- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

When I was a young boy, our big Sunday dinner were our favorite time of the week.

Today's menu bring back memories of those meal.

This is the comfort food my mother and my aunt used to cook.

A soup of dry and fresh mushroom, intensely flavored, but my version is surprisingly low in fat.

Poulet roti mean roast chicken.

I'll show you the classic way to make it moist and delicious.

I serve it with coquillette, little pasta shell, tossed with Gruyere cheese and fresh chive.

For dessert, feather light crepe filled with jam and fruit.

I hope you will join me for Sunday dinner.

We'll cook together for your family and friend on Today's Gourmet.

(bright elegant music) (bright elegant music continues) I'm doing a beautiful classic Sunday meal today, which bring a lot of memory to me and a very straightforward type of recipe that we do in France, a roast chicken, straight, pasta served with Gruyère cheese and crepe, of course, for dessert.

But to start with, we're going to start with a mushroom soup.

I have fresh mushroom of two different color.

I have onion here, I have leek, I have a large potato and I have dry mushroom.

Those are actually Boletus mushroom, and Boletus mushroom called porcini in Italian, cepe in French and the king boletus in English.

I put that to soak with milk, skim milk actually and my aunt used to soak that with milk.

I'm going to do just like her.

Of course, we used to do those soup, they were a little more calorie than what we are going to do today, because we used to do them with cream, butter at the end.

Today, all we do is a dash of oil in it and eventually, a little bit of the milk in there.

So we'll start with that leek.

This one is beautiful and clean, as you can see.

I will show you how to clean that one.

A lot of people waste leek.

All you have to remove is this.

And after that, maybe the first layer if it's fibrous.

And again, I keep that for stock.

Then after that, I will start cutting it around and I will see where the color of the leek is getting lighter.

And that's where I cut.

So it is not a question of just eliminating the leek.

What you wanna do is to cut it leaf by leaf like this so that you are left with the center, which is nice and light green and tender and what we do here, we cut it across this way and this way to open it.

And as you see a beautiful color inside, and of course, to wash it here, that's what we use and a leek like that, you can do quite a lot of soup with it.

So this one is clean.

We're going to cut it in pieces like this.

You don't have to worry too much about how you cut it, because in that case, we're going to puree the soup, so it doesn't really matter.

We'll put that directly with our bit of olive oil to cook.

Start toasting it and then we put a bit of onion.

Those are beautiful Walla Walla onion, very mild, delicious onion.

And again, that's the same family than the leek, the lily family, very good for you.

Good for cholesterol.

Good for blood pressure, good for everything.

Then we have that potato here.

Oh, I want to put first those dry mushroom.

Again for the (indistinct) here.

And remember, I'm keeping the milk, which we'll put in the soup at the end.

Put it there.

The potato, I have a large potato here.

Those are fresh potato, organic potato.

They look a little bit like Yukon Gold.

They have a beautiful yellow color.

And I like potato, this is the thickening agent in my soup.

I could put bread, I could put pasta, I could put rice, I could put couscous, I could put tapioca, any of those.

Then a bit of salt in there and water.

Three cup of water.

Water give me the (indistinct) and the taste of the vegetable much more than stock.

It is a mistake to think that you can only do soup with stock.

Now the water of my potato here, 'cause you see, you can peel your potato ahead, it's fine, providing you keep it in water, otherwise it'll discolor it.

I have some of those mushroom here.

And what I want to do is a garnish, that is, I want to cut the top of the mushroom a couple of slice on each of the top and put those slice together and cut it into a fine strip, which is what we call a julienne.

In nouvelle cuisine, we do a lot of julienne.

So I'm putting that down here.

(knife thudding) Cutting these into strip, this will be my garnish.

(knife thudding) And actually here, we are here.

I'm keeping that there.

The rest of the mushroom go into my soup here.

And that's it, I can bring this and my milk right there.

I have some soup which is already cooked here.

What I want to do is to puree it.

With a machine like that makes it very easy to go directly into the soup to puree it.

And you don't have to puree the whole thing.

Sometimes I like to make it only thick enough, thick enough, so to have it a bit more creamy in there.

I'm going to put my milk.

Don't put the end of it because there may be a bit of sand.

And finally, you put your mushroom in there.

I would, at that point of course, bring it back to a boil here, but we don't have the time so I'm going to bring it here.

I can put it on top.

A bit of the garnish here, I have some beautiful chive that I could put on top of it here.

Maybe even that flower.

Here is our soup to start our menu.

(bright elegant music) And for our main course, we're going to cook pasta and chicken.

