- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

And all of the thousands of recipe that I've made over the years require one common ingredient that never change, the right technique.

30 years ago I wrote a book about cooking technique, and 10 years ago I made this TV series.

And the information is just as relevant as always.

I hope you find this lesson helpful in your kitchen.

Happy cooking.

When in doubt, start with dessert.

People do look with great anticipation to the end of the meal, the dessert.

Except that usually to have great dessert, they go to a restaurant to have it because they are afraid to do it at home.

But that kind of fear will disappear when you know the basic technique.

So here we go.

(gentle piano music) One of the crucial steps of baking is using parchment paper.

Most of it is a matter of simple geometry.

I wanna first show you how to line up the classic nine-inch cake pan with the paper.

Now when you do a cake, fine, you know it's going to come out, but sometime you do something else in there and you're not quite sure that it may or may not come out.

So one thing that I do very often is to put little strip of paper in the bottom.

Now to measure, to cut a piece the size of this, what you do, you fold it in half.

That piece of paper is fold in half again.

And now from the center, from the center where there is no opening here, you measure, you fold it from that center into smaller radius, smaller radius, and so forth.

And this is the maximum, of course, here radius that you can, so you can measure here the center, which I would say is approximately here.

Then I cut it there.

And it should fit exactly the bottom of my pan.

Now as I say, if I know or if I think that I may have trouble doing that, then I may want to put a piece of paper this way, then the other one right there.

So this is one way of doing it.

Now if you do that type of pan, the principle remain the same.

You cut this in four.

Again, measure your radius one, two, three times.

And again what you want to do here is to measure to the center right there.

The center is there, and then you cut here, and you cut there.

That, very often, we butter that ahead.

So that will fit exactly there also, you see?

So there is no magic to that.

It's purely a question of knowing the technique to do it.

When you do a jelly roll pan for example, then there is different way of doing it.

And I'll show you the way I like to do it.

First, I don't wanna lose too much paper.

So I cut a piece, which is going to fit.

In that case for a jelly roll pan, I want it to go to the side.

So I want it to go to the side.

I know it's going to be approximately here.

So I cut that piece there.

The length is fine.

The width, about a little piece of that there.

Now you see most of the time I want this to be buttered.

And the principle will apply the same if I were to have buttered this, which I could have done.

If you want butter a piece of paper, what you do, you butter half of it.

Half like this.

And then you fold the one unbuttered on the butter one.

Sometime we do that ahead so there is no mess.

See here, you don't touch the butter, there is no mess.

Now when you're ready to use it for that particular cave, I will cut the corner so that it fit in the corner.

Okay.

Then I open it.

Now you don't put it this way, you put it first butter side down.

And I do the same thing in a cake pan.

Why is that?

Just so that it glue to the bottom.

You put it a little bit, take it back up, and now put it on the other side.

It will glue.

And as you see because of the corner that I did here, she's going to twist like this.

It will fit my corner perfectly here, there.

And this is the proper way to line up a jelly roll pan.

And at that time, very often what you want to do is to sprinkle it with a little bit of flour.

And you don't put much, you know?

You just move your flour around like that to have a minimal amount of flour.

That's the proper way of doing it.

Another technique that we use in France is cooking en papillote.

Papillote means different things in France.

It mean the little piece of paper that the woman put to put in their hair when you dye your hair, that's a papillote.

Then for Christmas we have a special candy twisted at the end, Papillote de Noel.

And papillote otherwise this way is a type of casing into which you cook fish or other things.

So what I have here is a large piece of paper which is folded in half, and you cut a little bit of the shape, if you want, of a heart in there.

See the principle of cooking in papillote is so that you get a lot of steam, you know?

And you get a beautiful... You can cook anything, veal chop for example, as well as fruit, as well as fish, but usually fish.

So what I have now is my papillote.

That is a kind of heart-shaped papillote.

And if I were cooking for example, fruit like I have there, then I would arrange probably my fruit in a certain way here.

Maybe some of the plum.

Often we put a sauce in it.

But as I said, probably the most classic is going to do it with fish, you know?

So I would've fruit there, maybe a little piece of butter on top of it so it melt.

