- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

- And I'm Claudine Pepin.

I love to eat seafood but I never know how to prepare it when I'm at home.

- Well, it's simple.

All you have to do is a few basic principle.

- I was at a restaurant a few nights ago and I had this swordfish poached with lemon.

Can you teach me how to do that?

- Sure, and I will also teach you how to choose fresh fish, and that's really important.

- Sounds great.

- I'm ready for my seafood lesson today on "Jacques Pepin's Kitchen."

- "Cooking With Claudine."

(gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) Well, you wanted to do fish, we're gonna do fish.

- Oh, I'm so excited 'cause I always get very confused with fish.

I love it, but I always have to come home to eat it 'cause I don't know what to do with it.

- So this is a free lesson that I'm going to give you in fish.

We're going to do a couple of different fish.

We're gonna poach a fish, poaching is a technique.

We're gonna broil the fish, that's another technique.

And we're going to do shellfish, maybe we'll do (foreign language) or calamari stuffed, you know.

- Oh cool.

- I know you like it.

So let's start with this here.

This is a big fish, you know, the swordfish.

- Oh, okay.

- Have you seen that in Long Island or the normal fish?

Sometime people use a shark for that too and it's fine.

This is beautiful, look at the color and you see how nice.

I mean, you know, there is a look to it to fresh fish that you don't have when it start getting old.

This, you would want to remove that very, very leathery type of skin here.

Trim it maybe a little bit.

You see, you see if you have a bit of discoloration, this is inside of the fish.

And it's okay, you know, if you don't do it, but it's a bit better.

- Of course.

- So we start cooking this.

This is about one inch thick, you know, you know you can do it in a stock.

You go ahead, put the other one.

You can do it in a stock but I like it on that type of thing because we don't ever cook it to do it directly plain in salted water.

So that's it.

Not too difficult so far.

- So far so good.

- So far so good.

And all we're going to do, and it's very simple, we're going to do a kind of vinegarette with lemon juice.

- Sounds good.

- Tastes good with it.

So we have some lemon here.

We put it in there.

Remember, I think you've done that a couple of time.

- Yes.

- Try to do it, that will be a bit of a garnish.

I'll check on the fish because it should be just barely boiling, just under the boil.

Oh you're doing good.

Okay, see that's fine here.

- That's enough?

- And we can do some lemon juice.

(food processor whirring) - Okay.

- Good, that goes back and forth so you need about two tablespoon, three tablespoon you see what you have and you put it in there.

What I'm going to do, we put on top, I'm gonna do some black paper, you know.

You see black paper, always use black paper corn.

Use a part like this and you see using the end of it like that, you rub it on top of it until you don't hear any more noise.

This is mignonette.

We call it mignonette cracked paper, you know, which is cracked bigger and it's freshly cracked.

Put some of the lemon juice in it.

Now we want to put the olive oil in there.

You want stir it.

Salt and pepper, I mean paper I have, - Yeah, - Just salt.

- This.

- That much.

- Yeah, that's it, okay.

And parsley.

See the parsley is nice here and you want maybe , this is the flat leaf parsley, you know.

We're going to put, and we want to, we don't want to cut it too fine, you know, kind of course this way.

- Okay.

- Okay, I'll get the plate.

- That's it?

- Well that's about it, you see?

- Wow.

- Now you see I'm looking at those, testing it.

That's fine.

I could probably show you the center of this, you know, for example of that piece, just to give you an idea and you can see that it's slightly pink inside.

Now, a lot of people like it this way or a little more cooked, some like it even less cooked than that.

I think this would be good.

- Yeah, that looks great.

- Okay, so what you wanna do is to drain it on paper towel a little bit.

So you can do that at the last moment, you know.

You know what we do in that sauce, what I like to do?

Put a little bit of boiling water, just a little bit of this.

- Oh.

- Okay, then let's put on top like this, you see.

- [Claudine] Oh, that looks great.

- It's very simple type of dish and that's very, very simple and very good.

So you'll do that one, right?

- Yep.

What's next?

- Okay, what's next?

