(Futuristic theme music plays) (Upbeat jazz music plays) - You know, I like to mix my menu sometime a little bit of French, a little bit of Italian, a little bit of South
America or somewhere, and this is what we are doing today. A kind of potpourri mixed menu. And for that, we're going
to start with the dessert, and we do have some
nutritional concern in our show as it regards fats,
saturated fat, and so forth. But you know, a great thing about that is that you have to think
of it in term of moderation, small portion, and even
do I'm doing a dessert with cream today, whipped cream, it is not necessary that you
have to do it with that menu. I mean, I do a dessert
for each of the show, but actually at home, you know, it's rare that I serve a dessert unless we have guests
coming over the weekend, we extend the menu make it a bit fancier, and so forth. And that's what we are doing today. So what we are doing is
basically whipped cream with the nuts in it, crushed nuts, and we are freezing that. We call that a parfait, and we have a cup and a
quarter of heavy cream, you have to use heavy cream
here, the whipped cream. I mean, it won't whip properly
if you use a light cream. A dash of vanilla and sugar, this is a pure vanilla
extract that we want to do. You can whip it by hand. Of course we do it into
that type of electric mixer, which is very nice, but
makes a lot of noise. It will take about two and a half, three minutes to whisk, and I have some right here, which I'm already ready to proceed with. You know, it has a nice texture, firm, and into this I already have
the vanilla and the sugar, but what we want to do with
the nuts, you see those are, hazelnut or filbert, sometimes called in different
parts of the country. F-I-L-B-E-R-T the filbert. For me, probably the best nuts. You put them in the oven so that the skin will crack on top of it and release like this. This is different for almond, where if you want to remove the
skin of almond, you boil it. When you take it out of
the water, you press it, and the almond pop out of the skin. That would not work with hazelnut. Hazelnut you have to put it
in the oven and brown them. And even if you spread a little bit of oil on top of it or water, actually, my friend Jim Dutch told me that the skin will release even better. But what you do, you put them in there and rub them a little bit to remove the skin, like that, in a towel. Don't worry about it if
you don't remove all of it, it's not that important, really, remove whatever comes out of it. The toasting of it
however is very important. The taste is going to be quite different from nuts which are toasted to nuts which are not toasted. That happened with everything, you know. If you consider like coffee, for example. In Europe, we toast the
coffee beans a great deal, and that's why you have what is called an espresso
coffee that is dark, you know, and strong because the beans, the coffee beans are toasted much darker than what we do in this country. And it's a fallacy to believe that because the nuts are toasted more, you get more caffeine in it. Whether you toast it
a little bit or a lot, the caffeine doesn't change in the beans. So as you can see here,
most of it are removed. We put it in that little
food processor here, and we're going to ground
this into a powder. (Food processor whirring) Goes quite fast in this, as you can see. This have a nice aroma now of fresh nut. We put it directly into
the cream actually. You know, there is
something similar to that that we do with, we take white sugar and
we put the nuts in it, then we cook it in the oven
and it's a type of meringue. We do cake with it, like a dacquoise, would be done with that type of cake. This is molded here, and now we put that into a little bowl. Any type of bowl is
going to work out fine, even a little souffle mold. We oil that very, very lightly. And what I did here, I put two strips of paper in it, because I don't know how
hard it's going to be to take it out, so that will help me pull it out. So what we are doing here, putting that directly into our mold, and as you can see, my cup and a quarter of
cream give me quite a lot. And I have calculated that
the serve for six, of course, I'm sure you can serve more
than that even with it. It's not really going to
be more than an ice cream, but it's still quite caloric, you know. What we put on top of it, maybe a piece of plastic wrap, so you can press it with the plastic wrap so that you make it flat on top. Wrap it and in the freezer. You can do that two, three days ahead. I mean, you can do that ahead. That's a nice dessert
to have in your freezer in case you have some
guests to pop unexpectedly. So what I want to do, however, I want to talk to you more
about the parchment paper. You know, the two strips that I do there, we do a lot with parchment
paper in the kitchen, and it's a good idea to
know how to handle it. See I have a piece of paper here. If I want to line up the jelly roll pan. If I do a buche de noel
or something like this, very often you will be told to butter it. So you see what I do here, I will take a little bit of butter and butter only half of it. Very lightly. So you butter half of that piece of paper. Then you fold the
unbuttered one on top of it again like this, and what you can do to cut each corner with a knife this way. At that point, you undo this, you put the butter side directly