This is not a question... And some sugar.

It is not a question of wrapping the food into paper.

It has to have air to create a dome, to create a hot house if you want.

So what you do there, you start folding very tightly on top, Oop.

To entail the thing, you don't want the steam to escape.

So you go all around this way.

And what you can do also at the end that I do, especially if I serve family, is to put some air in it, you know?

And I use a straw here.

Now of course in a restaurant that wouldn't be considered too sanitarian (air blowing) to blow it up this way.

You can use a bicycle pump and put the end, pump it a couple of times.

For the family, is slightly different.

So here you've created a hot house.

We put that in the oven, cook it, put it on a cookie sheet, cook it so many minutes.

It will get firm and cook the whole thing with steam.

And now I wanna show you something very common also, which is the souffle dish we use all the time.

So those souffle dish first, you butter them a little bit.

So inside of the souffle, the savory souffle, you put flour.

If the souffle is a sweet souffle dessert, you put sugar.

But what you do, you put sugar in it, you don't have to measure it.

And you twist it until it coat whatever it need to coat and you move to the next one, and on to the next one, et cetera.

And when you finish the last one, you put back your sugar wherever you took it.

(gentle piano music) Maybe the most important tool for the pastry chef is the cornet, the little paper cone, you know, which is used to do wedding cake, to do many, many, many different thing in the kitchen.

And it's well worth knowing how to do it, again in the technique.

You can buy, actually, triangle of paper like this.

But, I mean, I don't think there is any problem cutting a triangle.

The problem is to put it into shape.

Now, the triangle that I have here can be one way or the other.

You can see this one is basically a right hand triangle.

And this one may be more of an isosceles triangle.

One way or the other is going to work.

Don't make any difference.

If you have, let's say the right hand triangle here, if you remember a bit of your geometry, you fold the center of the hypotenuse in half there, and then you bring this around a little bit.

One, two, three.

You keep bringing it around.

Don't worry about the end of it.

Now when you have brought it around practically to the end, now you move your finger in that fashion.

That is, I bring it up here, you see, to get a point, total point.

Now if I let it go, it open.

Bring it back up very tight, tight.

And when I add it as tight that I want, then I fold it into it to get my cornet.

So what we have, either that cornet or other that I have here, we pour a little bit of chocolate in it.

Now it's better to do it several time and not put too much in it.

I have here you see maybe a tablespoon, tablespoon and a half of chocolate.

Though you do another one after.

And there I have different type of jams.

This is all apricot jam with a drop of coloring in it.

Food coloring, of course.

And in the food coloring this we're going to use it again in our decoration.

So here it is here, a bit of the red, a bit of the yellow, and a bit of the green after.

That should be plenty.

You want a strain, of course, your jam so that it's smooth.

You don't want to have large lump because it would get stuck into your cornet, of course.

Now, the chocolate has to be melted.

Be sure that there is no water in it.

Now when I fold this, you see this is where it opened here.

Well, I will fold it where it's supposed to open and fold it this way here.

I even filled it up a bit too much, really.

This way, and then after down.

Then I try it, you know?

You try it to see how fine a line you can have.

If you see, "Hmm, the line is a bit too fine," then you can cut it a little bit to get it slightly bigger if you want.

Okay, so I'm going to decorate that cake here.

And that cake is a plain genoise that I did, which is stuffed with a pastry cream.

And inside that, we have some marzipan on top.

So there it's up to your imagination.

And I thought that I would do probably a little bunch of flowers.

So I'm going to start by doing maybe a type of vase.

It's interesting here because you can basically do whatever you want.

There is no rule.

So... Say I do a flower there, maybe another one here, a little thing going up this way.

That's probably more than enough.

I could do a little ring outside, just to give a finishing.

And now the fun, often I have the kid doing that, you know, of filling that up with the different color jam.

So I have red here.

And I have a couple of flowers.

I can do them red.

Maybe this one and this one.

I should probably wait a couple of minutes sometime for your chocolate to set up.

Because your chocolate actually become, if you want the outline of the design and the outline of that design, some time need to get hard, you know, to contain the thing inside.

