(upbeat jazzy music plays) - 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 changed: the right technique.

Thirty 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.

(soft upbeat music plays) You know, most cooking shows are about recipes.

Well, this is not a show about recipes.

It's a show about technique.

Even before you start to cook, there is basic knowledge and basic skill that will make you comfortable in the kitchen, from peeling an onion without crying, to carving a turkey, to making an omelet.

Everything starts with technique because once you have the basics, then you can follow your imagination and never go wrong.

So if you're ready for a cooking lesson that I hope will last a lifetime, let's get started.

(music fades) Now, the first thing that you have to learn in the kitchen is to tie your towel to your apron.

This is very important.

So first, I have an apron where the tie goes all around so I can tie it in front, so that I can use this for my towel.

Now, look at the towel.

First, you take it at the corner to have a long thing like this and slide it under your tie once, and a second time again, and tighten it here.

Now, this is the way you have it because, you see, it holds nicely to the tie, but if you need it to grab something hot, it's very easy to pull it out, so it become almost a second nature, you know, for the chef to tie his apron all the time.

After the apron, of course, and the towel comes the knife, and as you see, the knife are an extension of your finger, and you need knife all the time.

And when I say you need knife, you need sharp knife.

It's very important.

Now the edge of the knife, the cutting edge of the knife, is made of teeth, tiny teeth, like any cutting instrument is made of teeth.

Now, when you take that knife and you start chopping on the table and banging it around, those teeth are going to get out of whack.

What do you do?

You have to realign the teeth.

You take what we call a steel or a knife sharpener.

It doesn't actually (metal clangs) sharpen the knife.

It realign the teeth that it is keep the knife sharp so you have to run it on top of it.

A lot of people are going to run it (metal clangs repeatedly) very fast like this, and that really doesn't do anything because what do you do here?

You cover maybe one inch from the center of the blade.

So cover the whole blade.

Start at the tang.

(metal clanks lightly) Finish at the tip.

(knife whooshes on steel) Whether you do it this way (knife whooshes on steel) or whether you do it against the grain this way, you have this (metal clangs) to protect yourself (knife taps steel) (metal clangs) here.

Now, the first thing, then, is to cover the whole blade.

The second thing is to apply pressure.

(knife whooshes on steel) Just don't let it run on to apply pressure.

(knife whooshes on steel) And the third thing, which it may be more important, don't move your wrist.

You have about 25, 30 degree angle here.

If you move your wrist, you're going to scrape out all those teeth.

You start this way on the up, (knife whooshes on steel) scrape out the teeth, (knife whooshes on steel) and likewise on the other side.

So keep that angle constant, (knife whooshes on steel) apply pressure, and cover the whole blade.

I have hundreds of knife at home, you know, because I'm a freak about knife, although you need basically three knife.

You need a long knife this way or this way, depending on your hand how big it is.

This is a chopping knife.

(knife taps counter) I need a utility knife about seven, eight-inch like that.

(knife clatters gently) And I need a paring knife.

Basically, with (metal clinks lightly) those three knife, you can do everything, even though it's nice (knife clatters) to have serrated edge and so forth.

I use all of them, (metal clanks lightly) but basically, you need three.

Now, occasionally, when you're finished using the edge, that is, by the time you've been using the steel for six months or a year, there is no more edge.

Those teeth have disappeared.

This is not going to do anything anymore.

You need a stone to create a new edge.

There is small stone like this, and you have different, you know, different texture in the stone that is this is much finer, this is much rougher.

This is the real big stone that butcher use.

There is three face, as you can see, (stone clatters) a rough one, semi rough, and very smooth.

Now, in those, when you use the stone like this, first you use mineral oil.

Now, you can use a stone like that with water, but the stone that always to be soaked into the water to be saturated with the water, it dries out very fast.

Then we use mineral oil.

Don't use olive oil or other type of vegetable oil you have in your kitchen.

It's way too rough.

It will destroy your stone.

You need a mineral oil, and after you use it with the mineral oil, you cannot go back with water.

The reverse is not the same.

You can start with water, eventually go (taps bottle) with mineral oil, it's fine.

Now, what you do, you put some on top of it, and spread it out and use your knife.

(metal clanks) Again, usually about 25 to 30 degree angle, (knife whooshes over stone) and you're going to run your knife onto it to create a new edge.

Now, why do I put mineral oil?

Well, you can look at this here.

It is dirty.

What is the dirt here?

This is actually (knife clangs on stone) the fiber or little residue or little pieces of stone that I have in there and the metal.

If I don't remove those little pieces by rubbing it on top with the knife and reincorporate that powder if you want it sown into the stone, and the stone end up being glazed like a piece of marble, and it slide.

It has lost all its abrasiveness if you want.

So you have to keep it clean with water or with stone.

From that stone, you move to this one (stone clatters lightly) and eventually, (knife clinks) the honing stone (stone clatters) that is honing the finishing of the knife, which is going to give it the edge.

I mean, of course, on a smaller knife, you go a little faster.