into your jelly roll pan and press it with some of the butter in the bottom off of it, lift it up again. Now the bottom is slightly buttered. Put it back on the other side, and now you mold this. We could have cut the corner this way, as you you can see here and there. This will fit exactly into the mold. This is how you do a jelly roll pan. Then after you lift up the paper, peel it up and roll
your jelly roll with it. Many other things that
we do with that paper, for example, if you want
to line up those mold, take a piece of paper, actually, you can use
the edge of the table as I'm doing here. Cut the rectangle out of it. Let's say that rectangle, you fold in half, again in half, and now from the center
where you have no opening, you fold triangle this way, a smaller triangle, and a smaller triangle, and so forth. Turn that upside down,
if you want, to measure. You cannot do it bigger than that, so you measure your radius from the center up to, let's say here, you cut it, and that will fit the
bottom of that mold exactly. Nice and round you see. Exactly folded. It makes your life much easier. For example, this one, which we call a savarin mold, you know, which is really strictly
for all those things. Again, I fold it in the same way, smaller and smaller and smaller triangle. You measure there from
the center, right here, the center is there. You cut it here. You can cut it with a knife, and now from here to
there again, you know, you're going to have a
piece of thing which is relatively hard to cut otherwise
fitting this perfectly. Maybe the most useful use
of that piece of paper is to do what we call (speaking french), and those are little cornucopia that you fill up with
something to do decoration, absolutely indispensable for someone who does a wedding cake. I cut a triangle here, so
like a right hand triangle, if you remember your plain geometry. You fold this in half in the
center of the hypotenuse here. Don't worry about the end of it. Now you go around a
couple of times, you know, now I put my hand inside, and I bring this with my
finger in that direction to get a real point out of that. Then I fold that in. Now I have a really very pointed thing. It's easier to put that
directly into a cup like that, or a bowl to hold it. And let's say, if I put a
bit of chocolate in there that will hold it. You usually put just a little bit to decorate in the bottom of it. I fold it this way nicely. Then you can cut the
point of it very lightly and to see whether, yes
it is coming out fine. And this is how you do
your decoration, you know. You have all kinds of decoration when you're in the kitchen like this, you do little flowers, you do one of that happy
birthday, very useful. Let's do our main course now. Now the main course today is going to be a dish from the south, the south of France, as well as the south of the United States, We are doing a ratatouille. R-A-T-A-T-O-U-I-double L-E. It's a classic dish from
the south of France, which is made of onion, garlic, eggplant, you have zucchini, tomato,
and pepper, you know. And of course on top of it, we are going to do a catfish. So the first thing we want to
do starting our ratatouille is to saute the vegetable
with a bit of olive oil. And for that, we are
starting with the onion, and you cut it kind of coarsely. Remember that the
ratatouille is, in a sense, even better done ahead
than it is when it's fresh. The ratatouille is served by itself as the first course, you know, and very often in the south of France they're going to serve it
cold, not ice cold, really, but like room temperature, you know. This is the way it is the good. So we have the onion, wanna saute those onion
a couple of minutes. And after the onion, the eggplant, and notice here, like in
many dish with eggplant, we are using the whole eggplant,
that is including the skin. You know, there is many
recipe for eggplant in Africa, especially north Africa, all around the Mediterranean
crescent, you know, all of the Arab world do eggplant. I think it's in Turkish they say there is over a
thousand recipe for eggplant. in Russia they do eggplant also. I'm putting that in there now. What is called poor
man's caviar, you know, where the whole eggplant is roasted to get roasted in the oven. Then you take the pulp from
the inside to make a mush, a kind of spread you serve with bread. They call that poor man's caviar. The zucchini is used a great
deal too, as you can see, this is your classic stew vegetable. You know, ratatouille in
France and caponata in Italian, you know, caponata is a stew, which is very similar to that too. Again, remember being on
the Mediterranean border, then all of those country
around the Mediterranean, will do dish, which are in a
sense, very similar, you know? So this has to cook a couple of minutes before we add the tomato here. We just cut them in half
parallel to the stem, you know, and press a bit of the seed and cut them into little
dice, like that, or cube. You want this to cook first, then the garlic, we take the
stem of the garlic out again, crush it so that that's release, that's going to release
the skin by crushing it. Then now again crushing the garlic to extract the essential oil taste (Knife chopping) and chopping of the garlic
into a puree, you know. You can, of course, use a press, you know, a garlic press is perfectly fine. What works well. Here I have nice color. Salt in it. A lot of ground pepper. I love freshly ground pepper in there, and you put some, a little
