- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

It's no surprise that Provence in the south of France is a mecca for food lovers.

The weather, the color, and the freshest ingredient combined with fine wine, make it heaven on earth.

Join me as I take a modern approach to a classic Provencal meal, eggplant and red pepper terrine, layered with Brie cheese and a sauce of fresh tomato, red snapper poached in white wine is surrounded by warm cucumber, sauteed in tarragon, then serve with a dramatic omelet souffle flavored with jam and espresso.

It's a spectacular finish.

So join me as we explore the flavor of Provence, coming up on "Today's Gourmet."

(light pleasant music) I love menu from the south of France, you know, very fresh food, a lot of vegetable, and this is what we are going to cook.

Although, you can cook it year round, but is especially good in summer.

And what we are going to start with is that terrine, you know?

A terrine of vegetable, mostly done with eggplant, and you can use that type of eggplant.

You know, the conventional eggplant that you cut into like half-inch slice, or the long narrow one other you have here, which sometime people call Japanese eggplant, sometime Chinese eggplant and so forth, which when I can find them at the market, are my favorite.

And the idea here is just to brush that lightly with a bit of vegetable oil, canola oil, a dash of salt on top of it.

And that's about it you do.

Then you put it on the grill.

And on the grill, it has to cook on each side for a couple of minutes.

And I have some here which I've been cooking for a while and she's soft now, which is what the way I want it.

You can, of course, do that ahead so that you would wanna use them when they're a bit cooler than what they are now.

But one way or the other, you don't want do the eggplant kind of hard, you know?

In the style of Nouvelle cuisine, you want it soft.

And this is what we have here.

So we have a terrine here, that's what we call a terrine.

And I line it up with plastic wrap, so it makes it very easy to unmold.

It's actually just a receptacle to put the thing and you could put it in the round thing or anything.

Brie cheese, and we are going to cut some Brie cheese here.

You want it fairly firm, but nice.

And what I do is really trim a little bit of the crust on the outside, on each side right here, the minimal amount, and cut them into slice.

When you do this, you know, this is going to glue to it, so you need another knife to get it loose, you know?

Otherwise, you'll have a hard time to pulling it out.

So this is what you wanna do with your Brie.

You can, of course, use mozarella.

And if you, or any other type of cheese, for that matter, that you have at home.

And if you really wanna cut down, then you may even omit.

Then I have red pepper here, and those red pepper, I'm going to show you later how to do it.

And I have blanched parsley here.

So the first thing that we do, we are layering that terrine, you know, a layer of this in the bottom.

Then you wanna put the red pepper.

Those are like pimientos, you know, red pepper which have been peeled, removed with all seed.

So you arrange that in it, then slice of cheese to cover it.

And again, you know, you can use your imagination and do another type of combination of what I did here.

In the meantime, be sure that you put a little bit of pepper along the way and a little bit of salt.

Again, you know the same idea here, whether you start with this or whether you start with your eggplant, you know, it's kind of immaterial, doesn't really matter, the way you wanna work it out.

Again, a bit more Brie.

In fact, I'm forgetting my parsley here.

See the parsley has been blanched with our flat parsley.

It will give color, and of course, texture to the center also.

So again, maybe I put a bit more parsley because I didn't put any here, and I can finish it up with this.

You don't have to finish it up with the eggplant, doesn't really matter here.

Then you bring that on top that we can do even a day, day and a half ahead.

Then we put a weight on top of it.

I have a weight here.

You can use whatever is heavy into the house to press this.

You wanna put that in the refrigerator now for a few hours for the taste to get together.

And I have another one, which has been cooling off here, that I want to bring back.

And with that, we are going to make a close.

You see I have a weight also here.

You see that terrine, I finish it up with the red pepper.

It really doesn't matter, but as you can see, it's nice and flat now.

So what I want to do is a raw tomato sauce here, which is very easy to do.

All I have is three clove of garlic, you know, and tomato.

I'm gonna start by chopping the garlic a little bit first.

(food processor whirring) If I don't do the garlic first, it tends, sometimes, to stay in pieces.

So I have like three cup of tomato here.

We want to emulsify it, and in that, I put a little bit of water, (food processor whirring) Tabasco, (food processor whirring) red wine vinegar, (food processor whirring) and olive oil.

