- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin, and all of the thousands of recipes that I've made over the years require one common ingredient.

It 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.

The American diet has gradually been including more and more fish and shellfish in the last 10, 15 years.

Take a look at all of the cookbook, hundreds of recipe using fish, shellfish, and very often with accent from all around the world, it's very diversified.

So now I wanna show you a few of the kind that you will come across most often and tell you what to do with it.

First, I wanna start with prawn.

You have prawn, and those are so-called tiger prawn, you know, with the head on.

And I'll tell you, if you eat the shrimp with the head on, and this is very sweet, the inside of the shrimp here is going to be very sweet.

It has to be super fresh.

If it's not fresh, this is going to get bitter very, very fast.

This happen to be a shrimp which is relatively soft flesh, you know.

Now, the standard, more of the standard shrimp are those here, and there is different way of de-veining it and taking the shell out of it.

Usually what you do is just running all around like this and taking it out.

Sometime you leave the end of it here, the tail, for decoration, sometime you remove it.

Even when I remove it, I tend to press on it and pull out to try to get the meat from the inside, you know, which sometime come out easy, sometime not as easy.

As you can see here, this is the meat now from the inside.

Conventionally when you do this, you have to de-vein the shrimp.

Although very often, I do not de-vein the shrimp myself, It's digested protein, not bad, but sometime it's a bit grainy.

So what you would want do is to open it.

As you can see, this one basically has nothing.

And you can rinse it under water.

Another way of doing that is to use one of those little implement here, which is a piece of plastic, which is used to de-vein the shrimp.

So what you have to do is to start at the beginning here, you go to the end, you follow the thing, and you continue straight.

And that will break your shell and usually de-vein the shrimp at the same time because it open the whole thing there.

So, you know, if you're proficient with that, it goes pretty fast doing it this way too, in term of de-veining if you want to do it this way.

You can see here.

This one, for example, you can see the vein very well, darker, as you can see here.

So that is kind of grainy and that has to be washed, washed out.

So you just wash it under water, you know?

And now let me talk to you about oyster.

There is an enormous variety of oyster on the market.

I mean years ago we used to have east coast, west coast oyster.

Now there is over 50 different type of oyster that we have in the United States, and people really go for oyster.

Some people don't like them raw.

I love them raw as well as cooked, providing you go to a reliable supplier so that the oyster are not wild because they can be dangerous.

But otherwise, you can go to any fishmonger and ask for the lot number.

It has to be numbered, and it has to be grown in an area which is inspected by the government.

This is the flat oyster of Belon type of France.

Probably one of the most expensive in France, those are greener oyster.

And you can see, I have a whole implement here.

Your classic opener here.

Here, even a can opener like this, you can go into the thing and prop it open, as well as a screwdriver.

Any of those will work.

Usually what you do, you use a towel to protect your hand there.

I go at the hinge directly at the end and pry it.

You have to insert it, to twist it.

And after you twist it, you run your knife this way to break the top part and the little, the little adductor muscle which is here, and then you cut it underneath to make it loose so it's easier to swallow.

The flat oyster is pretty hard to open.

Now, let's see if this one is a bit easier.

Again using this one.

Now again, I'm going to go at the hinge here, protect your hand again.

Try to get it into it and prop it open.

You can hear it popping open.

Then cutting again.

And you can see now the shell is clean.

And now again, some people serve it this way.

I like to cut the adductor muscle here so that they are much easier to swallow after.

Now, the classic way of serving oyster in France is with so-called a mignonette sauce.

Now, the mignonette sauce is a sauce done with cracked black pepper.

What is mignonette?

Mignonette is cracked black pepper.

I have black pepper, and this is what we use for, let's say, a steak au poivre, would be the same idea.

You put your peppercorn in there.

Remember when you go to the restaurant, the maitre d' crack a bit of pepper directly on your plate.

And the reason is that the essential oil comes out.

That's when it's really strong.

That's when it's really good.

If you have the pepper, which is ground for weeks ahead, it doesn't have any taste.

It burn your mouth but doesn't have much flavor.

So this is freshly cracked pepper.

And we use a little part like this.

This is flat.

And you use that part of the pot preferably on to roll it on top of it and applying pressure.

You can hear it.

