- Hi.

I'm Jack Pepin.

There are two French words that everyone can pronounce but that a lot of people misunderstand.

Those words are nouvelle cuisine.

To set the record straight once and for all, I'm going to show you that nouvelle cuisine doesn't have to be fussy, just fresh and delicious, like thin potato crepe dressed with red and black caviar, a pyramid of cabbage and anchovies covered with slices of grilled chicken breast, and a light chocolate souffle cake with raspberry rum sauce.

It's nouvelle cuisine you can make at home on "Today's Gourmet."

(upbeat music) You know, there is a great misunderstanding about nouvelle cuisine.

At it's onset in the early '70s, nouvelle cuisine was glorified by all the food writers and so forth, and now it's probably too criticized.

I mean, nouvelle cuisine is known mostly by its successes, which is over-decoration on the plate, very small portion, a weird mixture of different ingredient, raw vegetable and so forth, when in fact, nouvelle cuisine was going back to very simple good ingredient, the freshest possible way, short time of cooking, and of course, a little bit of originality in it, and that never go out of style.

I mean, good, healthy, simple food never go out of style and freshest ingredient never go out of style either.

So for our menu, we're going start by doing a large crepe, crepe with potato.

This is a specialty which was done when I was a kid by a famous cook near Lyon where I come from, which was called Mother Blanc, La Mere Blanc.

Now the grandson of that woman has one of the biggest restaurant in France, but she started doing those potato many, many years ago.

I used to go there with my father when I was a child and those potato crepes used to be served sometime with sugar and berry, you know, and sometime other garnish for meat.

So here we are going to do it with caviar.

So we have a potato which has been boiled, you can see.

And again, when you boil a potato, do not put it under water after.

Take it out, let it cool off, and all I did here, just scrape the skin out of it, then we put it through the food mill.

I like to use the food meal.

It has several blades.

I have all of my potato here.

This is one potato, which is about nine ounces, you know?

In that potato, we are putting two eggs this way and maybe even one extra egg white.

So you can even get away with one egg and one egg white as we are cutting a little bit.

So we mix this here with a little bit of flour and a little bit of milk to start with, so that it's nice and smooth.

During that time, I'm going to put that on so it get hot, my pan.

Mix that well so it's smooth.

And maybe a little more milk in there.

Usually, you know, when you do those type of batter, you do them ahead.

It's good to rest a little bit, especially when you have flour.

When you have flour and you do crepes, you let it rest so that the gluten, that is the protein in the flour, has that time to relax.

But frankly, it really doesn't make that much difference.

So here we have our batter ready and that's enough, of course, to do quite a number of crepes.

And what we are going to do, we are going to make one right away.

As soon as this is hot, I put a little bit of canola oil in there, and the canola oil is a polyunsaturated oil made of rapeseed, which is from the mustard family.

And again, I'm using a nonstick pan.

And this about two ounces of two ounces of the batter here.

You want to let it spread a little bit like a pancake to be about four, five inches in diameter, you know?

And while this is cooking, we are going to cover it with caviar later, so I want to discuss caviar with you.

That large can of caviar here is one kilo, 600 gram, which is over three pound of caviar.

And this is the way it come from Russia or from China.

I have two type of caviar here, (indistinct) red and black.

Now to be called caviar anywhere, it has to be from sturgeon eggs, and there is the sturgeon, the very large one called the beluga, the most expensive, it can go up to 1,500 pound, very large fish.

Then we add the osetra, O-S-E-T-R-A, which is a smaller fish, a bit different grain.

And finally the sevruga, S-E-V-R-U-G-A, which is the smallest of the sturgeon caviar.

The three of them are very expensive.

The most, of course, is the beluga and this is that type of grain, big, round, beautiful grain.

This one is a salmon caviar and it is done, of course, with the eggs of salmon.

Now, I can see that my crepe is doing well.

As you can see, it doesn't stick.

When I see air bubble coming on top of it like any pancake, I know it's about ready.

I slide this underneath and flip it over.

Beautiful crepe.

Of course, you don't have to put caviar only on top of that, you can put smoked salmon, you can put even a garnish of certain vegetable.

Usually, you know, smoke fish will go well with that type of thing.

So this is our salmon caviar.

See, when it is not sturgeon, it should be caviar of salmon, as it is here.

