- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

And all of the thousands of recipes 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 these lessons 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.

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

So here we go.

One of the richest of all dough that we do in baking is the cookie dough.

And it's mostly done from butter, flour, a little bit of sugar.

And contrary to other type of dough, like a puff pastry for example, where you want to keep the butter separated from the flour.

There on the other hand, there is basically no liquid because the butter is used as a moisturizer agent to cohere the whole thing together.

So because you use butter as cohesive agent if you want in the dough, then you don't really develop the gluten because the fat in the butter will coat the protein and that dough is not going to be very elastic.

In fact, it's going to be very soft.

Add about a tablespoon of milk in there with this, my butter, and that's about it.

When it's approximately together, you put it on the board in front of you.

And the technique there that we do, we gather it together and with the palm of your hand, you crush it in front of you in a technique we call frasier or frasier, you know, one or the other.

Then you gather it again with... You could if you have a pastry scraper.

You do it twice then.

And again, you scrape it this way to gather it together until the whole dough will cohere together.

But you can see that that dough at that point is going to be very soft.

Oh, I have a scraper right here.

That dough is going to be very soft and nice and basically ready to use.

As you can see here, if I were to press on that dough, there is no elasticity in the dough.

There is no bouncing back.

It is a cookie dough.

A best way to wash your hand is actually to take a little bit of flour and wash or clean up your hand with that flour, which then can be again incorporated into the dough.

Okay, so that dough, because I haven't developed the gluten could be rolled right away.

Any type of dough actually gain to rest a little bit, but this is fine with this one.

So I'm going to roll it.

We'll show you how you see still no elasticity.

The more water you have in that dough, the more elasticity you get.

So here I'm going to do a classic tart with it, which is a flan ring like this with a removable bottom with a fluted edge.

So what we want to do, put a little bit of flour on the counter and start spreading your dough.

As you see this dough, you can practically spread it by hand.

The richest maybe of all dough is going to be a Linzertorte dough, but this is pretty close behind.

Again, a bit of flour on top.

And we wanna roll the dough gently.

Now, that type of dough, you don't have to do very thin, you see, because it's porous, the dough is porous.

Because there is a great deal of fat in it, the dough is porous like a cookie.

It means that even if you were to do it that thick, the heat go right through it and you bite into it, it disintegrate in your mouth like a cookie.

So it's about, about slightly less maybe than a quarter of an inch, which is what you want for those type of dough.

Again, bring the dough back, it's quite delicate now, on top of your rolling pin, and turn it back upside down directly on top of the implement.

Now, lift it up so that it join in the corner.

See, you want it to fill up the corner like this, and you don't want to press on it and stretch it because it would break very easily.

It's already breaking a little bit because it's so delicate and of course freshly made.

So now I could cut it as is, but if I want to have a nice border, then I will take an extra pieces of dough and press it here to give me some extra dough in my border.

So I don't really care for the time being how it's done.

All I do is to lift up a bit of dough and press it to give me extra dough there.

Then I can cut it with the rolling pin this way and that way and get rid of the excess.

Now, the little extra dough that I have here, now I will press it this way to create a border.

You see?

That makes it slightly higher also.

And now, sometime you use a little pincher, you know, which is a dough crimper.

Or I can use the point of a knife just to mark the side this way.

That all around.

See, if it stick to your knife, then go into the flour a little bit, and that's it.

Now we often cook that dough in what we call blind way.

That is you cook it by itself.

If you put it into the oven by itself like that, it tend to collapse, unless you take the dough and with your hand, you roll it over to make it anchor on this side.

But conventionally what you do, you put a piece of paper inside.

This is what I'm going to do here.

Again, fold it in fourth.

From the center of your paper here, you do a small triangle into a smaller triangle and smaller one.

And we measure the radius which come from the center and should go up the side.

So I need all of it at least.

Piece of paper.

And now to make it easier to fold in it, we fringe the side.

That is cutting it this way, meaning that now that piece of paper is going to be much easier to press into place, you know?

