- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

With today's menu, we'll travel from the cold water of the North Sea to the beaches of North Africa.

Salmon marinated in spices, giving it a rich, intense flavor, my own version of gravlax.

Couscous is a typical dish of North Africa.

we'll make it with lamb, lots of vegetable and harissa, a hot traditional sauce.

Fresh and dried fruit make a perfect light finish.

So join me for an exotic menu that span the globe on "Today's Gourmet."

(bright jazzy music) Our menu today is going to be the national dish of North Africa.

Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, all of them do couscous.

The couscous is made with lamb, (utensils clattering) not all the time, but nine out of 10 times, sometimes with chicken, and what I have here is a leg of lamb, very lean meat, and we are cutting that into large cube, you know, about an inch, inch and a half cube.

And you see what you do here, it's a very lean type of dish also, because we use first the right cut, and secondly what happen is that you put that directly in there.

We don't fry it or anything.

Water, (water splashing) a dash of salt, and this, we are going to put seasoning on top of this now, and the seasoning is what we have here.

We have a ginger, and the ginger here, (ginger thumping) I'm going to cut it into that little, oop, in that part, into that little hand processor, you know?

You can have it peeled or unpeeled, it's fine, because I'm gonna do a puree with it.

Four or five cloves of garlic, about the same amount in ginger, and that, we are going to make a paste out of it.

(pieces clinking) to put that directly to season the couscous.

Here we are.

(processor whirring) That's it, it doesn't have to be in a total puree, providing it's chopped finely, as it is here, it's fine.

(blade tapping) What I have here, this will go directly (palm slapping) in there.

I can even rinse this out with a bit of the water there.

And I have some cumin powder, and tomato paste here, the tomato paste.

So this is the first part of our dish right here, and this will take, (pot ringing) this will come to a boil, of course, and you want to cook that for a good hour at first.

After that, we bring vegetable in it, first part of vegetable, because we are putting a lot of vegetable in that dish.

And the vegetable that I have here, first, I have eggplant, as you see, I have onion, I have carrot, I have butternut squash, and kohlrabi.

Those kohlrabi here, you could even use some of the leaf, actually, of the kohlrabi in there.

And I have, of course, another dish here which has been cooking for about an hour, (lid clinking) and here it is.

(food bubbling) And this is the time where we're putting all of that in it, even a bit of those leaves.

You see those kohlrabi are very white.

It's a type of turnips, you know, inside that we have, and this, on the other hand, the butternut squash, you could use another type of squash.

it's going to be beautiful (squash crunching) and yellow inside.

That's what we use here.

You can, of course, use other type of vegetable if you don't want to use those, but remember that we use a lot of vegetable inside.

So this is our first part, the first vegetable in there, okay?

And that has to come back to a boil, and cook about 15, 20 minutes with those vegetable, remember, because we have other type of vegetable, like zucchini, tomato.

Those don't cook very long, so we put them later on in there.

(dish thumping) So, mix that well with your juice.

You see how colorful already it is.

(spoon knocking) That comes here, (lid clattering) and that's going to cook for a while.

During that time, I wanna show you the special sauce, which is done in North Africa to put in there, which is called harissa.

Harissa is H-A-R-I-S-S-A, and it is made with hot pepper.

What I use here is the ancho pepper dry, as you can see them here.

Those, we put in water, you can soak them overnight, in that case, here, or in hot water, and they will reconstitute to this.

And what we want to do with that is, again, make a paste out of it.

(knife thumping) So I cut them coarsely now they are very soft.

Put my knife here, that way, you won't work without the knife.

Here it is.

And some are darker, as you can see, and you would want to take the stem out of it, which is tougher, (knife thumping) but this makes a great mixture.

You can keep that in your refrigerator for a month, you know?

And it makes a great taste.

See, those are lighter in color.

There is different type and different color.

A lot of garlic, I have about seven, eight cloves of garlic here, a bit of tomato paste, again, that we are putting right in there.

Now, I'm putting some of the juice from the ancho pepper here to liquefy the mixture, and a bit of cayenne.

You know, the cayenne is that very, very hot red pepper.

You know, you put a little bit of it.

We call that piment enrage in French, you know?

Enraged piment, it's so hot, so we make a paste out of that.

(processor whirring) That makes a great seasoning, you know?

Seasoning for stew, as we do here, but not necessarily for stew.

You can use it for soup, you can use it for different type of thing, and as I say, we can keep it in a jar in the refrigerator.

It can go there for a long time, you know?

Here it is.

(blade tapping) I could make it even finer than that, but I like it kind of a bit chunky like this, you see?