We are going to start squid now.

- Oh.

- So I want to show you first how to clean up the squid.

I mean, you have some squid right here.

You know how to clean up squid?

- No.

So you see, you have the whole squid here, the head.

So first you pull the whole head and there is some gooey stuff inside.

- Oh great.

- So let's forget for that a minute.

You see here you have the eye.

You want to cut it with a scissor just above the eye or with a knife.

See that you discard.

Inside there, you know, you press like this, you see that little round thing?

- What's that?

- That's the beak.

You pull out the beak- - Okay.

- At the round thing.

Okay.

And this is the tentacle, you really remove the skin out of that, that doesn't really matter to that spot.

Now you see inside, now, you have what is called the pan.

You see that thing here?

I'm gonna pull it out, it's like a piece of plastic.

- Oh wow.

- You see that?

- Yeah.

- It's called that the pan.

So underwater you do that in the sink, you remove that flesh.

So you want to be sure that inside there this thing is clean, you know you run it under water and you have a neat kind of neat little pocket here- - Yeah.

- That you can stuff.

So why don't you do 150 of those?

(Claudine chuckling) I'm going to start on the stuffing, okay?

- [Claudine] Okay.

- So the stuffing here is relatively simple.

What we are going to do, a little bit of olive oil, some chopped onion.

Okay, and look at what you're doing, not what I'm doing.

You would want to serve about three of those puppies and depending on the side, you know.

(oil sizzling) Okay, Let's put a little piece of celery in there.

Little dice of celery in the same way.

(knife thudding) Do you have any problem there?

- [Claudine] I don't know if I got all the gooey stuff out.

- Okay, we saute this.

Then I'll put a bit of garlic in there.

(hand thudding) I'll tell you what I have there, I have chopped onion, I have a bit of celery and now I'm putting a bit of garlic.

Okay.

- That sounds great.

- You smell it?

- Yes.

- Good.

Okay, and then mushroom, because this is really a mushroom stuffing that we do.

And I have a bunch of different type of mushroom we find at the market here.

From the white one, you know, the regular one.

And this is the big portobello.

- [Claudine] Oh wow.

- And then we have the cremini.

All of that is the same family.

All that is part of the agaricus family of mushroom.

We put our mushroom in there and that has to cook for a few minutes.

And what will happen here is that the juice, you can hear it sizzle now, but within a couple of minutes you don't hear it sizzle because the juice come out of it and it start boiling.

So we want to put some thyme, I have some dry time here.

I could cover this.

I'll leave it open, the juice is going to come out and after that, what we want to put in there, a bit of binding agent, we put a bit of breadcrumb.

How we doing, okay?

- Yes.

- Oh, you are doing good there.

- [Claudine] Well.

- So here is how you do fresh breadcrumb.

I have a couple of slice of bread here.

Those are from yesterday's bread so they are not too, and- - So they're kind of stale?

- It tastes stale.

(food processor whirring) - What happened?

- Ten second, (food processor whirring) Ten second you have fresh bread crumb and you don't have to buy someone else leftover bread.

You know, look you nice and fluffy it is here.

You see I had three little slice of bread here to do, I have at least over a cup of breadcrumb here.

Anyway, this is not quite.

Well it's dry, it's about dry enough.

So you know this would be the time when you add your bread crumbs in it.

And you stir it to bind it.

So you want to put the breadcrumb at the end.

- How come you get to do the fun stuff and I gotta clean the squid?

- Well someone has to do the hard work, you know, in the kitchen.

I'm the boss.

I'm the boss so you do the hard work.

Okay, and basically you have to let that cool off and I have some which is cold here so now I think you've done enough.

- Okay, I like that idea.

- Okay, so this one is the same breadcrumb but cold.

So you wanna bring that here.

Here you go.

- Now here is what we want to do, you know.

Those are small also.

The one that we use very often are bigger than that.

If you put too much stuffing in it, you know what happened?

The stuffing expand when it cooked and the calamari itself shrink down and the thing burst, you know?

- Oh okay.

- So you say you take a little bit of one of those here, they are stuck or what?