Here I'm cutting it.

Okay, this is the yellow.

Let's put a bit of yellow.

Two flowers yellow here.

Okay, maybe some of the vase I can put in yellow here.

And now we have all the leaves to fill up with the green.

Here it is here.

This way there.

And maybe I put even some of the green in the bottom of my vase.

Why not?

And I think that's about it.

I could, of course, spend more time on it.

And when you're done, you have a very simple and very attractive dessert.

(gentle piano music) I use egg white in the kitchen all the time, whether you do souffle, whether you do meringue, whether you do mousseline and so forth.

And the way of handling egg white is very, very important in term of beating them.

Often now is done with machine, but if you wanna do it by hand, I recommend a copper bowl.

That copper bowl is clean.

It's being washed with vinegar and salt.

Here, a mixture of coarse salt like that, and a little bit of distilled vinegar.

Now, this is to take the green stuff that you have on the pipe, which is vert-de-gris, which is the copper sulfate, actually.

The green stuff you have on the pipe in the basement.

So you would have to... I have already cleaned the inside, I just wanted to show you the outside to show you that the copper is going to be clean up with the salt, you know, the salt and the vinegar.

This is what you do usually.

This is what I did inside washing it, I mean cleaning it well and then rinsing it with water, you know, just with plain cold water, usually.

This is what you want to do.

Now you may say, "Why do I need a copper bowl for that?"

Well, anything you put in unlined copper will acidify.

We cook sugar in unlined copper.

And by cooking the sugar in there, it prevent crystallization of the sugar.

What does it do to the egg white?

Acid will give it the proper texture, the elasticity that it need, and the volume.

This is why many recipe tell put a pinch of cream of tartar, that's tartaric acid, or a couple of drop of lemon juice, citric acid, or a couple of drop of vinegar, acidic acid.

We have copper, we don't put anything in it.

I have a long whisk here with balloon whisk, so called.

And the whole mixture will be taken in one stroke, rather than a small whisk where I have to move all the time.

So this is the proper whisk.

Now the technique is at first, if I start slowly like that by whipping the eggs, they go like a wet mop all around and nothing happens.

So the first thing you do, you have to break the egg.

(whisk banging) I break the egg, so now they are liquid.

Now I start slowly.

I go underneath and lift up the egg.

(liquid sloshing) Now you can hear the egg falling on themself.

And I try to move my wrist more than the whole arm so I don't get tired as much.

When I was an apprentice, the chef used to say, "Don't touch the bowl."

(liquid sloshing) So I try not to touch the bowl now.

He's not behind me, so it doesn't matter.

The point is that I can touch the bowl, but the technique is to lift it up and inflate it rather than stir it like this, you know?

If I were to whip cream, I would whip the cream this way.

If I whip into the cream, beating it this way, the cream will turn into butter.

So the technique whipping cream, doing egg white is going to be different.

You see those egg whites are halfway done, practically finished.

If you get tired, you change hand.

(whisk banging) But basically, you continue with your six egg whites.

And you see six egg whites should give you six cups of beaten egg white, is basically what I have here.

Those eggs are basically ready now.

And we finish it turning around and across, around and across to tighten the egg.

We call that, "tightening the egg."

And that egg is really tight and solid now.

So that's when you start adding your sugar.

Now in the machine, of course, you have the sugar as it goes.

Stand up meringue, I'm doing meringue here.

The stand up meringue is four egg whites to a cup of sugar.

Now the more you mix your sugar in it, the tougher your meringue is going to be.

That is, you can mix it even with an electric mixer.

And very often it's done this way.

And what happen is that your meringue, you beat it for a while, it become very elastic, almost like a boil frosting.

But the merengue themself are going to be a bit marshmallow-like, kind of tough.

By folding the sugar in at the end as I do, and mixing it less, I have more of a grainy mixture.

And I have to use that mixture.

I can't keep it as long as the other, but that will make a very stand up meringue.

Now look at the technique of folding.

The right hand is folding the mixture exactly in the same place.

And it is the bowl which turn around.

That is I don't go here and fold here and fold here and fold.

You fold in the same place and the bowl turn around.