Now, this is a hot sauce.

(spoon scraping) So as I said, harissa, you know, the standard one, most people buy it, but then it's nice to do it yourself, and we want to put it in the first lamb.

Remember, one tablespoon of this, we wanna put in there, (spoon tapping) to start giving some hotness to the dish.

(lid clinking) Okay, so now, we have that here.

This, we don't need anymore.

What we want to do is the garnish which goes with that, and the garnish which goes with that is a grain, a grain special to Africa, which is called couscous, you know?

And conventionally, it's cooked in a couscoussier.

That is a special dish, if you want, a special piece of equipment that you actually have, like, a type of seal on top, and you put it, and the steam cook it, and as it cooks, you bring it together with your hand to make it loose, cook it again, and so forth.

The conventional method of cooking it is quite complicated and takes a long time.

(stove clicking) So what we use here, what's available in the market, is that type of couscous, which is an instant couscous, which cooks very fast, and this is a semolina grain, that is a wheat grain.

You know, whether it's flour, whether it's semolina, or couscous, it is still the wheat fine, I mean, puree, or rather, powdered, very fine in the case of flour, a bit bigger for semolina, and even bigger so for couscous.

So what we have here, and I have a little bit of butter here, we put that in there, and I like to put the fruit, the fruit from Africa here, like fig, dates, all of that type of thing will go well with it.

So we cut those in there, sometime nuts, even, I put in it, you know?

when you cook like that, you try to work with the climatic condition of an area, and use the product which is conventional there.

So what we want to do is to coat all of this nicely with the butter in the bottom, and a dash of salt in there, because I'm putting plain water.

And the quantity of water that I put here is the same quantity than the couscous that I have here.

(water sizzling) So here it is, I put it back in there.

That's all you do, and I shut it off.

I shut off everything.

And there, at that point, it doesn't have to cook.

(spoon tapping) It will just expand and absorb all of that liquid.

You cover it, and within 10 minutes, you're ready to use it, so it's a very easy thing to do.

And after that, what I'd like to do is actually to put the rest of our vegetable in there.

Now, I know that it did not really cook as long as I would like to, but those vegetable cook less, I have tomato, zucchini, chickpeas, those chickpeas, I cook them before in water.

You can get a canned one if you want, it's fine.

The chickpeas usually take a long time to cook.

(food bubbling) So let's say, this has been cooked for about 15, 20 minutes.

(spoon clinking) Those vegetables are actually getting soft now, so it's okay.

I wanna put my zucchini.

You see, often when you cook a lot of vegetable, it's a question of common sense, you know?

If you do a soup, and you have different type of vegetable in it, let's say, if I cook those zucchini in the same time than the carrot, I may cut the carrot very small and the zucchini very big so that they are cooked together.

If I don't do this, then I put the zucchini later, you know, one or the other.

Just a question of common sense.

Likewise with the tomato.

So I have my zucchini here, tomato, just diced tomato.

(dish clattering) I could even have a little more tomato.

Often, those are nice, those so-called plum tomato, you know, because they have a thick wall, and they are very fleshy, you know?

And they are nice to put in stew.

And again, you can vary those vegetables.

In Africa, I have seen gumbo in it, manioc, different type of other thing.

Then my chickpeas with the juice.

So you can see that relatively, in a recipe like that, (glass clinking) which would be plenty for, like, six, eight people, even though we do a recipe for four, I actually, did I put salt in there?

(lips smacking) Yes, maybe a bit more.

You can see that I have a pound and a half of meat, and very divided meat, which is 24 ounces, which is about six ounce of raw meat per person to start with, about three ounce cooked, but I have probably four or five times the amount of vegetable with this.

So this, I'm going to put it on the medium, and while this is cooking, I want to prepare the first course for us, and the first course is a gravlax of salmon.

(plastic crinkling) and that gravlax of salmon is done with that large, beautiful salmon, which is a raised salmon, what we call now Norwegian salmon, or Canadian salmon, or Chile, any of those place it is raised.

Of course, we can buy the filet at your fishmonger.

I'm gonna show you how to take the filet out of it with a large knife.

Carry it around so that you can turn your knife around, put your knife flat on the central bone, and cut it out.

As you can see, if you have a nice knife, which is sharp, it's going to work pretty good.

Now, another thing, too, very often when I do this, because that bone is round, so I lose a little bit of meat here.

So what do I do after?

(blade scraping) I scrape the meat.

You see, from the bone, and all of that, I keep to do a mousse or a tartare, or any of that thing, so I lose nothing at all.

