- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

Nowadays, you don't have to live on the coast to get good, fresh seafood and fish all year long.

I love to start a meal with a simple but impressive Timbal like this one, made with layers of sauteed shrimp and spinach.

Salmon is moist and delicate when you poach it in a savory broth with julienne vegetable and lemon peel.

A comforting puree of celery root and potatoes remind me of my childhood in Lyon.

And for a spectacular finale, I make ahead mango souffle done in a modern style without egg yolk.

Fresh fruit and the bounty of the sea, it's a seafood lover's delight next on Today's Gourmet.

(bright music) We have a seafood lover delight for you today, fish.

And now people eat much more fish than when I was a kid.

I remember it was once every blue moon that we ate fish and now we eat it sometimes two, three times in the same meal.

And I'm going to start with a shrimp dish.

The first dish is going to be a Timbal of shrimp and spinach.

And the first thing that I wanna do is to start cooking the spinach.

Put a little bit of oil in there.

I have a canola oil here and we're going to flavor that with garlic.

I have three clove of garlic here.

I may have a bit too much.

You wanna crush the garlic to release the essential oil and probably have enough with that and chop it into a fine puree.

This is where the garlic is going to be really strong.

Done this way.

What you have to be careful too is this way you don't want to burn it.

If you burn it this way, it is going to smell and taste acrid, you know?

So when the garlic is peeled very, very fine like this, you don't wanna burn it.

You wanna spread it out and you start right away with the spinach.

Those spinach are still wet from washing and that's what you want.

You see, what I do first, I mix that in the garlic, then turn them upside down so that the garlic is on top now.

And the rest of the spinach, I put a little bit of salt on top of it and there will be enough moisture for the spinach to fold down and just get wilted, which is what I want.

And the best way is to put a lid on top of it.

The lid will give me a bit of moisture inside.

And then while this is cooking, the second thing we wanna do is to peel our shrimp.

And I have shrimp which are peeled here and some which are not.

One of the classic way of peeling shrimp is to take the shell out with your hand this way and you may leave or left that little piece inside.

If I leave it, I can press it and pull it out.

Now to get the end of it.

But then at that point when you do this, you also have to cut it to remove the vein if there is a vein and clean it up here.

And this is cut in our recipe in three pieces.

Now there is those little plastic gadget here which are really nice.

There is different one, just a long thing where you insert this inside at the end and keep pushing and that will remove not only remove the whole shell, as you can see, but at the same time, it de-vein it.

It takes the vein out of it.

So this is a nice little gadget.

It's just a piece of plastic.

It's really not expensive and you can get it usually in your fish store.

So again, you just go like this.

You can to extend the shrimp first, run it along the back, up to the back, up to the opening here.

And again, take the whole thing out.

And at that point, you can, as I say, if you want, leave the back in decoration.

The shell, you can freeze them and keep them to make stock.

They make very good stock too.

What we wanna do now, again, is to cut this in three piece for our recipe right there.

And now I wanna check if my spinach are close to done.

You see, you can see here that some of the garlic burn a little bit underneath.

Should have stir it more.

But it's okay, I'm gonna stir it and hide it so no one will see it.

The spinach are basically cooked enough here.

I wanna put it this way.

And then right away, I'll put the shrimp to cook in the same skillet.

Again, maybe a little dash of oil, a bit of salt, and this will cook in like a minute or so, you know, quite fast.

See, they start getting red almost right away.

So again, I cover this.

And while this is cooking, another garnish that we wanna do is the tomato.

I have tomato here.

I drown that tomato in boiling water.

And you dump it in boiling water for about 10 second and that releases skin.

You see the skin, again, is very, very soft.

And can be kept for stock, 'cause I do all the time.

Then this one has been peeled also.

You open it this way so you can press it and remove the seed and the juice from it.

And all of that, again, can go into stock.

This is a garnish, so I have enough with that.

And this can be cut into little dice or little strip, however you want it.

What I want in this, you know, not only the color of the tomato, but I want the raw taste of the tomato, which I like and I have basically enough for what I wanna do here today.