Okay, here is my meringue finished now, so I can fill it up and show you how to fill it up.

I have a 16-inch bag here.

And you need at least a 16-inch bag for meringue.

I have different tip here.

I have a large one, it's like 3/4 of an inch.

This one is barely 1/2 an inch.

And that, the fluted type of tip.

So, I mean, there is hundreds of different one.

The first thing that you do, I'm picking the big one here.

You put it in it and be sure that it fit at the end here.

Now on something like this, if you don't want it to go all over the place, you twist the end of it and push it in the tip so that when you fill it up, it doesn't go through and fall on the counter.

The second thing that you do, you fold the edge of your pastry bag so that you have a clean edge.

And again, you know, this is a meringue, like meringue, like whip cream.

Like, that type of thing is very, very light.

So you can have a large bag and fill it up a lot.

But if you do... something like pate a choux for example, puff dough, then it's a tough thing to pipe, and you cannot fill it up as much as this.

Now here I feel up about as much as I could.

You bring the side around again.

And what you want to do here, you want to be careful of folding this properly, you know, at the end.

This is really full here, so I'm folding it this way.

And at that point on a pleat, I will pick it up in the corner of my hand, extend this, and then I will keep this here.

Now I press with that part of the hand.

That end is on top of the finger, and the point should not open here.

Okay, so let's say here, if I do something round, I will put the head, I direct with that hand, I put the head here and you press without moving, then you move up.

Without moving, move up.

Now if I want to do a teardrop on the other hand, that sometime we do in the set, then I press and pull out.

Press, pull out.

To do the body of a swan or something like that, a type of teardrop or in the bottom of a mold.

Now to do a type of eclair, you go straight then bring it back up like this.

Always bringing back up, up to break the tail.

Now, if I wanna do what we call a puits d'amour, a love nest if you want, it's like a little Vacherin, then we do a round thing like this.

And then at the last one, you do a second layer on top.

This will dry out and be filled up with cream or different type of thing.

You do a lot with meringue, any type of shape.

But if I wanna change the shape for example, then I put another one, I can put it right there, and I do that type of shape let's say.

Another type of meringue, the meringue a la creme, you know, we do with whipped cream in the center of it.

This is nice to do.

And if I want to do another shape even, then I can take a smaller one, for example here to do mushroom.

So I do small mushroom.

Again, break the tail.

See here what I would do at that point is with a wet paper towel, or you put your finger with a little bit of water, you touch the end of it, and that will eliminate that tail.

This is the top of your mushroom.

Now for the point of the mushroom, you want on the contrary to do point like this to make the stem of your mushroom, rather.

So you do a lot with your meringue.

Of course, you try to do them of all equal size so they cook about the same amount of time.

About 200 degree, this will take about three hours, an hour and a half for those small thing, but three hours for those to cook in the oven.

And what you will have after is that type of things that you can see here.

And a very brittle type of meringue.

You can hear it.

(meringue crunching) You know, very tender, that type of meringue.

So I have my Pre Da Moore here.

It's very, very light.

Those and the teardrop here.

And you can see here the head of my mushroom.

Usually what you do, you do with a little knife, you make a hole there.

So you have to cook them twice, you know?

You make a hole there and you put a little bit of meringue in that thing and put your tail back in it.

And then you place that back in the oven for 20, 30 minute just to dry out the bottom of it.

This is the way you do your mushroom.

And finally, when you have it all done, then of course you can assemble it together as we have here.

And I have the Pre Da Moore so called, a different type of meringue.

The classic way in France is to put a bowl of ice cream, maybe a bit of whipped cream on top.

The mushroom goes on a buche de Noel, you know Christmas log.

All of that is used and make really terrific, inexpensive dessert.

One point, however, about meringue, if you want to keep them, you keep them in... It's not a question of temperature, it's a question of moisture.

It has to be kept like in a Tupperware, or one of those very close type of plastic.

And then if you really keep them well, you can keep them for several months.

(gentle piano music) There are obviously many more technique you can learn to make yourself a better cook.

But I hope I have encouraged you to pick up a few more skill in the kitchen.

Thank you for joining me, and happy cooking.