Actually, if you're really broke, you can go to the fishmonger, ask for a couple of bone.

He'll give you a free bone, you can scrape it, and do a tartare for free, you know?

So what we do here, we have the rib cage, so I have to slide my knife, a long knife, underneath.

And you see I keep my knife very flat here so that I can actually just remove that part of the thing, which is the rib cage, you know, where you have the bone there.

And now, the only thing that I have to remove more, there is a series of bone that I can feel right here.

I can feel it with my finger.

I have to remove those with a little plier here, the one after the other.

There is about 28, I think, of those bone.

When I remove those bone, I know that I need glasses.

I kinda feel them more than see them, but it is very important to remove those bone, because after you do a smoked salmon, or you do a gravlax, how we are going to do today, and what happen?

You are trying to cut it into thin slice, and you have those bone.

You feel it gets smaller and smaller, and this is the last one.

Yeah, I can run my hand and feel if everything has been removed, you know, those tiny bone here.

So that's basically all cleaned this way.

What we do so that the seasoning in the gravlax get into the flesh better, I have removed the scale before.

All I want to do is to run my knife very gently, you see.

You run the knife rather very gently that to just cut the surface of the skin in a kind of crisscross pattern so that a little bit of the seasoning can go in, you know?

And that's what we want to do here.

Bring that there.

And now, we are going to season the gravlax.

You know, gravlax, conventionally, you know the gravlax is the Scandinavian country, so you know, we have a mixture of the different part of the world, the Scandinavian country, of course, gravlax, and we started with a couscous, which is part of the Maghreb, you know, the part of the world called the Maghreb, M-A-G-H-R-E-B, I believe, which is that fertile strip of land which comprise Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, just in front of the Atlas Mountain, you know, at the tip of of North Africa.

On the other side of the Atlas Mountain, you have the greatest wasteland in the world, which is the Sahara Desert, but in front of it, you have beautiful skiing in Morocco and so forth, and absolutely beautiful land.

So what I have here, I have salt, a bit of sugar, and all of the seasoning that I have on the table here.

I have nutmeg, I have cumin, I have cayenne paper, very, very hot, I have paprika, and here, this is allspice.

You can change those, of course, if you want, but this is our first curing.

(glass clinking) Now, the curing, of course, is the effect of the salt.

The salt will cure the fish or the meat, and by curing, actually, it draws out the moisture and deprive the bacteria of a necessary living condition.

(spoon scraping) So this is the action of curing, so I have that mixture, I have that mixture here.

So you know, when you have a smoked salmon, a smoked salmon, it feels cured.

Usually, it's cured with salt, sometime a bit of sugar.

That's about it.

In our case here, we put a lot of other type of seasoning with it.

And what I want to do is to put that in plastic wrap like that, it's about the best way of wrapping it, you know?

This to put it aside, and unless you have the very large one, the conventional one is fairly narrow, but you would probably need two of those, and I can smell my stew cooking.

I can smell it, that it's bubbling a lot, so maybe I'm gonna put that on a bit lower.

That's it.

So my gravlax is there, I'm going to put a little bit of this first to go through the skin here, and so forth.

Rub it, (glass clinking) turn it on the other side, gently, and then put the rest of it here, which I'm going to spread nicely, and that will take about 12 hours of curing, you know?

By the time it's finished curing, I could use it just as is.

I would have a type of gravlax, you know, but we're going to do one step further.

In any case, to do that, just wrap it tightly.

And most of the juice which is going to come, and all of the salt and the seasoning will be absorbed into the salmon itself.

And by the time 10, 12 hours later, you won't even see it.

It'll have disappeared.

And of course, I have one which is done right here, which has been cooking for about that amount of time, which has been curing for about that amount of time, about 10, 12 hours.

(tray thumping) And now, I open it, and you can see it has a beautiful reddish color.

Now, everything has been absorbed in it.

You know, there is basically no liquid left.

The second step of what we do, which is a bit unusual, because, as I say, you could use it this way, is molasses, dark molasses and soy sauce.

I have about two tablespoon of soy sauce that I'm going to put with about a quarter of a cup of dark molasses, you know?

And that is going to give a very special taste, and also a very special color to my salmon, a dark, rich color, you know?

So this, your best bet is really to put it back on your tray so that it doesn't go all over the place, otherwise, you'll get yelled at, at me, so I put it back here.

Okay, we put our dark mixture here.

I want to put some on the other side, so I want to turn it.

It doesn't matter which side here, because you know we are going to turn it in the refrigerator, (spoon clinking) and all of that is going to go on top of it.