(food processor whirring) That's about it, you know?

Very fast and very good.

Now I could leave that as is.

If you want to be a bit fancier, you wanna strain this through a food mill as I'm doing here to remove the seed, because the seed, of course, are not eliminated in the, and this is a good food mill.

You should be able to go back and forth, you know?

So as you can see in the bottom here, I'm going to have the fiber, all right, left.

I have a light tomato sauce, which is quite flavorful here.

And what we want to do is to unmold this.

Of course, by putting the layering as I did here, it makes it much easier to unmold.

There is no way that it cannot come out.

The reason is that, remember, I have the plastic wrap, you know, around.

Here it is.

You can see the whole layering of my terrine here, it's beautiful summer dish.

What I want to do is to cut a piece, maybe right there, to show you the cut, you know, how beautiful it is.

And maybe another piece to serve on a plate right there.

The sauce will go around, nice pink sauce.

You know, depending on your tomato, sometime the tomato in full summer may have a little more color than that.

And what I want to do is to do a little bit of the sauce here also.

Here we are, and you could actually even put a few thing of parsley around as I'm doing here to finish the dish.

And this is our first course summer meal.

And I wanna show you how to peel those red pepper that we have used in our terrine.

See those, when you peel pepper, those are nice and firm.

What you do, you put them in the oven.

Under the broiler, you can put them directly on the flame.

They have to get all charred around until the skin kind of blister.

Then after you do that, you put them in a bag, close them so the steam will lose, loosen rather, I mean make the skin better.

It makes it much easier to remove.

And this is what we have in there.

They're still warm.

And as you can see, after they have been, you can do that under the sink.

But as you can see this, the skin is really going to remove.

It's very important to steam them in a plastic bag like this Ziploc.

It's very good, you know?

So then what we do is we take the center of it, we can open them.

There's always some liquid in there, you know?

And we want to clean out all those seed.

You know, you can do it with paper towel even, cleaning out the whole thing.

And this is basically what we add in our pepper terrine, you know?

Those red pepper with that nice taste of charcoal or you know, nice type of roasting, you know?

There is another way actually that we peel pepper.

You can use them raw and peel them with a vegetable peeler.

And that's what I do here.

You see, if you have a good vegetable peeler, it's not difficult.

What you have to do is that in the part, you know, where you have, you cannot do in those recess.

So what you have to do is to cut those recess to remove those segment, and then after, you have access to the side, you know, where you couldn't get before.

Now this is all peeled, it's very delicate.

You can cut it in julienne like this or in little dice like this, which is what we are going to use in our next recipe.

And our next recipe is a fish from the south of France.

Again, one of those nice, delicate fish grouper family.

So what we have here is a couple of tablespoon of olive oil.

We're going to put a leek in there, quite a lot of leek, leek shallots, and I wanna cut that very thin, and we wanna cook that for a few minutes, you know?

So we are going to poach that with wine, you know, wine and leek.

I add that right in there.

And my red pepper, the red paper will go in there also.

I have shallots here, you know, those tiny shallots which are chopped very finely.

I mean you can chop them or slice them very fine this way, it will be perfectly fine also, and mushroom.

I have a julienne of mushroom here that you do by taking the top of the mushroom, cutting it the cap like this, and cutting it into little stick like this.

Actually, can be cut in any old way.

It is not that important, you know?

The mushroom can also be carved, you know, if you want decoration like this on top.

That's what we call fluting a mushroom, you know?

This require a little bit of practice, but it look nice when you put it on top of a fish, you know, using the cap this way.

And usually, you will use it whole like this to poach it.

We can poach it right with ours here.

And then, of course, wine.

What we have here, about a cup of wine, add good dry white wine, dash of salt, a bit of pepper, and this will cook for a minute or so while I'm preparing the fish.

You can see here, I have a beautiful fish.

The eye is clear and transparent, this is a red snapper.

And what you do, basically, is to cut it there, put your knife flat on the center, on the center bone, and remove your filet this way, you know?

Now those filet, you have to remove also the center part, which I'm doing here of the rib cage, you know, that I have there, so that it basically boneless here.

You do the same thing, of course, on the other side.

So a filet like this is going to be about, not quite half of the weight of the fish itself.