bit at the end anyway. The garlic and this is it, I mean the ratatouille. Now you can cover it and cook it for about 10, 15 minutes. Conventionally it's cooked a little more, and I have some which is
already cooked right here. And now what are we going
to put on the ratatouille? Catfish. And the catfish, you know, is a very interesting fish. In the last few years, it's available in so many
different part of the country, because it is farm raised. You can have it all over. I have the catfish here. I want to start by cooking the catfish, and I will discuss that
with you a little bit after. So I put this in that
very hot skillet here. I put some water in it, and just put my filet of catfish
in a little bit of water. I mean actually what I'm doing is steaming them in that water. A couple of minutes on each side. Pepper and salt. Cover it. Then we poach them about two,
three minutes on each side. As you can see here, I
have a whole catfish. Those are farm raised catfish, of course, because they have those
whisker like the cat. You have to be careful with though at the end of those fins there
is a very pointed needle. And if you puncture yourself
with this, it's very painful. But usually, of course, you are not going to buy it in this form. I wanted to show you
a catfish farm raised. You buy it directly, of course, from the fishmonger in filet. A very firm, nice white flesh fish. When the filet are undone, you see on the other side here, I have a little bit of darker flesh, and you can remove a little
bit of that if you want because that's stronger. Now, and this is often
what people are objected to the catfish filet, which
are fished in a pond, you know, and they end up being
a bit strong in taste, but those are not, but even the one that you
fish yourself, you know, if you clean it up the right
way, what I have done here, it's a perfectly good fish. Especially as I said, so
firm, you know, and all that. So you can use it, you can saute it, you can even grill it on the barbecue because that will hold. always remove the skin, however. The skin is like leather, you know, it's very, very strong. In addition, what we are
going to do with that catfish, we are going to do an herb with emulsified into a
kind of a green puree with a little bit of olive oil in it. And for this, we need
that little machine here. Maybe first, I'm going to
turn my filet of catfish because they probably are cooked
on the first side already. But I can see here turning them, that's quite a nice filet. And you see what you do there, basically you saute
steam in the same time. I didn't put any fat, but they have just enough water, so by the time it's finished cooking the water has disappeared. So I lose none of the
nutrient or anything, which is why this is a good recipe too. And all the taste stay
in my skillet over there. So in sort of in top of that, we want to do a little bit of herbed oil. And now I say, I used
that little machine here. This turn much faster
than a food processor and it can liquefy, and very often that's
what I do in my kitchen. I take this, I put peppercorn
in it, the black peppercorn, a few zip of this and I have a powder. You know, I have ground
pepper, freshly ground pepper. So I use that all the time. And here we have tarragon, you see. That tarragon leaf, when you buy tarragon, what you do, you take a piece of it and taste it. Two types of tarragon; French tarragon, so-called,
it doesn't come from France but it's called French tarragon and Russian tarragon. One has taste, The French
tarragon has taste, the other one look exactly the
same, has no tastes at all. So be sure to taste it. If you buy a plant that you
want to put in your garden, because that grows well
and comes back every year. It's terrific. Now there I have some,
see what I did here? This is what I shouldn't
do in that little machine. Put your finger here when
you put something in there, otherwise it fall into the center shaft. A little bit of oil in there, a little bit of water in
there to help in the emulsion. Two, three tablespoon. Then I put that on. (Machine whirring) I can do like a green liquid out of this, (Machine whirring) and that green liquid out
of this will, of course, be beautiful in color. And you have all of the nutrient,
I mean, look at that here. I could have turned it even a little more. Into this, we are going to
put a little bit of olive oil for flavor here. So I have a tablespoon of olive oil, a dash of salt and pepper in there. (Pepper grinder drowns out voice) You know, we used to cook
those sauce a great deal. And now a raw, you know, the raw tastes of those herbs on top of it is really terrific. We could also to do reduction with wine and with a lot of butter
added to the pot in emulsion, a little bit of olive oil here, and just at the last moment, in term of a steakhouse where
other piece of fish, you know, in fact vegetables to replace,
like ours on their sauce or something like that,
that's going to be very good. So, we're going to finish presenting this. Now, our ratatouille, we put
underneath here in the pot, we put the ratatouille right there. And the filet of fish which now are, as you can see, completely cooked. There is no more liquid in it. I said, the liquid had evaporated. They get all the taste. Grab that on top of it right here. So you have a complete meal here, all of that bed of vegetable. And as I said, ratatouille
can really be done ahead and serve, you know, very nicely cold with a
bit of olive oil on top, and sometime with even