My shrimp is basically cooked enough here.

It didn't cook very long, as you can see.

And finally, the last thing, I add my tomato.

And the tomato, I don't even wanna cook them.

Remember that I use that skillet two or three time.

All you wanna do here is to warm it up, to take the shield out of it.

And I put it in there, that's it.

Now I don't need that anymore.

What I wanna show you, and sometime you may want to wait a little bit for this to cool off, is to build your timbal.

The dish that we have here, you can, of course, serve it as is, but if you wanna make it a bit different, you build it into a timbal.

And what I have here is a little piece of plastic wrap on top of those.

You build, we have about three, four shrimp per person there, right?

So you build your timbal of shrimp and shrimp and spinach, more spinach on top.

This is hot.

And that, you know, could be done ahead.

I'm gonna do just one to show you how to do it.

It's relatively easy.

And at that point, you can close it.

And this, you would want to keep that warm.

You know, you can keep that warm.

And at the last moment, if you rewarm them, you wouldn't want to do that too much ahead, you know?

All you have to do is really to open this and invert that on your plate.

You put it on the plate to invert it like this.

And it has to come out because we have this around.

You have that little timbal, and you can arrange a little bit of the tomato around for color, you know?

And maybe even if you want a little piece of tomato on top.

And that's nice, a bit different, very fresh type of presentation.

And with that, now what I wanna do is to start the second dish, which is really a salmon.

And the salmon, I wanna poach it in a vegetable broth.

And what I have here, I have a hot pot.

Next to the hot pot, I have water and white wine.

About half a cup of each.

Half a cup of water, half a cup of white wine.

And I wanna put a julienne.

Let's say here, a julienne of leek.

So you take the leek, cut it in half.

And now with this, you fold this into two, this way.

And that thing you cut into a julienne.

The julienne refer to the thinly sliced strip like that.

We call a julienne.

Julienne goes back to the 17th century.

There was a woman by the name of Julienne Darblay.

We forget the last name now.

But especially in Nouvelle cuisine, type of cuisine now, a lot of people cook everything in julienne.

What I have here, those are shiitake mushroom cap.

You can use any type of mushroom.

I wanna put in there.

I wanna put some fennel.

This is the fennel.

Some carrot.

See a whole, very strong vegetable broth.

A little bit of chives in there.

And some lemon.

See the lemon, you can actually just take your peel of lemon and put pieces of lemon peel in there to give you taste.

Then I put a dash of salt in this.

Season my stock.

I think I'll need a little more white wine in there, or water.

That's it.

Then I cover it.

And I wanna cook it five, six minutes to really develop the taste of all of those vegetables, which are really not only beautiful, but full of nutrients.

And the vegetable stock like that, done this way can be used for many things.

And of course, we are going to use it for the salmon here.

And I have that big salmon, which I wanna show you.

This is a raised salmon.

And what we wanna do is to take the fillet out of it.

You slide your knife underneath, turn your knife around so you are flat on the central rib, on the central bone of the salmon.

And start cutting all the way down to cut that big fillet here.

And of course you turn it and do the same thing on the other side, which I'm not going to do.

And now I have that fillet of salmon.

Again, using a long knife, you're going to slide underneath here to bring in, to get all of the bone here, the bone of the front carcass, you know.

All of that is going to go into stock.

And you have some bone that you want to remove.

The bone are there, directly in there.

And I wanna show you a couple of those bone which you pull straight.

You see, this way.

And you can go to the end.

The bone start around here and go up to the end.

I don't need all of this.

So I'm just going to cut a piece from here, slide it to remove the skin, you know, which is the proper technique here.

You slide it and remove the skin.

I won't need more than that here.

Put that with the rest of our salmon and cut this.

I could cut that pieces of about four ounces, would be about this way.

I can cut one piece or actually butterfly this way.

And what I'm going to do is to put that to cook right away into my stock.

Can see how beautiful the stock is.

