm "Cooking at Home". (calming jazz music) New England clam chowder
is on the menu today. I used to do this when I
worked for Howard Johnson in 3,000 gallon batch. Not exactly like this, but I
wanna show you how to do it. I have some bacon here,
couple of slice of bacon. Two, three slice, I should
have about probably... (knife cutting) Probably half a cup, yeah,
about half a cup of bacon here with a little bit of olive oil, maybe one tablespoon of olive oil. I want that to fry for a few
minutes, three, four minutes. And then after, we're
gonna put leek in it, I have one leek here, cut it in half. (knife slicing) That's what you do to expose
the center of the leek. That's where the dirt is, so we wash it. (water running) Okay. (knife chopping) That's probably two cup of leek here. I like leek, you can put onion if you don't have leek, it's okay. On top of the leek, I'm
going to put some garlic and usually I crush the
garlic and peel it fine. But you can also do it
with this as you can see... (garlic grating) Do garlic this way. You can see here the amount of garlic and even do it the other way
if you want to see the inside. And here, I will have
a large load of garlic, probably a good two
teaspoon of garlic here. Can of course, crush it
by hand as I do usually, but it's another way of doing it. So, I think my bacon is about fine now. (bacon sizzles) So leek goes in it.
(pan sizzling) Garlic.
(grater tapping) And I want to cook that for
a minute or so, together. I put a little bit of fresh thyme in it. I have from my garden, so like a teaspoon. And jalapeno pepper. Always test your jalapeno
pepper when you do it because sometime I use those and tell about the taste of green pepper and some of the time it
kinda blow your mind. It's gonna add a bit of
a kick, not too much. So you can adjust the quantity that you want to put in there. Today I'm putting the whole thing here, which is probably like
two, three tablespoon. This again, I'll stir it.
(pan sizzling) I'm going to put two
cup here of clam juice and probably a cup of water. And I have about half pound
of potato here, two potato. I'm going to cut them in
two dice, about half inch. (knife chopping) About the same amount that I have of leek. So this is the New England clam chowder. I used to have a restaurant in New York called La Potagerie on Fifth Avenue. I used to do the Manhattan
clam chowder with vegetable, you know, tomato, vegetable and all that, quite different than that,
the classic New England. So again, about two cups of potato. Okay, here you're going to have eventually to adjust for salt of course,
so I have about probably a good half a teaspoon of salt and pepper. What I do a lot of cooking, I know I want to use
freshly ground pepper. So if I do a lot, so I know I need some. So I use that type of
little coffee grinder so to do fresh pepper, that's it. (pepper grinding) So this, (Jacques whiffs) very strong. So I have freshly ground pepper here and I could probably half
a teaspoon or so in there. This is it and (spoon tapping) one thing that I forgot
to do was to put flour. I was going to put some flour
right on top of the leek. When you wanna take liquid
out of a bowl like this, very often what you do, is to go directly into
your stock like this and grab liquid, you see. This is a bit, okay. I will dial it, couple of
tables full of flour in it. Remember when I did the leek? I could have done directly into the leek, sprinkle it on top and that
would be, have been easy to do. But yeah, that's another way of doing it. You don't wanna put the
flour right in there here because it probably would form into lump. This now will come to a boil. Boil gently for like about
20 minutes and some corn. I put a bit of corn in my chowder 'cause I like corn and I
think it goes well with it. So when you cut corn like that fresh, be sure your finger are
not higher than the corn. It goes here and you (indistinct) it. When you cut it with a knife, don't put your knife
straight like this out, you have to cut. You see it's easy to cut like this. You know the motion of a knife, that is the motion of cutting
rather than just crushing. You can do it of course another way by putting this straight down
and doing it the other way. Those are fresh corn and
there is nothing like. And when corn like this,
yeah, it will give you a cup, about a cup of corn. So we'll put that at the end because I don't wanna cook the corn more than like one minute. Just bring them to a boil
at the end with the cream and you can feel the
texture that he have here is just slightly oily. (spoon taps) I will test it for salt. I think it's fine now. Cover this, lower the heat, 20 minutes. Okay, my chowder is nice and
thick here the way I want it so now I'm putting my corn in there and I just want that to come
to a boil with the clam. I add two can of 10 ounce inch
of baby clam here, cooked. Of course you can do that with fresh clam. Take a long time to cook for the clam, that would be end of four six. I'm going to bring that to a boil. Now it came back to a good boil, now I'll finish it with cream, a good half a cup of heavy cream here. You can even be a bit more generous with your cream if you want but that's fine so here it is, (utensils clinking) the New England clam chowder, I put a bit of chive
for color on top here. Okay, my New England clam
chowder, happy cooking. (relaxing jazz music)