(metal scraping) Now, all my green pepper, my black peppercorn are cracked here.

Now you see this is the way you would want to use it for a steak au poivre.

You spread it out and dip your steak au poivre on each side.

If you want it a bit finer, you bring it together again, and do a little more, like it is here.

And this would be perfect for what we are going to do today.

Would you like to use white peppercorn, black peppercorn, green peppercorn?

It is all the same thing.

The green peppercorn is when the berry is not ripe.

The white peppercorn, sometimes stronger but doesn't have as much taste as the black one, which has all the shell from the outside.

I have some shallots here.

So you have the peppercorn, shallots, red wine vinegar, and sometime a tiny dash of oil.

Also some people sometime don't put it.

This is your classic sauce, mignonette so called.

And the mignonette sauce or lemon juice or a clam sauce, you know, you put on top, you put a little bit on top of it.

And if you have cleaned up your oyster, (slurps) you can swallow it like that and it absolutely delicious.

(lighthearted music) And now let me show you how to handle clams.

There is different clam on the market.

Of course, the most common are going to be those.

I have different type here.

Even the razor clam, which look like a razor like that.

You have some (indistinct).

The cockle, that come from Oregon type of place.

And those are your classic clam.

The smallest one is the cherry, is the the littleneck.

Then those are about cherrystone, and the very large quahog that you do clam, you do clam chowder or the thing with it because they are tough.

In any case, they all open in the same way.

Again, use a towel if you want, and you can use one clam knife.

It has to be sharp, you know?

Or one regular knife like this.

What you want to do there, it's easier, in fact, than for oyster.

Place it on the palm of your hand.

And you want to place the blade at the opening here.

Then with your finger and thumb, those finger here, you put them against the blade, and you apply pressure here till you go right into it.

Then you cut right through through the adductor muscle.

See those muscle here are those kind of sinus extend and contract, which make the clam open or closed.

Remember that basically, all, whether it's oyster, whether it's clam, whether it's mussel, they all have those type of adductor muscle.

If you want, those sinus, which make the clam open and close.

And that's the way the animal feed itself by filtering water.

And it can be served with the same sauce that we are using for the oyster.

One of the best, one of the cheapest, one of the highest in protein shellfish is going to be the mussel.

You can get it all over the country, very inexpensive, very, very flavorful.

It does some of the best sauce that you can do with a sauce or soup.

Usually your mussel used to come years ago, very dirty.

Now they are grown usually on wire so there is no sand in them.

So they are quite nice.

I like those type of mussel, like those are, which are slightly yellow and all that, we call that Bouchot in France.

Now, if that, that one is open, you can tickle the mussel inside to see whether it's closed.

If it doesn't close, (knife tapping) bang on the shell like this.

If it doesn't close again, then you know it's really dead.

At that point, I wouldn't use it.

Look at the other one.

And now when the beard is out like this, pull out the beard, huh?

You know, the beard is very tough.

It's actually a protein type of thing.

It's very tough.

And in Greece, they get those beard and generation from father to son, they make gloves out of it.

And those gloves are extremely hard, and the knife doesn't go through it.

Those are for the fishermen.

And again, you clean it up this way.

And you may want to put it in water, and even use the brush if you think they are dirty to go against it.

Now, another thing that I do sometime after I wash it, I press it.

I press it, you see to make it, the two shell, to try to make it open this way.

I see now it's strong.

I'm telling you what because I have made sometime a mussel like that full of dirt.

And there is so much suction that you wash it, it doesn't move and you do this.

But when you do that, it slide open.

And if you have one of those in there, it can ruin your whole batch.

So that's a nice way of doing it too.

Now those, very simply cooked, what we call sailor style in France, moules marinieres so called.

It's just done with a bit of chopped onion and white wine.

And what happen when you do them like that, they open like this.

And after you take them and eat them right out of the shell this way.

If you wanna go one step further, you remove them from the shell.

And with the juice, you make a bit of a sauce as I did here.

Just sauce with a little bit of cream and some herbs in it.

Now, if you really have a very, very large mussel, and if you object to the mussel being a bit tough as they can be, those (indistinct) because they are very tender, you can take the mantle that you have all around, which is that strip here.

You start at the belly, there is the belly here, and you grab that piece right here, and you pull, and you have like a string, you know, which comes out.