It should probably cook a little longer than what I did to develop a bit more taste, but that should be enough here.

I'm going to put that directly to porch in there.

This would be also excellent served cold.

You could serve that cold, porch that and serve it cold with a light dressing or something like this, you know.

In our case here, we're going to do it this way.

So there, I let it cook a couple of minutes.

And while it's cooking, the vegetable that we're going to do today is a potato, a mashed potato, type of mashed potato with celery root.

We call celery root or celeriac.

It's used a great deal in France.

This one has been peeled and I cut it.

I mix it with my potato.

It depends the time of the year.

Those are pretty tough.

You know, I can feel it.

And what happened is that you want to cut it, you know, and see how tough it is.

I know that this one is pretty tough and I wanna show you maybe the center of it.

If I can cut it open, take the skin out of it.

They come very large and the center end up being quite cottony, you know.

And if it's too cottony, that part which is very soft there, you want to remove.

The rest, you peel it and you cut it, mix it with your potato.

What I do in that recipe, I use a minimal amount of water.

I have a cup and a half of water.

That's all here, a dash of salt.

And that's all I want to put in it because I don't want to drain any water at the end.

I wanna cook it this way.

And when it's cooked, it's going to look this way.

So I know that, you see, if you put it in a lot of water, you have to drain the water and you lose a lot of the nutrient.

In that case here, I don't lose anything.

I put the water, everything in it and I start straining it, which I'm going to do here.

You wanna put it through a food mill, especially this.

And the reason is that in a food processor, you will tend, of course, to have little pieces left over, especially the pieces of celery.

If they are too tough and fibrous on the skin, you want to, that's it.

So you strain this.

I can strain basically all of it.

Here we are.

And this is a fine strainer.

You know, there is different blade on this.

You wanna put this in there.

And I want to work a little bit of milk into this.

Remember, there is no richness whatsoever to that present.

A little piece of butter.

I put like half a tablespoon of butter in there at the most.

And then you work it out with a whisk.

For a very delicate, very light puree.

Now, if your celery happen to be too tough, put a bit more potato, a bit less celery.

You know, you can balance it the way you want.

And what we wanna do now is to present that here.

And I can smell the taste of the celery, you know, which is always very fragrant for me.

And we're going to serve that with our salmon.

The salmon should be cooked now.

It really doesn't take to cooking very long.

We have a bit of a decoration, some thing that I can put in there to give it a little bit of color.

And my salmon here, as you can see, is cooked already.

I wanna take one piece of the salmon that I'll put in there.

And put all of the garnish, the different vegetable garnish that you have in there.

And of course, some of the liquid that I have in there.

The liquid broth is excellent.

And this is the way you would wanna serve it.

Just portion the broth with the mashed potato.

(bright music) And the perfect finish for our elegant meal is a souffle.

We're gonna do a souffle of mango with a mango sauce.

You know, the mango are 17 times as much vitamin A as peach.

Very good fiber.

And I wanna take a little bit of the mystery of souffle out for you.

What I have here is the flesh of two mango.

You can see they're about a pound each.

They have to be ripe and soft.

And there, I peel them.

Take the seed.

And basically what I wanna do is a puree.

Half of the puree I wanna use for the souffle.

And the other half, I wanna do a sauce with it.

I'll measure approximately, I have half of the souffle here.

I'll keep the other one for my souffle mixture.

And this here now, I wanna finish the sauce.

I could have rolled it to make it a bit finer than that, but I put about two tablespoon of Grand Marnier there.

And to give it a beautiful color, a bit of a different, two tablespoon of grenadine.

To make it a beautiful pink color so that it's slightly different than the flesh of the souffle.

If you feel that it's a bit too thick, put a dash of water in it, but I think it's fine.

So I leave it at this.

And now I wanna do the souffle and beat the egg white.

I have three egg whites here, which I put directly into my copper bowl.

I like to beat the egg white in the copper bowl.

I have a quarter of a cup of sugar with it.

And this is three and a half cups souffle mold, which has been buttered and sugared.