(knife whooshes on stone) Again, the movement is the same (knife whooshes on stone) this way or this way.

This is so you need to spend 20, 25 minutes with a knife, you know, to create a new edge.

Now, you've created a new edge.

You take your steel again.

(knife whooshes on steel) For another six months or so, you are ready to use it.

Now, what is a sharp knife?

I go to people how then they say, "Oh, we sharpened the knife because you know we are coming," and so forth, and I look and I say, which side did you sharpen, you know?

What is a sharp knife?

It different for different people, but I tell you, I have a rotten tomato here, over ripe and soft.

If you take a rotten tomato like that, not one hard, and you can take your knife and run right through it like this, (plate clinks) then it is likely that that knife is sharp.

(knife clinks on plate) This is what a sharp knife is.

There are different technique you can use to achieve different result with a knife.

The first, maybe most important, is the knife position.

This is called a French knife.

It has a return here, and it clear your finger.

Chef's knife or French knife.

When you use that knife (knife taps repeatedly) like that, your finger are clear from the board.

Of course, when you use the knife horizontally, most of the time you have to clear up the table and work here.

Otherwise, if you were here, your finger are in the way.

So you work on this part of the board.

You keep that knife here, (knife taps) you put the other hand this way that the hand which hold the food.

Always this way, never this way, or you're going to cut the end of your finger?

(knife taps) Always this way.

Be sure also that thumb stay in the back here because very often, people do that.

The end of the thumb is there, (knife taps) it goes again.

So keep the thumb in the back.

(knife taps lightly) This goes there.

The knife now comes against the knuckle.

It can be right in the center (knife taps board) here or a little more again that finger.

It's immaterial depending (knife taps board) how you feel comfortable with it.

Now, that hand is a dummy.

It just go up and down.

(knife clatters) This is that hand which other everything.

(knife taps board) If that hand push the knife, the knife follow.

Wherever the knife goes, (knife taps rapidly) wherever the hand go, rather the knife, stay glued to it.

(knife taps rapidly) That the only way I can look at you and chop without cutting my finger.

Be sure also lift only the back of the knife.

Lift the front and go down.

You don't have to go fast.

Eventually, you will lift up (knife taps lightly) the whole knife and start cutting this way.

Now remember that you never really crush.

You have to have the motion of cutting, either cutting down and forward or down and backward.

(knife taps lightly) That's important.

And now, we're going to chop parsley.

This is flat parsley with the stem.

You can pick up all of the leaf if you want, but conventionally, in the kitchen, what we do, (knife taps) just to cut the part, even though there is little pieces of stem left here, it's perfectly fine for chopped parsley and that part of it goes into stock.

That's what we do, a bouquet garni seasoning, or go into the stock.

Now, there, when you do your chopped parsley, you gather that into a little bundle like that, and you slice it, (knife taps gently) just what I said, (knife taps rapidly) by gluing your finger to the knife.

So you do it once.

It's halfway done, then you put it together again into a little bundle, and you do it again.

(knife taps rapidly) Now, a lot of people, they put their palm of their hand, the palm of the hand, yes, on the table with the point of the knife there and chop back and forth.

(knife taps) It is fine, but it really doesn't work out that well because there you're crushing more than cutting.

You see the idea is to put the point of the knife first (knife taps) and the back of the knife after to get that motion of cutting, (knife taps rapidly) and this is what it give.

Your chopped parsley (knife taps rapidly) that we can put right there.

The technique become very, (knife whooshes across board) very important there and, of course, the knife, being very sharp, it doesn't crush it.

It cut it properly.

(knife whooshes across board) And that's it to chop parsley.

Now, if you want to chop basil, for example, I have basil here, the basil is very tender.

You see, if I take that leaf of basil and crush it like this or press it, well, within five minutes, I'm going to have black line all over the place.

That basil is bruised.

So you avoid bruising the basil.

We do with the basil, taking the whole top, again, keep the stem for to put in stock or whatever.

We take those beautiful leaves of basil here.

I can smell it.

There is many different type of basil.

And we gather it together to roll this into a little bundle like this, and that bundle now, we slice it, (knife taps repeatedly) see, down and forward and into what we call a chiffonade.

Chiffonade from the word chiffon.

That is, it's a little bit wrinkle-like.

Like chiffon, the material itself.

So now we do a chiffonade with basil.

You can do a chiffonade with lettuce, anything which is going to get wrinkled, and as you can see, I have chiffonade, and it is not bruised there.

Well, we can put that here also.

(hand whooshes across board) A chiffonade.

Now, of course, one of the things, the most used, is onion, and there is different area of onion from the small flat onion which are very used now, Italian onion, the red onion, the yellow onion, and any of those, some are stronger, some are finer.

It's purely a question of taste.

First, you want peel the onion.

Some leave the root.

Some remove the root.

(onion skin crackles) In addition, cut the front like this.

If you want to leave the root, leave the part of the root there.

Now, it is not a question of removing necessarily one layer of onion; it's a question of removing enough layers so the onion is totally clean (onion skin crackles) You know, sometime you need to remove two layer.