And that's it.

And on top of this we put a weight.

You can put from rice, to those are very special kind of metal implement, beans, anything like this.

And the weight will keep the dough down as it cook for the first 10, 15 minutes.

Then after you remove that, remove the paper of course, and then you fill it up.

You see that dough can also be done, as I have done here or there, in different shape.

And this is just plain rolled by itself.

And what you do, by the time you finish rolling it, I'm just showing you a little bit here.

When you finish rolling it like this, let's say, and you want to do an edge, like for example, that edge here, and you can trim it a little bit.

You bring the side on itself all around.

And when you have a certain amount of dough at the border like this, what you do, you press it into a triangular shape, like a pyramid shape.

You see, this is the secret of it to be pressed into a pyramid like this.

The point is that the base being wider and this way it doesn't collapse on itself.

You cannot press it straight.

So this is what I did on this, freeform.

And then after you can mark it this way by pressing it a little bit to give it more of a shape.

Now, you put that into the oven and you cook it.

You now have a receptacle, a shell that you can fill up with raspberry, strawberry, any type of fruit and so forth.

Now remember, that dough is rich and it has a tendency to burn.

And you can see this one, like a cookie, tend to burn on the side.

If this happened to you, one of the best thing to do is to use a grater like this.

And what you do, you grate your dough, you grate the black part of your dough with your cheese grater, and you can remove it this way.

You can, you know, spend a little more time with a smaller grater, and then you can do that with a puff pastry, any other type of dough.

But you see that dough will be, I'm breaking this one, will be like a cookie, very, very brittle, very tender, and very buttery.

An excellent dough for that type of dessert.

(bright piano music) Let me show you a very easy way to glaze strawberry.

A beautiful strawberry here.

And I have currant jelly here.

The currant jelly is melted and mixed together.

It's just cooling off now.

It's still slightly tepid.

And all we do is to dip it in there.

You stir it a little bit with a whisk so that it's nice and smooth.

Now, if you're ever going to serve that in the summer and you think it's too hot, what you could do is to mix a little bit of gelatin in it and to bring it to a boil and that will set it up.

See, what we do here, you want to get a plate, very ice cold plate, put it maybe in the freezer, get your berry directly onto that cold plate, and then you place it back in the refrigerator.

After it's been in the refrigerator, a little bit of the currant jelly will make like a little pool around.

So it will set up all there.

Then you can transfer it to your plate.

Maybe you could have a little sprig of mint in the center, a cookie, a very simple delicious dessert.

(bright piano music) I wanna show you a great technique to make chocolate leaves.

They look so real that it's unbelievable.

They are so real of course because they are made with real leaves.

I'm using here, you have to use a leaf of course which is not poison.

This is camellia leaf.

And you see what happen is that you look at the leaf and take the side, not the shiny part, but the side where you have the rib.

And what you do very simply, I have a sample melted chocolate here.

You dip it into your melted chocolate so that it cover the whole back of it.

And then you plate that back into a little container like this or anything you have, something for baguette, for bread, which will give it that shape.

And that's about all there is to it.

And you can do very large leaf actually and smaller one.

You try.

Careful not to have your chocolate when you dip it like that go around because it makes it a bit more difficult to peel after.

But that's all there is to it.

Very simple.

And I wanna show you a few here which come out of the refrigerator now.

And you will see that they're going to peel very easily, as you can see.

And you have all of the marking of the leaves on top.

So they truly make a very stunning presentation on a cake.

To arrange all of that, you can do that with white chocolate as well as a dark chocolate.

(bright piano music) The art of cooking sugar can be very complicated, and there is real specialties to do that.

But the cooking of a caramel, a simple caramel, is relatively simple.

Let me show you how to do it providing you follow some good advice and some good recipe.

Now, what I'm using here is a so-called sugar pan.

That is, it is copper without anything on it.

And the copper, anything you put in raw copper like that will tend to acidify.

And why would you want to acidify sugar?

Because acid will tend to prevent crystallization.