There is two type of caviar of salmon, red one like that, one from the coho, which is a type of salmon, and the other one from the chum, which is also called dog salmon.

The salmon itself is not that great but it makes the largest, the best of the caviar.

And this one here, if you could look at the grain, there is a little dot inside the grain here we call the eye.

That indicate what is called the natural, you know, one of the best caviar.

This of course, is much, much less expensive.

You can buy that in tub or in bulk and it is quite inexpensive, I mean relatively, compared to the other one.

Our crepe is now ready.

See, it's brown on both side.

So we can put it here, and actually, we can finish that dish.

We present that in the center and I put, of course, much more of the red caviar because this is, as I say, much less expensive than the other one.

When the season is... I mean, in New York when we have the season of the caviar or if you have the chance of living in Alaska, I used to go to Alaska fishing salmon, and I would make my own fresh caviar, which really doesn't take that much time.

You know, you cure it.

So on top of this, we put a little bit of sour cream.

Of course, if you want to cut down on your calorie, you can eliminate the sour cream.

But I put about maybe a tablespoon here per person.

And the black caviar.

I mean, they always say that the black caviar, you should take it with mother-of-pearl, you know, or something which is not metal.

So here my third caviar, a little bit of it, very expensive and very good, maybe a few chives around for color, you know?

And again, you see nouvelle cuisine in the sense of not only the originality of the dish itself, but the colorful presentation and all that will have the type of eye appeal that you have in nouvelle cuisine.

What I wanna do now, the second dish is a grilled chicken.

And that grilled chicken, I want to do it with that vegetable peeler.

I do skin of lemon, which I put into the little grinder.

Then peppercorn, I put my finger here so it doesn't go in the shaft.

Fresh oregano I put in there.

And within seconds, I have powder, a powder of fresh herb.

You can marry it the way you want.

Actually, you can use that for lamb, you can use that for fish.

But you can see, this is absolutely great.

A little bit of olive oil in there.

And you put that to macerate, you know?

You can macerate that overnight, actually, you know?

The same thing with fish.

Remember I didn't put any salt or anything like that, so it won't cure it.

You can cook it right away if you want also, which is basically what I'm going to do because we need to cook it.

So I'm putting on my grill.

I have here the grill is clean.

Very important to have a very clean grill and a very hot grill.

I'm lowering the heat there.

And now, since we are grilling, I want to tell you a little more about what you use to grill with.

You know, when you do barbecue or thing like that, there is so many different type of coal on the market which give you different type of taste.

We have here, you can take it, it's very, very light.

It's a pre-cooked wood, if you want, what we call wood charcoal.

It's maid from hardwood.

This is often what I use.

It goes very fast, because the wood as I say, is precooked so it get red very fast.

And along here, I have here an apple, applewood, which give you taste.

Mesquite here.

The mesquite is quite known now usually coming from Texas, a fairly strong taste.

I have an olive wood here.

The olive wood will do a very, very hot heat, you know?

And here those are lava beans, rock actually, which get red and that's what I'm using in that gas grill over there.

And finally here I have cherry.

And in the middle, the regular briquette that people use.

Now the briquette are a petroleum derivative, and when you barbecue with it, I mean, you can smell it, it smell like tar when they race you past the road.

So if you use that, I don't use it personally, you really have to be very careful that this is completely cooked, that there is no more smoke which goes on your food on it before you put the food on.

So it should be gray ashes without any smoke showing.

And now that you know you have your choice of doing that type of thing, I want to go see whether my chicken is cooked on the first side.

All right, so I want to turn it.

I have a nice... I like to have the strong taste, you know, not only that strong taste of charcoal, you know, that you have.

Of course, usually when you do the barbecuing at home, and I love to do barbecuing at home, my wife want me to do it outside because otherwise it's smell of the house too much.

But I have, of course, at home a grill outside.

I also have a grill inside.

And what happened is that I have a big hood with a lot of very strong aspiration with it.

And that's what you need.

In any case, with the chicken, we are doing a salad and this is a salad from the south of France.

And that salad we called an anchoiade.

Anchoiade come from the word anchovy, because it is made with anchovy that I have here, which are come the little anchovy in oil, you know, that you have in can that we shop.

A puree of garlic that I have here too, as well as red pepper.

Remember, we cut those pepper, I take the skin of the pepper with a vegetable peel, I can dice it, or actually cut it into thin slice like this, what we call a julienne.