I cook the pasta in there in a basket like that, it makes it easier and I have those little pasta we call coquillette in French, which are shell, little shell.

And the French, we often cook it, sometime with Parmesan cheese, but very often with Gruyere cheese, Swiss cheese.

So this will come to a boil.

I want to stir it a little bit.

This will come to a boil and cook about seven, eight minutes.

Again, I have no salt in the water.

I will put the salt in the sauce after.

And then now, I want to talk to you about chicken.

I want to put that on.

And here I have a chicken, about three and a half pound.

Chicken for me is one of the best thing that you can do, a plain roast chicken if it's cooked properly.

Well, the first thing that I want to do is to remove the wishbone to make it easier to carve.

So I cut on each side of the wishbone and pry it out with my hand to remove those two pieces that we call the wishbone here.

That makes it much easier now.

It is not in the way when I carve in the dining room.

Then we want to cut the end of the tip.

That must be for aesthetic reason and tuck them underneath here.

Same thing on the other one.

And then after that, we want to truss the chicken.

That is, you can keep that for stock, remember.

Put that here, then those leg here, you want to push them in.

That is, you want to bring the breast up like this and we want to truss it, so we put it this way with a piece of kitchen twine.

This has to be thick, heavy butcher twine.

You don't want to use a thin things, which is going to cut your finger.

So we go underneath, you cross above, you go under the drumstick, which makes an eight.

You close it and then bring it around and just go around the wing here, so that it anchor it and we tighten it right there.

That's it, the chicken is trussed, so-called and as you can see, it has a nice shape, the breast is standing up and there is no string on top of it.

My pasta is boiling a bit fast here.

A little dash of oil.

And now, to judge a restaurant, often, I use a chicken.

A little bit of salt inside, a little bit of salt on the outside, dash of fresh pepper corn and that's about it.

What we do, however, we cook the chicken on one side, breast down.

On the other side, breast down.

Since only the back is exposed so it doesn't dry out.

So this is the way we started.

I'm going to ground it on this side here, starting in that skillet with a tiny bit of oil.

We're going to remove the fat at the end anyway.

So that's going to cook for a while.

I'm going to get rid of that.

And especially with chicken, you have to be very careful, especially with salmonella now to clean up your hand after you do the chicken.

So clean up your hand now.

What we are going to do is to grate the cheese for the pasta.

And I have two type of cheese as you can see here.

The one with the hole is actually the Swiss cheese and this is the Gruyere from the valley of Gruyere in Switzerland, it's a type of Swiss cheese but richer.

I think I'm going to use this one today.

We need about a cup or three quarter of a cup maybe of Swiss cheese, which I'm going to do.

And leave here this way.

Now, we are going to put a little bit of chive.

That's going to go into our pasta, remember?

But I cut it ahead (knife thudding) and I put it on the side right here on a little piece of plastic.

Very often, I use those little piece of plastic.

It makes it easier to clean up.

Now, I want to turn my chicken.

What I'm going to do is show you to use a little piece of parchment paper.

You don't need a big piece, just a little square like that, because it doesn't stick and if you're afraid, unless you use non-stick pan, you're afraid that it's going to stick.

As you can see here is brown on one side.

Put it on the other side.

I'm pulling that in the bottom and that on top of it.

So that will start browning on the other side when I put it in the oven.

So like this, I know it is not going to stick.

So now I'm going to put that in the oven.

High oven, about 425 degree.

And I am going to take one on the other side, which is finished.

And as you can see, I have a beautifully roasted chicken here.

At the end, we cook it on one side, the other side and finally, at the end, this is the time when you lift it up, pick up a little bit of the fat a few time and base it like this.

That will give it the color and the taste.

(speaks in French) Now I'm going to carve that chicken, put it here to carve it.

Remember, that we can remove the skin of your chicken.

I wanted to show you also that when you turn it, you should puncture your chicken in the pleat here or there but never in the breast.

And I have the chicken here, pull out the juice.

This is to carve and look at what I have here.

I have beautiful de-glazing.

So what we do here is to pour that juice in their fat and all.

I will let the fat come to the top.

After the fat come to the top, use a little bit of it for the pasta.

Meanwhile, what I will do is to take a little bit of water from that pasta and what we call de-glaze the pan.

That is, we want to use the crystallized juice here in the bottom as you see, melted.

This is delicious.

And that, we are going to use that to toss our pasta in.

That's going to become our pasta sauce.

So I pour that directly in the pasta bowl here.

And with this, we also putting about a couple of tablespoon of the fat from the chicken.

Instead of using olive oil or butter, that's what we are using this time.