And this here, that we are, you know, the vegetable I've been cooking maybe one minute here, that's about enough in modern cooking.

You know, we don't cook them long, you put the fish directly on top.

We have four filet of fish here, maybe a little dash of salt again on top, and they're going to poach in that white wine.

Another garnish we are going to do, cucumber.

And cucumber is rarely served cooked, but we are going to cook it.

It's a bit unusual, it's a bit different.

You know, the cucumber is cut.

Those are the long narrow, so-called English cucumber or seedless.

Although, they do have seed.

There are different way of doing it.

But in that case here, we cut them in fours, and each of those piece start by removing the seed.

That's what we call turning vegetable.

Use the point of your knife, whoop, it's a bit slippery, to shape it into a kind of football type of shape, you know.

And we do that with carrot.

We do that with, of course, a lot of different type of vegetable.

So here it is here, you know, that type of shape.

You can cut them, peel them, and cut them in pieces is perfectly fine.

That's a bit more elegant.

We drop that in boiling water.

This will cook very, very fast.

It comes back to a boil, and basically, it's ready.

So let's see our fish here.

See the fish, the way it curl up.

Now those fish are basically ready, so it does cook very fast.

What we wanna put is a tablespoon of butter.

Remember, all we did was a couple of tablespoon of oil in it.

Our tablespoon of butter at the end for maximum flavor to mix into the sauce.

This is now is back to a boil.

So we want to do is to drain it, place it back still wet in there, a little piece of butter in it, like half a tablespoon, and tarragon.

The tarragon goes so well with it.

Chopped tarragon, you know, beautiful tarragon leaves here as you see, a dash of salt.

We want to make that together, and oop.

And that's about it.

So those type of dish you know are very, very fast as we can say.

All you have to have everything ready.

But when you have everything ready, it goes very fast to cook.

You should cook it at the last moment.

Remember, that the tarragon is quite strong and give a lot of flavor to it.

So it has that type of anise taste to it.

So here, we want to serve that individually that you can serve right here.

I could put a bit of the garnish in the bottom here, gonna put some on top also.

And one filet, one filet per person would be plenty.

See on the red snapper, I clean up the red snapper before, take the scale out of it, you know?

And if you keep the scale out of it, we tend to keep the skin of the red snapper because it is delicate, and first, it has a beautiful color also.

So that's what we'll do here.

If you want to dish for your fluid mushroom here, you could to put it in the center of it.

And with that, our cucumber, which are a classic way of garnishing fish, you know.

You can put around your fish, all over here.

You see, sometime, we do that in barquette, and it is very elegant in barquette.

This is a bit in the style.

If you want a nouvelle cuisine, something delicate.

And that would be the main course for our Provencal meal.

(light music) We have a very elegant dessert today, what we call omelet souffle.

It's actually like a souffle, but done in the shape of an omelet.

It is actually the classic base of the Baked Alaska should be this way.

And what we have here is six egg white.

Conventionally, of course, it's stuffed with ice cream and we're not going to put ice cream in it.

We're going to beat those egg white.

And again, in a copper bowl, what I start is by beating the egg very fast.

So I break the egg white so that they are liquid, and then after, slowly, you go underneath to lift up those eggs and I flip them.

I beat them in a copper bowl here.

If you have a stainless steel bowl is perfectly fine.

The copper bowl, however, will have a physical reaction with the eggs and tend to make it foam, you know, because of acidity.

So it is conventional when you look at recipe for for beating egg white that the recipe will tell you, put a bit of cream of tartar, which is tartaric acid, or a couple of drop of lemon juice, which is citric acid, or a couple of drops of vinegar even, which is acetic acid.

Any type of acid will make it foam.

In fact, even a drop of a little dash of salt in it will break the albumin in the eggs and make it foam.

But you have to be careful if for the bowl not to be dirty.

That if there is any fat in it, it reverses the process and the egg don't whip.

As you can see, those eggs are practically ready now.

I have a large balloon whisk, you know, what we call a balloon whisk.

And when I move it, the whole mixture is move in one stroke.

I don't have to go from one corner to the other.

Like I would have two if I had a small egg, a smaller whisk.

Now you see those eggs all the shape, a beautiful shape.