And that of course not only it is beautiful, but it is very good.

And especially if you take the skin, you know, much easier to digest.

So we start doing that dressing here.

So the dressing is done with that puree of anchovy, and in the south of France, you know, that puree of anchovies, they mix it with olive oil, a little bit what I'm doing here and put it on the table, and they call that bagna cauda, which mean hot bath.

Bagna cauda in Provencal.

It's almost the same thing in Italian.

Italian do, and you keep that mixture lukewarm on the table with all kind of crudites, you know, celery, carrot, and so forth.

You dip that into it.

It's a terrific dish to do.

So you can do that with that type of strong dressing for the garlic as well as the anchovies.

We're going to make that together with red wine vinegar here in the bottom.

Of course, you know, the advantage of those type of sauces, you can do them ahead perfectly fine.

The amount of acid, you know, the amount of acid to oil is usually 1:4 to also depend what you like.

I'm putting Tabasco, because I like things, you know, well-seasoned, and Tabasco is one of my favorite.

And we can put that in the salad later on.

Then the olive oil, a little bit of olive oil.

You can do a mixture of olive oil and another type of oil if you want with it.

You know, olive oil, it's a question of taste.

Sometime I use walnut oil, the walnut at a strong taste also, which I like.

I'm going to put a little bit of salt and pepper with this.

Okay, make that and put this on the side and now I can cut my cabbage.

I clean up that cabbage before.

This is what we call a Savoy cabbage.

And as you can say, you can see, rather, it is beautiful, it's curly, it has a beautiful and you know, all the green vegetable like that are very high in vitamin A. This has a lot of fiber.

In addition, those type of cruciferous vegetable are very good for, let's say, for different type of cancer and all that because the fiber.

So it is good, it's a type of modern cole slaw if you want.

I take a few leaves, you see you can kind of roll the leaf together with a large knife and you do a julienne.

You know, the advantage of this also is that you can do that ahead.

Very often, you do a salad, if you do it a little bit ahead, it get completely wilted.

Well, this actually you wanted to do it a little bit ahead, because you want it to get a little soft, you know, and it'll take a long time to get wilted in this.

So sometime also, what we do at home when the season is there, I do two bowl like that, one of the green or white cabbage and the other one of red cabbage, and I arrange it, you know, differently on a plate One right, one white, rather, or green and the other one red and it, of course, looks terrific, We have to toss that up.

I can use this also.

And as I say, you can do it a little bit ahead.

That salad goes well with anything, you know?

I used to have a little restaurant in Connecticut many years ago, and we used to serve those type of salad, as a first course.

You know, a lot of different type of salad we used to do.

So this is done now.

What I want to do is to arrange it in a nice plate.

And it's nice and crunchy too.

So one of the indication of nouvelle cuisine, to set an originality not only in the presentation but that type of dishes as you can see.

So I can do a salad here, which would be... Mmm, by the way, I should put some of this in there for color and taste.

So here it goes back.

Now it look like Christmas, red and white.

Okay, maybe I'll take my chicken out because they should be cooked by then.

Here they are tender, and what you want to do, you know, probably not put them back in the same dish that I had before.

Remember, you have to be careful of salmonella with chicken.

They are nicely brown on each side.

I'll take them out.

They should be tender, you know.

I'm not going to use all of this.

And they should rest for a few minutes, you know, so the juice goes in before you use them, but for me, I think I'm going to use them right away.

Put it on the side.

I can arrange some of this around here.

Again, the red pepper, and now some of your chicken.

All of what we want to do is to slice the chicken into nice thin slices, very moist in the center here.

The same thing with that chicken.

You see, the breast of chicken is going to be very good if it's not overcooked.

If it's overcooked, it's going to be dry, you know?

This one is just nice and moist and beautiful, still with the taste of the grilling, you know?

Which is of course what you want.

I have it here.

You finish arranging it around, and that type of salad, of course, is served lukewarm, is the best.

Maybe a bit of that on top.

And this is our anchoiade with grilled chicken.

(gentle music) One thing people love in nouvelle cuisine is the dessert, you know?

A lot of chocolate dessert, and it become quite fashionable to do those chocolate dessert, chocolate cake, you know, without flour or very little flour.

Like in this one I have just a little bit of potato starch in it.

A bit of sugar.

Mix that in my chocolate.

And some butter here.