This is pretty elastic, you know, as you can see.

I mean I don't mind it, but some people want to make it a bit fancier, a special salad.

So you may want to do that.

As I say, especially if you have very, very large mussel.

In any case, this one here is done this way.

In the sauce leftover, I have shallots and so forth, a little bit of cream, white wine.

And we can do a classic dish that we call a pilaf.

A pilaf of mussel.

So what you do, you can oil or butter a little container like this.

This is about about a cup container.

And you use a rice, put a little bit of rice inside.

This is a nice dish to do.

You can do it with different type of shellfish actually, yeah.

And you do like a nest inside, as you can see here, I'm doing like a nest of the rice.

Then I will fill it up with my mussel.

Maybe eight, 10 mussel per person.

A little bit of the sauce, not much.

And more of the rice on top.

You're doing a kind of package to put it together.

You can press it a little bit to hold it.

And, you know, one of the good thing to that, you can do that for a party and have that ready.

You can have that ready directly on your plate and keep it warm this way, you know, before you serve it.

You can keep it for a while.

When you're ready to serve it, of course, you open it, it's nice and holding together.

And I should have put a little bit of green in there, a little bit of, will look better.

And into this, I can present a little bit of the sauce around.

It's an easy dish to do that you can do with several type of shellfish if you want.

But classically, it is done with the mussel.

(gentle piano music) And now, let me talk to you about crab.

There is different type of crab.

This is the large Dungeness crab, which is very specific to the west coast of the United States.

Very, very sweet meat, absolutely delicious.

On the east coast, we tend to get more of the blue crab as well as the soft-shell crab, of course.

This is simply poached, and I cooked this one this morning.

But usually you can buy them cooked.

What you would want to do very often, if you have the choice, is try to get the female because of the roe.

This is a male, it's narrower, the female have more of an apron.

One way or the other, you will break that here, grab it at the corner here (shell cracks) to open the shell like this.

And that part of the shell right here is eatable.

I'll use a lot of what's inside here.

For example, especially if you do a mayonnaise or something like that, you can make that in it for flavor.

So you can remove that to use it.

And, of course, the body itself here, first, you remove the appendage, which is the lung that you have here, and the stomach's in the middle.

And after you've done this, the lung and the stomach here, the rest, mostly eatable.

You break it in half.

And from that half, you will go and break it into chunk right here.

And those chunk here are where you are going to have your large lump of meat, you know.

You have to spend a little bit of time with it.

You have to be patient, which I'm not.

So when I eat with my wife, I finish my crab about half an hour before she finish her because she go into all of the tiny little hole to eat it.

But it's well worth it.

It may be the best of all meat into the shellfish.

It's so sweet and nice.

(upbeat music) One of the greatest joy of summer for me in Connecticut where I live, is to eat lobster when the lobster is fresh.

And I have, those lobster are not too expensive during the season.

This is a pound and a quarter lobster.

It will cook very fast, you know, a couple of minutes of boiling by the time you have it, and let it into the hot stock, and you can have it hot, cold, and so forth.

I wanna show you how to separate the meat.

First, the two claw that you break here.

As you can see, one claw is much larger.

Maybe you see it better in that direction.

This is larger and thicker.

And this is more pointed.

And two, this is the pincher, this is the crusher, so called.

The animal use it for different type of thing.

So that you want to separate.

Maybe the best part of the lobster, according to certain aficionado, is that particular muscle on both of the claw right here, you know, it's a lump of meat.

So what you do, you break those here.

(shell cracking) And you want hopefully to get the meat in there in one piece.

So you start breaking that part and pulling it gently.

You can see that piece should come with it.

Now, if you wanna break this, one of the best way, put your towel on top.

(tool tapping) Break it with something like this.

Don't.

(shell cracks) And pull it out.

Okay, I have it in one piece here.

The only part is that I can feel it with my finger here.

There is a large piece of cartilage in the center here, which I want to remove, as you can see right there.

At that point, if I remove that, this is nice.

Basically, I have the whole claw there.

Another way of doing it, breaking it again this way, and I have the front here, is to use a knife, which I use very often.

(knife thuds) Crack it like that with the knife, go in (shell cracks) and crack it.