They are elastic here.

You take the time where we want to tighten the egg.

We call that tightening the egg, and then we put the sugar in it, you know.

And I have here, half a cup of sugar that we put.

I wanna work it out with it a little bit, too.

And conventionally, you know, for the Baked Alaska, that's what people do.

It need a bit better if you take have a couple of egg yolk here, I beat the egg yolk with half a teaspoon of vanilla, and we flavor it with this.

This is the real mixture, which is much more delicate than just the plain eggs by itself.

This, we're gonna fold that gently into the egg mixture.

Again, you know, notice that the left hand is turning the bowl and the right hand just doing the same movement over and over again.

So what we do here, of course, you use a metal bowl, you know, a metal tray for that.

Wanna place some of that mixture in the center.

And conventionally, jam, you know, pound cake with jam on top.

I turn it upside down here as you can see.

And I have a black current jam here.

You can have whatever jam you have, I think three slice will cover it.

And the other side, I want to brush it with espresso, you know, which again, give a lot of taste to it, you know?

So use a large brush like that to kind of impregnate those little slice of pound cake.

You can use lady finger, you can use other type of thing there.

On top of this, a bit more mixture to cover the top, you know, as I have here.

And the rest of our mixture is going to go in the pastry bag, we put a fluid tip at the end.

We press it to get it nice.

Press at the end, you turn the end of it, but you can put all of your mixture in there.

This is where it is better.

If you have someone helping you and holding the bag, you know?

We can hold it with your belly.

We need all of those, all of this in there.

Okay, here.

In my bag, I want to clean my bag to have everything in.

Now with a spatula, I'm going to smoothen this in and out, you know, like you would do a souffle.

The only problem with that dessert, which is done in a few minutes, you know, it doesn't really take long, is that it should be really cooked right away and used right away, you know?

So this is one of the, now I turn my bag, so that I get it, and then you can, of course, do whatever decoration you want around it, you know?

Using the pastry bag to make it festive, you know?

This is actually my Rococo period, you can see that.

More on top.

Use everything that you have in there, pressing it to have it.

And as you see, it look much more impressive than actually it is difficult to do.

It's fairly simple.

So this now cannot wait.

Unfortunately, it is lighter than a souffle, there is no base, so it has to go in the oven pretty fast.

And that will cook in about 12 to 15 minute, you know, in the center.

So be sure that you have a tray which goes in the oven, stainless steel or other thing.

And I have this one here, which is just about cooked that I have here.

And that's what you bring to the table with a little bit of powdered sugar on top, if you want, for a beautiful dessert, very elegant that we call our omelet souffle.

There is always an element of suspense in souffle, and it's even worse.

So in the omelet souffle, because the omelet souffle, you have to consume it right away.

You know, I love to do the type of menu, where the dishes go so well together and that's what we have here.

The south of France, you know, something very light, delicate, a lot of vegetable, a lot of color.

You know, there is a type of symbiosis between the food which goes together and the wine for that matter.

I mean we have here our red pepper terrine, which is a stunning thing for a picnic.

You wanna go to a picnic, you bring this, you bring the sauce separate, you cut it into slice, and you can even put it in sandwich, you know, in between sandwich, it would be absolutely terrific.

Then we have that fish, you know, which is special to the Mediterranean, that type of red snapper.

Of course, you can use any type of file fish that you want with the same type of mixture and try those cucumber this way.

Maybe you never try cucumber this way.

They're really excellent with that taste of tarragon.

Then with that, of course, we have a salad.

A nice salad will go well with it.

And after, at the end, you know, that beautiful omelet souffle that we have here, that you want to cut into it, and it is lighter, of course, than a souffle, you know, with a little bit inside as you see of the red and the biscuit that we put in it, or pound cake or whatever you want, or even cookies, you know, or lady finger, of course, would go well with it.

This is a stunning dessert that you can go for a special occasion.

With that, I like to serve one of the greatest wine of the South of France.

A bundle, you know, which is made from a special grape, the Mourvedre.

This is Domaine Tempier bundle, just above Toulon, a very fruity, spicy wine, which goes so well with the type of food that we did today.

Try that menu for your friend, try it for a special occasion.

You're going to love making it.

I love making it for you, happy cooking.