Of course, those are rich and what we are going to do today, we have two egg yolk in there, but actually we are going to use six egg white to beat them and do a little bit like a souffle, you know?

I do that mixture there.

Then we put it again to melt, to finish cooking on the double-boiler here.

During that time, I want to beat my egg white.

And you know, I know there is new modern, appliances, but sometime I beat it by hand too.

And you see here, to start with, I may put a little dash of salt.

Why is that?

Because I'm beating that in stainless steel.

Often you'll see in book that the eggs are bitten in copper.

There is a physical reaction between the copper and the egg white, which acidify the egg white.

If you don't have the copper, salt, which is sodium, will make it foam, or citric acid, lemon juice, acetic acid, vinegar, or even a little bit of cream of tartar, tartaric acid.

All of that will make it foam, which is the idea.

So you start by biting the egg very fast so that they are very foamy like this, To break the eggs with it.

Then you start slowly, and notice that you can't even practically hear the whisk.

Then if I move my wrist, I go under the eggs to lift up the eggs practically without touching the bowl.

That the idea to inflate the egg this way, I mean the classic way of beating egg white.

When I was an apprentice, if the chef heard the bowl, you know, that we are touching the bowl, then he would yell at us.

So I get the habit of beating it, and that you don't get tired.

In fact, if you get tired with one hand, you change hand.

Now that's what you do.

Beating it a little bit on one side, a little bit on the other side.

And you need a balloon whisk with that, what we call a balloon whisk, which is round.

They are practically ready now, you see?

If I beat both eggs by hand, it would go at least twice as fast as with the machine, you know?

Now those eggs are ready, they hold a peak.

You see?

They hold a peak.

This is what we are talking by holding a peak this way, you know?

And then that's it.

When your eggs are there, you have to use them right away, you know?

So my chocolate is hopefully melted here.

I mean, all the ingredient.

And I combine it with the egg white.

Usually, you really fold it in, you know?

I can mix it a little bit with the whisk, but it tend to break the egg white too much.

So I fold it, what we call folding.

You go underneath, lift it up, you know?

And notice here that usually my left hand is really turning the bowl.

And the right hand is doing the same motion, we call a folding motion here, combining it together.

Sometime, you know what is done also is to mix the sugar, which goes in the recipe, directly into the egg white.

Here is my mixture.

I will pour that to cook.

That's it.

And this is a nine-inch pan.

Actually, you know, that recipe, you could do that in a smaller cake pan, even in a souffle mold, you know?

What I'm doing now, putting that directly into the oven, about 350 degree.

I have one which is cooked on top here, and you can see that it's inflated like a souffle.

You could actually serve that now as a souffle.

But here I have one which has been cooled off and which is there.

It will deflate a little bit.

Remember, there is basically no flour in it.

We put a bit of powdered sugar on top of it.

And we serve that with a sauce made of raspberry, strained raspberry preserve, and rum.

You can buy actually, your raspberry preserve now.

They have some on the market without the seed, seedless, you know, and that's what we do.

A little bit in the bottom of the pan.

Spread it out.

And I will give you here the value of eight cake.

So eight portion, that's going to be in the area of 300 calorie for eight portion, maybe with a little flowers next to it for decoration.

And this is the way it should be served.

I wanna show you our whole meal in the dining room.

Our chocolate cake here is ready.

It's called a chocolate souffle cake because you don't have much flour in it, but actually, it is not a real souffle, although you can serve it, you know, hot when it comes out of the oven.

This is very colorful.

You see the color of the plate and all that in the style of nouvelle cuisine, very modern.

We have, of course, first our crepe like that with the different type of caviar.

You can see the design of the plate.

This is bright and beautiful, expensive but terrific.

The salad, the lukewarm salad is one very well known aspect of nouvelle cuisine.

And it's done a great deal with duck, with game, in that case with chicken.

And of course the grilling and grilling with the citrus fruit like the skin of the lemon are very nouvelle cuisine too.

And finally, our chocolate cake here without flour, served with the raspberry sauce.

And of course, this is very much nouvelle cuisine, because the raspberry are used a great deal, as well, of course, as the kiwi.

And with that, we have a Chateau la Lande here.

It is a pomerol, a wine from the southwest of France, mostly made with Merlot.

I think it would go well with the meal.

I hope you have enjoyed our meal today and I enjoyed making it for you.

Happy cooking!