And you put them down and I cross like that, that's it.

- Done?

- Yeah, yeah.

Now I'm gonna show you another way of doing it with a pastry bag, it's gonna be easier if you have a pastry bag at home.

- If I don't, I can borrow one.

- Actually even if you do it by hand, this is the tip that you put in it.

About three quarter of an inch tip.

But even if you were to do it by hand, you can, if you have a tip, at least put the tip in there like this.

- Oh.

- You know, that's going to make it easier to stuff it, you know.

I think it's about full enough this one so you wanna put a tooth pick on that one?

- Okay.

This as close as I've ever come to sewing.

This is great.

- Oh hear your mother said that?

- [Claudine] No.

- Okay, now push this with the spoon here.

In there.

Oh, okay.

- Is that enough?

- Yeah, that's fine.

Just to show you, you bring that down, then you bring that back up.

See, at that point it's a question of just inserting the end of that in there and pushing and stuffing, you know.

Do you get the idea here?

Okay, you wanna stuff one?

- Oh, all right.

- Okay, you stuff one and I'll get the one which I've stuffed over there.

- Okay?

- Hold your pastry bag this way and press with that part of the hand.

All right, good.

You doing okay?

- Yeah.

- You know what I forgot in my stuffing?

I see it now.

See you confused me, so.

- Oh, it's my fault, that's right.

- Okay, what you do in your stuffing, you chop that coarsely and you put that in your, before your bread of course before the bread.

- Well you can just- - You saute this in there and after you add your bread layer on.

- Yeah.

- So let's arrange this in there.

(pan clattering) - Just like this with nothing else.

- Yep.

No, but for the time being, that's all, you're going to arrange them in there.

- Can they be one on top of the other or do they have to be?

- Oh, you want one layer preferably.

- [Claudine] Okay.

- They're gonna shrink quite a lot.

So here I have a pound of tomato, you know, just the pound of tomato cut coarsely like this.

And into this I'm putting two tablespoon of tomato paste.

Okay, a bit of salt, a bit of pepper and cook it without sauce.

(food processor whirring) See this is a raw tomato sauce done very, very fast.

That's it.

- Nice.

- I put salt, I put pepper in it.

Okay, we leave it here.

Now look at that, we are gonna poach this in there.

You could put a little bit of white wine in there.

And you know what we'll put on top?

Some fresh oregano.

- Oh yum.

- And this, smell this.

- Saffron, I love saffron.

- Saffron, this is the pistol of saffron.

And you put a little bit of the real saffron here.

Now we can put it to cook.

- Okay.

- And you cook this for about 15, 20 minutes and basically that's what we have here.

And we are going to arrange them.

You have to be careful not to make them boil too much otherwise they tend to crack, you know?

All right, right here, yes.

- Thank you.

So we'll arrange this.

In fact, you know, you know what you can do for me?

- What?

- I'll go here and you remove the little tooth pick.

- Okay.

- Because this one broke.

When it broke you put it upside down so you'll get nobody complain.

- Nobody will see.

- Yes, you see actually I think the recipe, we put the tentacle outside, we put them around, you know?

Okay, that's what I have here.

Okay, here we have.

So you wanna put a little bit of green.

Remember what we put in it?

We put some oregano in there, didn't we?

In the thing so we can put a nice little piece of oregano on top.

- Okay.

- Between the outside.

- Well, you know, presentation.

- Well presentation, taste is what's important.

- Yep.

- Presentation is important too, but not as much.

This is your squid stuffed with mushroom.

- It's difficult for me to tell if it's fresh or not.

How do you tell?

- Well, to start with, you buy fish in a place where they have a lot of volume and you look at it.

So the red snapper, type of red snapper.

Now here, you may not know how to bone that out, but you can buy the whole fish, it's less expensive and ask the guy, "Can you bone it out for me?"

You also have the guy, all the fish coming fresh every day when you go the market.

Now look, how glossy it is, you can look how shiny the eye is.

You know the eye is very important.

The way it reflects shine and particularly the gill.