(knife clangs) And usually, you will get your whole meat, piece of meat also.

Again, I have, no, that piece has been removed from the center also.

I have my two claw here.

This, I will use a towel, (hand banging) something to crush it, remove that piece, which, as I say, is so good right there, that little nut.

And there is a little piece in there that you can remove also.

In fact, when I do that at home, my wife will go through the whole thing to eat absolutely everything.

Now, the back part of this, I mean the body itself, you will twist (shell cracking) to take the tail out of it.

Break the tail this way, then take a couple of the pieces of the shell, and the rest will usually just slide out.

Now, what you may want to do with the tail after is to cut it up.

And if you feel that you're going to have a lot, like I have a little bit here of the, sometime you have a long line maybe on that, which is again the vein that you have inside.

See, this doesn't have much inside.

So basically, out of your lobster, what you're going to get is your two claw and the meat of the claw.

I didn't clean up the other one.

The tail.

And the weight of that, you can use sometime in decoration, the antenna and so forth to put it.

Or sometime you use the tail itself, you know, the back of the tail, the three thing to put on your plate as decoration.

You have to realize that the meat of the lobster is going to be one to four, that is a pound of lobster will give you approximately four ounces of meat.

(gentle piano music) One of the least expensive shellfish on the market is the squid, also called calamari.

You have it in many, many restaurants, classic and Italian restaurant, Chinese restaurant.

And it's a very inexpensive piece of meat because the yield is so great.

A pound of squid is almost 80, 90% eatable, as well as octopus.

Contrary to a lobster, where one pound of lobster is four ounce of meat.

Dover sole, one pound sole is four ounce of meat.

And a salmon, for example, is 50%.

So those are the thing that you have to look at when you're buying in term of what you spend.

Now, those are small calamari that we have, and available like that on the market with the head, the tentacle, and the body.

So what you do first, you pull the head out.

Now you can see here the eye.

And just above the eye, you want to cut it here and discard that part.

So just taking a knife, scissors is usually the best way.

And in that little hole that you have here, if you press that hole, usually you have the beak.

The piece of the beak inside.

Sometime, I cut probably a piece of it, you see, which is there.

Sometime, depending where, you pop it out, and you have that beak which comes out.

That should be removed.

It is not necessary to remove the skin out of the tentacle, just wash it.

Then now the body itself, there is a bone, if you wanna call that bone, which is called the pan.

And the pan is that piece of cartilage that you have in the back here, which I'm trying to get now here at the end of it, and pull it out.

And you can see, it almost like a piece of plastic.

You know, that the pan.

That is removed also.

And now, usually, you remove that skin from the outside.

You can do that under water.

Sometime, people remove the flap.

That is those two flap on each side.

I tend to leave them on it with it.

And frankly, if I grill it, when sometime I grill the whole thing, I don't even remove that reddish skin from the outside.

I leave the whole thing on it, you know?

But now, I have removed that.

So you have to empty the inside.

There is a lot of, you see, white stuff that you have in the inside.

You can even, if you want, use a spoon to go inside to be sure that you empty it nicely.

Okay.

It's totally empty.

So now, you would want to wash this.

Now you can see here, it lend itself to a beautiful receptacle, and it lend itself to all kind of stuffing that you can do in there.

Now, for example, you can stuff it with other shellfish or you can stuff it simply with a little bit of bread flavored with herbs and so forth.

Very often, otherwise, this is cut into ring and fry.

This is sometimes chopped and added to the stuffing.

I have a stuffing here of rice and different type of herb.

What you do, you just put, you know, I have a pastry bag here with a very big tip.

So this is one of the best thing to do.

You put it right in there and you apply a bit of pressure, and fill up the pocket here.

Now you see what I have done here.

I have fill up the pocket up to here, and I don't really want to fill it up much more than that because your stuffing will expand during cooking and the whole thing can burst.

So basically, the easiest way is to take a a skewer this way, go through one way, go through the other way, and this is ready to be cooked.

That can be served as a garnish around or actually I could have add it into the stuffing.

And this is what I have here.

I have small clam here that I saute briefly and finish with a little bit of a tomato and herb sauce.

And that, of course, with some stuffing that I add inside here.

Of course, before you serve it, you would want to remove those skewer.

(lively 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.