What is crystallization?

Crystallization is the level at which at some point in the cooking of sugar, the sugar may form a mass.

We call that mass in France.

That is form all crystal of epic color and the whole thing looks strange.

That happened around the bowl or the soft crack stage, which is a stage that I'm going to show you later.

But if you do a caramel, it really doesn't matter even if part of your caramel crystallized because caramel is much hotter.

You have to go through 317, 318 degree, and by the time it get to 315, 316, when the sugar itself start turning yellow, turning into caramel, even if it crystallized, the whole thing melt into caramel.

So you can't really mess a caramel.

In any case, what you do, very often, recipe tell you put a bit of cream of tartar, put lemon juice, few drop of lemon juice, few drop of vinegar, all of that is acid, tartaric acid, citric acid, acidic acid, all of that to prevent crystallization.

But if you use copper, you don't have to use anything at all, just put it in your copper.

But you can, as I say, cook sugar into any other type of pot too.

It's fine, especially for caramel.

In any case, after you mix your sugar and your water together, you don't touch it.

You wait until it come to a boil there, and after you let it cook.

And it will take, it depend on the amount of caramel that you have, but probably seven, eight minute to get to the proper temperature.

The way I look at the caramel now you can see the bubble, the thickness, and it look for me it's about at the hard boil stage.

It started a soft bowl, it start by doing the thread, soft boil, hard boil, soft crack, hard crack, turn into caramel.

Those terms are very important for the candy maker.

And you have a candy thermometer which give you the temperature.

The temperature here, it approximately 270 degree.

What you do, I do it with my finger, but if not used to it, I would advise you to do it with a fork.

You put it into cold water, grab a little bit of the sugar, and place it back into the cold water.

Now, I can see that the piece that I have here will form into a hard ball.

You know?

And now it's going pretty fast now.

So now it's already turning into what I consider a soft crack.

And I take some, grab it in there, and as you can, I can see here and I can feel it.

I already have a caramel which is cracking.

Now, if I try to bite into that caramel, (caramel crunching) it crack, or it will stick into my teeth.

This is a soft crack.

Now, within second or not much of a second, it will turn to the hard crack.

And at that point it's a white caramel.

When I bite into it, it kind of explode between my teeth.

Very, very brittle.

Then it start turning into caramel, which is really an indication of the color.

When it start turning yellow, it's about caramel.

So now we would be at a hard crack about, and the hard crack is about 310 degree.

So I will test it another time, taking a little bit of it back in there.

And I can see just by the color that this will be a hard crack, you see?

And if I bite into it now, (caramel crunching) you can see it's very brittle.

It doesn't stick to my teeth anymore.

This is the time that you can dip fruit in it, like strawberry for example.

Now, and place them, of course, you would want to place them after on a oil tray, because if you don't have them on an oil tray, it will of course stick.

So be very careful not to melt your finger.

You go into it all around, lift it up gently, and place it on that oil tray.

Now, what will happen?

The caramel will form a shell around the berry and will start softening the berry, and the juice will come out of it.

And you want to eat that maybe 30 minute after when the shell of sugar is almost melted.

When you bite into it, you still have only a little shell of sugar, and the rest is soft and a bit lukewarm inside.

That's when it is the best.

And as you can see here, it's not going to stick up fully.

You see, it's hard already.

I have that shell of sugar on top of it.

So that goes pretty fast.

You can do all kind of other fruit like this.

Now, that sugar, if you look at it now, is close to caramel.

It start turning slightly yellow.

And if I had crystallization, I did not have crystallization, but if I had crystallization, it about at that time that all of those crystal will eventually melt, the whole thing will turn into caramel.

So I have a nice color here, I mean a pale, a pale yellow color, and I like my caramel a slightly darker in color, so I'm going to let it cook a little longer.

Now, depending on the heat transfer of your pan, the quality of your pan, that sugar may continue cooking for a while.

So sometime when you take it out, you better have next to you a pot of water so that you can stop the cooking.