I mean look at the gill here.

It's pink, it's fresh, it gets very dark almost black when it get old.

So that's very important to look at the gill.

Those are fanned dab.

You see how glossy they are?

Maybe more than anything else you have to smell it.

Put your head down, smell it.

- Doesn't smell like much.

- That that's the point.

If it doesn't smell like much then it's fresh.

If it starts smelling quote, fishy, it's off already.

- My dad will fish, but my mom, my mom's the one who has the fishing poles and everything.

My dad and I all go drag netting for minnows and stuff to do friture.

But my mom's the fisher person in the family.

- You know when I do a dessert, even all the dish, I take advantage of the market.

Very, very fresh and nice.

See those are, they smell good, they are soft.

You see?

- They smell great.

- Stuff like that.

- Yeah.

- We're going to do a dessert with these mangoes.

Just peel them and do a little bit of, with a bit of cognac, lemon juice that's going to be nice, you know.

So do you want to peel it too?

Why don't you try the vegetable peeler?

- All right.

- I'm gonna start with the knife because you see what happened is that here wait, wait look, Claudine look.

You want to cut enough of it, sometime it's slightly green underneath.

So you want to cut enough to remove the green so go ahead.

- Am I supposed to try and do the same thing you're doing with the vegetable peeler.

- Yes, the vegetable peeler is fine.

- [Claudine] Okay.

- Okay, I'm finished, how about you?

(Claudine laughing) - [Claudine] Let's try.

- Oh, Okay, right.

So here is now we are going to cut it directly in there and all we want to cut is- - Every time I've tried to cut- - Just it slice like this.

But you know what?

Saw it like this.

Watch that thumb, okay.

- You don't think it'll taste good?

- The thumb, we don't want any, any red in our dessert here.

See you get as close as you can until your knife hit the pit.

There it get kind of tough, you know.

Okay.

- Can you show me how good I'm doing?

- Yes.

So why don't you put the sugar in it.

- Okay.

- Two three tablespoon.

That's probably about what we would need in there, it depends.

- Okay.

- Okay, so what we do, we have the skin here.

The skin here, we do a little bit of a julienne The julienne of the skin, that's what we put in there.

So you put that in there and then we put this, I'm rolling that on the table.

- Why?

- You roll that on the table to crush the flesh inside so you get more juice out of it.

- Oh.

- Then you can use that for juice.

Put that.

(lemon squelching) Even the pulp, okay.

And then we can put a little bit of cognac if you want.

Or we could put (foreign language), or we could put a liquor, or no liquor at all if you don't feel that you want liquor, that's perfectly fine.

Go ahead, a little bit of it.

Don't be shy.

- Is that it?

- Go ahead.

Whoa, okay, okay this is good.

And that will be nice to marinate, you know, for a little while.

- Okay.

- Okay.

That's a very delightful simple dessert, you know.

- Yeah.

- I put the other one.

Yeah, see about four.

Put a little bit of the juice on top, this is the best part of it.

Okay, and that will be ready.

But before we go to the table, I wanna show you another recipe with broiled bread snapper.

- Oh - Yeah, and I have it here.

I have done two broiled fish.

All I have is two filet here and fresh breadcrumb on top.

I wanna show you how to do that.

I wanna put that under the broiler.

And not too far, you know, it's about that much, about maybe four inch, four five inch from the broiler.

You can do it higher or lower.

You don't want to do it too close because you have to cook the fish.

This is raw fish, you know.

- Okay.

- So here is what we have, we have fresh bread crumb here.

Have three slice of bread and you put it in the food processor, you have fresh bread crumb.

We're gonna put some garlic with that.

I'm doing the garlic.

(hand thudding) Okay, a bit of garlic this way.

And we put the grain of scallion.

You could put parsley, you could put chive, could put a little bit of tarragon.

But basically this is what we are going to do.

I have enough here.

And into this, what you want to put, it's a little bit of olive oil.

I have olive oil and maybe a bit of butter.

And I have put some in the olive oil and the butter.

And you know what we want to do is just to put a little bit too moisten it so it doesn't burn.