So that's an interesting, quite interesting cure, a bit different than what is conventionally done.

So, (smacks lips) I'm gonna wrap this again, tight, and occasionally, you know, if I have that in the refrigerator, I may turn it this way for a few hours, and turn it the other way.

Clearly, it doesn't matter that much.

It should cure nice here.

What we do, however, after like, a day, you know, that has been curing this way, I take it out, just with your hand, sponge out a little bit of the liquid, there is not that much liquid left, actually, and then you put it on a wire rack in the refrigerator for a good day so that it dries, and that's what I have here.

Actually it's even better if you leave it for a couple of days, you know?

And I have one here, (tray thumping) which has been drying out.

As you can see, here it is other.

So this is a beautiful salmon that I'm going to carve, and show you here.

I need usually a long knife, you know, to carve.

I want to cut it from the center a little bit so you can see the color that I have here.

I have a bunch of salmon which has been cut from the center, you know, right here.

(plastic crinkling) You can see the beautiful edge and the cured center.

So, you wanna hold your knife flat, gently, and cut it into a thin strip like this.

Actually, you know, your best bet will be to have a knife even thinner than that, but it's okay.

And another thing, too, sometime you have board, you know?

You put a board where you can put your salmon on top of it.

There is special board for that, where the salmon doesn't slide, and you don't dirty your table, you know?

Actually I have one of those right here that I wanted to show you, because there is some rib in the center of it, you see, so that salmon doesn't move when I slide it.

Another thing, too, often it slides on the table.

You can always wet a paper towel, put it underneath, and that will hold it on the table.

So again, you see, I have those thin slice.

You can see that it's basically transparent, a beautiful color.

So we can continue cutting for a big party.

What we want to do here is to arrange some slice directly on a plate, and with some salad.

We have different type of garnish.

You can season that with a little bit of vinegar and oil, your salad, if you want.

Actually, you can leave it plain, also, because you can season the top of your salmon.

(cork popping) And we can even put, sometimes I put cracker or potato chip underneath.

What I want to do, however, you know, it's seasoned salad like this, but a salad which kind of hold is shape, you know, so that not only do I have color, but when I put that on top of it, it kind of fall nicely, you know, in different, you know, without being too flat on the table like this.

So that would be a beautiful thing.

You can prepare it this way, also, with capers, you know?

Capers here, olive oil on top, oop, a bit too much here.

And now, we want to see whether our couscous is ready.

(spoon clattering) I think it is, right there.

(lid clattering) (food bubbling) And we want to serve it, we serve the couscous like in other part of North Africa, where they serve the seafood in.

And you can see this is totally cooked and very fluffy now.

I may not put all of it in there, but again, what you want to put is to put it in the center of it, to do a big nest there, and place the meat in the center of it.

Meat and vegetable, mostly vegetable, and as you see, this is an absolutely terrific stew.

You should have quite a lot of liquid left, as I have here, because you want to sponge that liquid with the juice.

You know, the liquid, you wanna sponge it with the couscous, and this is about how you would want to present it on the table.

Beautiful, healthy, a great dish from North Africa.

And this is the national dish of North Africa, the Maghreb.

You know, food is a real international language, you know, wherever you go on a journey, traveling, if you can share food with people, even though you don't speak the language, you make friend.

Food and wine, and this is what we have today, a mixture of different part of the world, but mostly North Africa.

And I have that salmon first, that sometime I serve actually at home with some onion.

You see those onion, I washed them under water so that they don't discolorate, and you put that on top.

How beautiful it is, you see?

And with this one here, we could have those little triangle, or rather, yes, triangle of dark bread with butter, if you want, and that really dress it up.

And of course, the couscous, the couscous have everything in it, a little bit of meat, a lot of vegetable, the grain around it, it's a total dish.

And with that, at the end, we have dry and fresh fruit, a lot of dry fruit in North Africa, you know, dry prune, dry fig, dry apricot, and so forth, and that's what you want to have.

And with that, a strong, deep wine, you know, you could have wine from North Africa.

Here, we have a Chianti Classico, which is very good with that, a very robust, (wine trickling) very harmonious wine, well-balanced.

It's going to go very well with it.

Be daring a little bit, go to the market, buy couscous, a little bit of lamb, and do that great dish for the family.

They're going to love it.

And don't forget to put a little bit of harissa, which is the hot sauce, on your couscous, and it's done by mixing the harissa with a little bit of the juice from the couscous cooking.

And I'm sure you are going to love it just as I love making it for you.

Happy cooking.