black olive, you know. So a little bit of that beautiful
green herb sauce on top. I can put right there. Maybe a bit of presentation. Those chives, you know, I have chives in the garden, so I like to present them to
make it a bit more festive. And I have a beautiful main course here. What we are going to
do, put it on the side, we now are going to move
to the first course, so what we've had, we've had a dish from the
south of the United States if you want catfish, we've had the south of
France with our ratatouille, now we're moving to
Italy with a carpaccio. And the carpaccio is like, we
used to do the steak tartare, you know, the ground beef that was season and serve this way. We do it with a piece of beef this way. We're going to have some basil with it, beautiful red onion, some
Parmegiani, you know, the parmesan this way. The real one is Parmigiano-Reggiano, which is what this one is. A whole garnish on top of it. Now, look at that steak. That steak is basically what we call a clean steak coming from the butcher. This is a dream steak. Well, for me, it is not cleaned enough, so again, we are cutting it. Now that steak with all
of those things removed is going to be about eight ounces. You see, I even remove the back here. I really take anything
which resemble fat, skin, or anything like that. Particularly for that recipe. I don't want anything left in it. I'd rather have it smaller, but all of this will be removed. Okay, now we're doing
four portion with this. I cutting it in half. And each of those again in half, you know, so that gives me approximately
two ounces of meat here, which is not much. Now those two ounces of
meat we have to pound them to put them directly in those plate here, beautiful plate, and to
help in the pounding, what I do, I do that with a
piece of plastic wrap, you know. Put a piece of meat right on top of it, and another one, again, a type
of sandwich here this way. And we use a meat pounder here, (Pounding) and you can see here, (Pounding) it makes a lot of noise, of course, but we want it very thin sometime. (Pounding) That's it. People will freeze the meat, you know, to have the meat frozen
and do that to slice it. I don't like to do this, because I feel that the frozen
meat render a lot of liquid. Remember that carpaccio,
C-A-R-P-A-C-C-I-O, was an Italian painter of the 16th century chiaroscuro period. And he used to paint with
a lot of red and white, so someone thought of
doing a piece of beef, pounding it very thin, which is red with a little strip
of mayonnaise on top white, and that was the carpaccio. Now, of course, we do
carpaccio with anything. People carpaccio fish,
carpaccio one thing or another. You know what you can do here, to do it to that extent I do at home, then put another plate on
top, leaving the paper here, doing a second one, the
one third, fourth one, you do a whole party of six, eight people. And you can do that ahead. Now, if you have any
concern with raw beef, you don't do, you know, you steak tartare or carpaccio like this. I understand that. And then you should not
do that dish very lightly. Be sure to go to a butcher
which is very reliable. Remember however, that
when you do a roast beef, which is very, very rare that you slice, for that matter even a hamburger, which is very rare, that you slice it very close
to what we are doing here, so it doesn't really make
that much difference. Now there, I have a green onion here and we slice this very, very thin here. (Knife chopping) And I want to have those strip of onion, and I have some here which I already wash. I wash it with water that removes stuff. There's a compound of sulfuric acid, which kind of sting your eyes
and discolored the onion. If I wash it with cold water, I put it in a sieve, rinse
it, that take it out, and that's what I would do, normally it make the onion
less strong, you know. But I have the decoration on top. You could put some scallion, you could put some garlic on top of this. We give a garnish. And as I say, remember that this is like two
ounces of meat at the most. Now on top of that, we are
putting some fresh Parmigiano, which I use a vegetable peeler like this. This is the way I use truffles. So if I have those truffle
for (indistinct) and mushroom. Especially the white
truffle from Alba in Italy, it's called a tartufo bianco, and the tartufo is very expensive, so you shave it with a
vegetable peeler on top of pasta or whatever here. Then a bit of basil. I have a couple of basil leaf
that we roll together here to do what we call a type
of chiffonade, you know, where we bring the basil together. We have color here, but
more important than color, we have taste. Now this is about 120 calorie
as it is or not even quite. Now, of course, by
putting your oil on top, you will like a tablespoon of
oil you need on top of that, and that will double your calorie. You can cut it down a
little bit if you want. And now let's see the whole menu for us. Now I have the dessert
and I use those strips, you see, to remove it. It's quite handy and nice. You remove them, of course. The dessert can be cut
into like eight pieces. I'm sure you can decorate
with fresh eatable flowers, that I have here, which
is of course pretty. As well our crystallize
violet, which are cooked. That makes a terrific finish for our menu with carpaccio to start, the catfish with our ratatouille, a nice salad, a piece of bread, and, of course, a good glass of red wine from the south of France. I hope you enjoy it. Happy cooking.