There is still fat, but I'm going to remove it later.

Now, I want to show you how to carve that chicken.

For the dining room, it's a nice things to do your carving in the dining room, too.

What I have here, the first thing you want to do, so of course, removing the string.

Don't forget to remove the string.

Very often, you may carve it in the dining room or in the kitchen, it's a bit easier.

Puncture your leg on one side, you cut around one leg.

Now the breast here, I cut in the joint of the breast with a joint right there and I cut a piece of the breast, as you can see, again, getting off that piece.

Same thing on the other side, one leg.

It's impressive when you cook, carve in the dining room and when you serve the whole chicken this way, but you cut it at the last moment.

Remember, when that chicken come out of the oven, don't cover it with the aluminum foil or anything like that because it has a reheated taste.

And now what we have the breast here and the breast, as you see, I remove the whole breast in one stroke and here I have now the carcass.

So I'm going to bring that here and I'm going to decorate that with watercress.

I have a bunch of watercress here.

This, I used to do a soup, all the base and so forth.

I leave it on this side, this is for my decoration.

We put the breast of the chicken on top of it here.

You want to put back your breast just the way you cut it.

I started there.

I put the other breast here, the other leg here.

I can even cut the end of this with a bigger knife here if I want to be a bit nicer.

This one goes here, this one goes there, put it a bit on the bias.

A nice bunch of watercress here.

And we have a beautiful chicken right here that we are going to put here for the time being and see whether our pasta is ready.

So what I'm doing now.

Get inside, checking it.

Yes, about, it's still al dente, a bit to the teeth.

But basically, this is the way we want it.

You want to shake it a couple of times, because there is water which goes into those coquillette, which goes into those little shell.

Pour it into this as we have it.

This is really a home-style type of cooking.

I've already removed the fat that I needed, but you see, any extra fat, I'm going to get rid of and just keep the bottom part of the juice, which is the best part.

So I have removed all of my fat here.

I bring that here, a little sauce boat.

I can strain my juice directly in there.

And this is a dark rich juice.

I could even put a little bit of the pasta water in there to clean it up more.

Now, I'm putting the cheese and the chive in there.

Remember, I have no salt to that extent in there, because I didn't even put salt in the water.

Pepper, a lot of paper here and I have to toss my pasta and you see all of that liquid I put in the bottom is going to be absorbed in the pasta and it has a nice taste.

That nice symbiosis, if you want.

It goes with the chicken together.

We have the juice of the chicken, the fat.

We have our chicken here, beautiful.

And then our pasta dish.

I could serve it in that at home, I would serve it like that.

But it's a bit more elegant in this.

And here you serve this, serve that on the table with a little bit of that juice, even the juice in there or here.

And this is heaven.

(elegant music) For our desert dessert in that very classic, very straightforward French dinner, roast chicken, pasta with Gruyere cheese and we are going to do the crepe and the crepe are very classic in France, all over France.

Whether you do a crepe suzette, very elegant and so forth.

Or whether you do just a crepe at home, as my mother used to do.

Crepe exists all over the world.

I mean, there is no cuisine who doesn't have a type of flat, unleavened pancake-like, which is used as a wrapper, either in savory or either with sugar.

I mean the French have the crepe, the Italian have the crespella, you have the pfannkuchen in Germany.

The Jewish people have the blintz.

The Chinese have the Chinese jianbing.

I mean the Mexican have the tortilla.

We have the pancake in America and so forth and so forth.

And the bread with the Arab country.

So what we have to do here, I have two third of a cup of flour.

Again very cheap, this is a very cheap, because I can do an even cheap calorie-wise, because remember, here with two third of a cup of flour, two eggs, I do 20 crepe, which is a lot of crepe for that amount if you have two or three per person.

What you have to do, however, and I use skim milk here, I only put a certain portion of the liquid in it.

I put the eggs and a little bit of the milk, so that by the time I mix it with my whisk, as you can see here, I get a mixture which is quite thick.

The mixture has to be thick so that the thread of the whisk is going to smooth out the mixture and I have a very smooth mixture.

If I were to add all of the liquid in it, then the protein in the flour will coagulate and I will have nice little dumpling all over the place.

You don't want the little dumpling in your crepe batter.

So you have to stir it.

And this apply to all batter by the way.

You can do a lot of different batter this way.

So this, as you can see, is very liquid and I want it very liquid.

It's even a bit too thick here.

So I put a bit I can put even water.

Sometime I do it with regular milk, half milk, half water.

That's about fine here.

Now, I add a bit of oil here, which I have here.

And what I want to do, I want to just oil the first, for the first crepe, because the pan has to get in the mood.