- Okay.

- And that get a nice browning when you do that.

Okay, so we're gonna put that in the oven.

You prepare that here.

Why did you put aluminum foil on top here?

- So that I don't have to do dishes for hours at the end of the evening.

- Oh, that's what it is.

So you know you have your filet of fish.

Bring me a little bit of salt on top.

A bit of salt and a bit of pepper.

You put on top, okay?

And basically what you want to do is to arrange this on top like this, you know.

Okay, you're gonna do the other one.

See, but maybe not as much as what you have in your hand.

We need it from the other side, remember?

Okay, let me check on the one that I have there.

Yeah, it's about ready.

So I'll show it to you, you see?

You see what happened?

You cook it on this side, it needs to cook a couple of minutes on each side to cook the filet.

And I only put- - Wow smells great.

- The bread crumb on one side because you couldn't brown underneath otherwise.

But now what I do, I turn that brown breadcrumb here and you see it's already partially cooked on this side.

I can see the edge.

Then you put the rest of your breadcrumb and take you no time to do it, right?

- Yeah.

- Nice.

- This looks great, this looks really nice.

- Easy to do, huh?

Okay, now I show you, I told you that I was going to show you very easy recipe to do with fish, so that's what we did.

Anyway, when you do fish, you wanna decorate it with lemon.

So I wanted to show you the lemon.

See this one is cut.

- Yeah.

- Oh, that's it.

(Claudine laughs) You did it.

- Yeah.

- Okay, so what you did here, we do the same thing, but instead of going straight, see I cut here.

Instead of doing that here, I put this one on a bias here.

I do like a triangle, but the triangle is on the slant, you know, in a spiral way.

And now when you open it, you know.

- Oh.

- Okay.

See it's going to be in the spiral.

So it's a little more elegant.

So that's one way of doing it.

You can put a little piece of parsley on top to decorate your lemon.

You know, another way of doing it too, as we used to do, was to use this here and to do strip like this.

But sometime you do strip without going to the end.

You let it hang like this.

and you know what you do now?

- No, what?

- You fold those thin layer like this all around.

- Oh.

Oh that's really cool, I like that.

- Do like a type of basket, you know.

I think on this, you know what you wanted to do, to do like a a basket if you want, to that basket you put some parsley, you know, if you open this if you want and you can put a little bit of parsley in the center for the time being.

- That is great.

- You put your parsley.

I'm gonna check on the fish.

Put some parsley there to fill up that basket.

- Okay.

- Could have done one more lemon and the fish would've been burned.

(Claudine laughing) But let me put it on the stove right there.

- Okay.

- Okay, it's hot.

But this is fine and it should be flaky and I can see, you know, the way it bounce back.

It just barely cooked in the middle and that's basically what I want, you know, so.

- Oh yeah, my basket's full.

- You want to do?

Your basket is full, it's on both sides.

- Oh.

- What we have here, a beautiful piece of fish.

Shall we put that one next to it?

- Yeah, I like that one.

I think I like that one the best.

- Okay, I'll put this one here.

I'll put a piece of lemon next to mine too.

- Okay.

- I'll get it.

And why don't you get the- - I'm gonna get the- - Yeah, why don't you get the dessert with us and we go directly to the dining room.

I'm giving you that one, it's nicer.

I'll take that one.

I think you're going to do all of those recipe, they're pretty easy to do, right?

- Oh, I think so too.

- Okay, well with fish usually you would have most of the time white wine with those fish.

You can have a light red also.

People drink that a lot, a great deal.

We have a Viyonair here from California but I have another wine here for you.

I know you've had it already, you like it, it's a Chablis, you know from upper Burgundy in France and I'm sure you're going to enjoy this.

I tell you, I love to cook fish for you.

- Thank you for teaching me so much.

- And I hope you're going to learn about fish and hope you enjoy our class today.

It was a real class, we did three main dish.

You can be served with potato, with rice, with noodle, Claudia and I had a ball making it for you.

Happy cooking.

- Happy cooking.

(gentle music)