Depending, sometime, you know, on your pan, you take it off the heat and it stop cooking.

Some of the time, as I say, it continue cooking for a long time and it get darker, darker, darker, and you don't know to stop it.

You stop it by lowering it in the water.

Now, I'm stopping the heat.

And at that point I can stir the caramel, do whatever I want, it won't change anything anymore.

So I will put it in there because also what I want to do is that I want to cool it off.

And because I want to cool it off, you see it's a beautiful color, it's stopped now.

And we want do a caramel cage with it.

And you can't really do a caramel cage now because it's too thin.

You have to wait to get a little more viscosity in it.

A little thicker.

Depend of course on the type of caramel cage that you do.

You know when you have a pot like that, if you want to do what we call a caramel sauce, I would now add into that pot about the same amount of water then that I have of caramel, that is about a cup of water.

The whole thing will bubble, the thing will melt, and then I will cool it off, and it will not turn into something hard.

It will turn into something thick, and maybe a thick caramel sauce.

And then you can dilute it a bit further with cognac, rum, or whatever you want, and you have a caramel sauce.

That's how it's done.

So here.

It's better in term of viscosity.

The thickness basically close to the thickness of what I want.

So I'm going to take it out of water.

I know it's not going to cook any longer.

I will dry that on this to do my caramel cage there, and I will do the caramel cage on the outside of that bowl.

I oil it very, very lightly with an oil without any taste, you know?

Now, some people have trouble doing caramel cage.

It's really not complicated.

What you have to do is really to follow the sound principle of architecture.

That is the caramel cage that I'm doing here is with not many thread.

I like it.

I will show you another one after.

But for the time being, this one here, what I do, I'm carrying the beam from one side of the house to the other side of the house to carry the whole thing.

Instead of throwing a bit of caramel here and there, you know, I'm carrying it from one side, as I said, to the other.

And after a while I have a few solid beam, then I know that one side will register with the other when I pull on it.

So it's a good way of doing it.

And of course I could put more or less caramel, depending what you wanna show underneath.

Sometime you don't wanna cover your dessert too munch.

And okay, here is what I... I think that I have probably about enough here.

Caramel on top.

This is relatively a large caramel cage.

I mean, you can do it much smaller if you want.

And now what I say, what you wanna do in there is to add water if you want to do a caramel sauce.

If you don't wanna do a caramel sauce and you want to clean that up, fill it up with water, bring it to a boil, or fill it up with water and leave it overnight in the corner.

The sugar will melt.

Okay, it will take maybe a minute, around that.

What I try to do here at that point with my thumb like that, I go against it and pry it out a little bit to know whether it's going to slide.

And I see now that it's sliding, that's it.

So I can basically, still probably a bit soft, but you can see I can lift it up and do it this way.

Ay, ay, ay.

So now I have a caramel which is pretty open.

You see that other caramel cage that I have here, which is a much finer type of thing, I did it inside the bowl with a caramel which was cooked less than that.

And unless it breaks, it happen, I can show you what I did there.

I actually put it inside the bowl.

See, that's where it was.

And oil like that, and then I throw the caramel, much more small pieces of caramel here and there, and eventually shrink a little bit as it cooked.

And after the shrinking process, then I could remove it.

And of course the caramel cage, you can keep it for a while depending on the moisture that you have.

But if you're in an area which is very dry, you have no problem, you know?

But if it's an area where it's very humid, it's not a question of temperature, it can be 110 degree outside, it's not going to melt the caramel.

But if it get very humid, it start getting sticky.

And especially if the thread are very thin like that, within an hour and a half it start melting.

This will last longer.

What you can do here, you know, on top of your cake, you could put flowers on top like that decoration, or maybe a little sprig of mint.

You know, if you put that on top of a custard or something like that, little flowers.

I mean, you have like a kind of work iron if you want here, and you could put that decor.

So it's a very fanciful, relatively quite easy.

If you follow that recipe, it's a very easy thing to do.

(bright 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.