If the pan doesn't get in the mood, it sticks.

So when it sticks, I give it to the dog.

The pan should be pretty hot.

And we are going to bring that on the other side.

It makes it easier here.

If you are right-handed like me, you put on this side, because there is a certain technique.

What you have to do, the liquid is batter.

As soon as that liquid touch the pan, it's going to solidify.

So the speed at which you spread it out, will determine how thin the crepe is, that is, if you leave it there, it stay where it is, get hard right away.

So you put it in one corner and spread it out very fast.

Check it, you see.

I fill up the whole thing and now it's hard already.

Now you can see inside of this, you can see those tiny hole all over the place here.

This is what we call in French crepe dontelle.

Dontelle means lace, so when it has the tiny little hole it mean that the batter is very, very light and it does a crepe extremely thin.

So here, it has to get a bit harder.

I lift it up and turn it on the other side.

It always brown nice on the first side.

Always brown nice on the first side.

So when you turn it upside down, as you're going to see here, I could flip it and then after, take it and put it flat here.

Then again we'll start, now I only oil it the first time.

Now, when I made the batter, I put a little bit of oil in there and that's all you need.

It's a non-stick pan of course.

I put it there, again, check it and put it.

And don't worry if you have a little hole like here.

Just fill it up after.

I left that hole on purpose to show you that, you see.

It is, so now I do a couple and as I said with that amount of batter, I can do at least 20 crepes.

So it's very inexpensive.

When my daughter come home from college and especially, when she was small and brought guest, she'd take the end of it and turn it.

She wanted crepe in the morning.

Now, the first thing that I did was put my skillet on the stove, put it on and by the time I mix one egg, that bit of flour, that's it, they were done.

So we did that, very easy thing to do and you can use it for many things.

So here we have our crepe here.

I have a bunch that I've done before.

You can see that those crepe are very elastic and they are very tight, small and quite elastic, but very, very thin, crepe dontelle.

We're going to prepare them.

And when I was a kid, we loved it with jam.

I have all kind of jam here.

This is a strawberry jam.

We had the plum and so forth.

Spread it out a little bit, fold it in fourth like this and place it there.

You see those crepe are quite large.

Two per person would be enough.

I have beautiful apricot here.

I have quince over there, I love quince, I have plum.

And I do jam at home a great deal.

I love to do jam, too, in summer.

So here, we put this here and we put a little bit of powdered sugar on top of this and you can decorate them this way, even with a strawberry if you want on the side and maybe a little piece of mint for color.

Now I want to show you another way of doing it, a big one.

Sometime when we were a kid, we used to love it, my brother and I, with chocolate.

So here, I put chocolate in it.

Just grate a dark, bittersweet chocolate.

And we roll it, we roll it this way, you see.

I put another one with jam.

Maybe that's a bit too much jam on this one.

And again, roll it just another way, rolling it this way, another type of jam.

And then you can have fun and the kid love to do that.

So do it with the kid.

You see I can decorate all of this and put all kind, look at all the beautiful array of different fruit that I have here.

So we can put fruit, I have raspberry, I have cherry here.

Look at that, I have beautiful strawberry, blackberry.

And if you want even be a really fanciful, you can have a few eatable flowers from the garden, a bit of mint for color, I mean leaves of mint like that and you have an absolutely beautiful looking tray.

And now those crepe are beautiful with all those fruit on top and all those color and relatively very low calorie.

Remember, that I have two third of a cup of flour here and I do 20 crepe, I have two eggs, so you can really splurge a little bit.

Two, three crepe per person are fine.

And we have first in our menu, the soup and that mushroom, too, is extremely intense because of the dry mushroom in it.

A little bit of cream at the end, but not munch.

We have the pasta, remember the pasta, with that beautiful juice that we have.

Natural juice from the chicken.

Then our chicken here.

And believe me that chicken, you could have it without the skin.

If you remove the skin before or after, it'll of course cut down considerably on the amount of calorie that you have in it.

With a little bit of watercress.

Finally a couple of crepe per person and you have a really family-friendly gathering.

The chicken, remember, eat it as soon as you can and don't cover it with aluminum foil, because it's going to start steaming and it's different.

Now, the crepe, again, you can serve them for breakfast, would be very good also.

But with that, of course, you have a salad.

And finally, I have a Saint-Joseph here, which is the higher part of Cotes du Rhone, close to where I come, a very intense, fruity berry-like red wine.

And with my roasted chicken, a favorite wine for me.

I hope you enjoy looking at the show today.

I enjoy cooking it for you.

Happy cooking.