So you start your egg white by beating it fast, fast so that the whole thing get loose.

And then you go slowly.

See, you have to go under the egg white and lift it up to try to inflate it.

And you should have a ballon whisk as I have here.

The ballon whisk is important because, you know, it pick up the whole mixture and lift it up in one shot.

If you have a small whisk, you're gonna have a problem with it.

So what you do, you beat it.

It's almost ready now, about 30, 40 seconds.

Change hand if you feel too tired.

The egg white should be pretty firm, you know.

Actually, it's even easier if you have more egg white, like five or six.

I think this is fine now.

It can hold a nice peak, as I can see now.

So I put my sugar in it.

I'm going tighten it.

I tighten it and the sugar will stabilize it, you know.

And that's about it.

And now we wanna put the rest of our mango in it.

Remember, we have approximately a cup of the mango mixture also here.

I think I have too much.

Here it is.

And you start folding it.

Use a rubber spatula, gently folding it in.

Like this.

Remember, this is the type of souffle that I'm doing here, which doesn't have a regular base.

That is a base of milk, cream, egg yolk.

Any of that stuff can also be done ahead.

First, it doesn't have any fat in it.

And it can be done ahead a little more.

The reason is that, whoop.

Okay, you see the three egg white will fill up the mold.

Exactly.

That is one egg white properly beaten give you about a cup of egg white, which is what I have here.

So what we wanna do now is to smooth the top up.

Keep that on the side here so you can clean your spatula.

And I have to go on the side here because I have to hold the end of it and decorate the side just with the spatula this way.

I have a bit left.

I put it in the middle here.

With your thumb here, you run it around to create a nice edge.

And that's it.

Your souffle is ready to go into the oven.

You can put it directly into the oven or actually put it on a cookie sheet and put it that in the oven.

It's fine, one or the other.

375 degree in the middle of the oven.

It's going to take about 25 minutes to cook, but you know you don't have to put it in the oven.

You can actually put it right there in the freezer.

I wanna show you one that I have in the freezer here, which has been frozen for a while.

You don't put a piece of plastic wrap, by the way, on top.

When you have it, the whole thing would stick to it, but after it's been frozen, it get hard.

Then you can put a plastic.

And as you see, this one is double the size of the other for eight people.

This is hard now.

That souffle, you would take it out, put it to defrost for like 20 minutes or so.

It's not totally defrosted, a little bit.

And right in the oven, just as I did the other one, and you have a beautiful souffle that you can make ahead.

(bright music) And now my souffle is ready.

I can smell it.

We're going to take it out of the oven.

Ooh, it is practically lifting out of the mold.

You know, remember I said we can freeze souffle, but I, whoop, kind of collapsed on itself here.

Lifting out, you wanna put, you don't wanna freeze a souffle with a bechamel or a cream or flour base.

It won't work as well, remember, because this one is done only with a puree of fruit.

And with egg white, you can do that.

But the other one, you probably would not.

The souffle will tend to collapse a little bit, as you can see.

This one, lift up from the bottom of the mold, it's still a perfectly delicious souffle this way.

And actually, you can let it cool off this way and have it cold, like a kind of pudding with the same sauce.

So today, we have a great menu, starting with that timbal of spinach, you know, which is terrific.

Then, the salmon in that savory broth with a puree of potato and celery root.

And finally, our souffle.

At the end, remember that sauce made of mango that I'm going to have here.

And then, of course, the souffle, which is very satisfying for probably more than four people here that I have at.

It's still slightly wet in the center, the way I'd like to have it.

And we can put a few pieces of kiwi on top here and there for color and for decoration.

And with that, we are serving Sauvignon Blanc here.

It's actually a Pouilly Fume from the Loire Valley in France.

It's 100% Sauvignon Blanc, similar to what we call here Fume Blanc.

And it's going to go very well with our mixture today.

I hope you're going to try souffle.

Try to freeze it.

Your friend and your family is going to enjoy it.

I enjoy making it for you.

Happy cooking.