As you can see, for example here, that layer is kind of fibrous and a little bit leathery.

That would be removed, too.

So sometime you can (onion skin crackles) leave the root right there.

(knife clatters) It will help in the chopping a little bit.

Chopping, again, it's very important to keep things flat, so (knife taps on board) first, I cut that in half.

It's much easier now with something flat than something round.

Again, the knife against this, and I will go up and down.

(knife taps board) Notice that I'm going to start from here in order to do that.

(knife taps rapidly) This is the slicing, (knife taps rapidly) the slicing of onion up to the root there.

(knife clatters) Separate.

Now, the onion, of course, will make you cry, and this is a compound of sulfuric acid in onion, which makes you cry.

Now, if your knife is very, very sharp, then you won't cry (knife clatters) because it doesn't crush it.

It doesn't release some of that liquid.

It very sharp.

Now, to chop an onion, you do it that, and I start here, you know?

I don't start here and crush.

I start here and go down.

So you cut your onion (knife chops rapidly) to chop your onion, rather.

You cut this with that the whole thing is cut into slice but kept at the root.

Then now you keep those slice together, and you cut across, like that, with your onion, and finally, in that direction.

(knife chops rapidly) And now, I have, as you can see, very finely chopped onion (knife whooshes across board) without crying too much because I haven't crushed the onion.

Now, that compound of sulfuric acid that I mentioned before, it's what will discolor the onion, make it dark, and sting your eyes.

But that compound of sulfuric acid is water soluble.

So what do you do?

If you want, if I'm going to saute those onion, doesn't make any difference.

But if I use those onion with caviar in the dining room, for example, or with a steak tartare or with a carpaccio or with a gazpacho, then you wash the onion.

You wash the onion a little bit in cold water like that.

That wash up that compound of sulfuric acid.

Then you put it into a towel (strainer taps) to clean up your onion, press a little bit (juice trickles) of the juice, or rather, of the water from the onion here.

And now that onion could be done one day ahead.

That onion is going to stay white and fluffy just like this (piano music plays) for several day in the dining room.

And now, one of the most important part of my cooking, particularly because I love garlic, it's garlic.

Now, you see head of garlic like this.

You remove a little bit of (garlic paper crackles) the paper on top.

You press it.

Now, when I go to the market, I look at the garlic like that, and I press it and see whether they are very firm and tight like those are.

Now, to separate those cloves, you put it slightly on the bias with the palm of your hand.

If you hit it there (hand thuds garlic), it will separate those cloves.

(garlic paper crackles) Now, there is two essential oil in garlic, which need to get together to give you the smell and the strong taste of what garlic is.

Unless, you crush the garlic to get those essential oil together, then the garlic is going to be very mild.

It mean that there are recipe we do in French cooking like a roast chicken with 40 clove of garlic because we keep the garlic in the shell.

Now if you want to peel your garlic, one of the first thing that you do, the first thing that you do, you cut the end of the stem here.

The stem has to be removed anyway so it should be removed now.

So I cut the end of the stem of that garlic.

Now, because I cut the end of the stem, if I crush it a little bit (knife taps garlic) like this, that will release the skin of the garlic.

(knife whooshes across board) See?

This, (knife taps garlic) a little bit.

The flesh is going to release from this.

Now, that garlic at that point, if I were to use it just as a sliced garlic like this (knife taps rapidly) to flavor some oil and all that for pasta and all that, that's going to be stronger than the garlic in there, but it's still fairly mild.

No, by the time I crush it, and I will crush it right there, now what do I do here?

You can crush it (garlic cracks) a little bit like this.

Otherwise, it tend to get away from you.

This is what my daughter says.

So you press it so it can and then you hit it (taps knife) farther to really crush it.

I mean, directly, I do it directly (bangs knife) this way, but she tell me when she does that, it goes all over the place (bangs knife).

Now, this is crushed now, so I can put the palm of my hand on the table and rock the knife.

(knife taps) I don't have now to cut it this way because the fiber already broken.

(knife taps rapidly) So I rock it to chop the garlic going back and forth.

Now, you clean your knife on the garlic this way and start again (knife taps rapidly) and then, you have a real puree of garlic and of course, the puree of garlic here, it is really were the strongest.

Again, it depends the way you use it; that if that garlic you were to saute it, and if you burn it a little bit, you're going to smell it right through the room.

So you have to be very careful.

If, on the other hand, you put that into a stew, and it cook for an hour-and-a-half or two hours, then the taste is going to get very, very mild.

(bright music plays) I have here a regular Boston lettuce, which has a certain way of doing it.

The Boston lettuce is if you grab the Boston lettuce and press it, too, it's going to bruise.

So you have to be careful.

Now, the first thing that you do, you take the back of it, and this is the stem that we used to call, years ago when I worked as an apprentice in France, we called it the (foreign word) of salad, and we used to cook that a la Grecque, like a salad, like a cold thing.

And, of course, when you are in a restaurant, you have 30 or 40 or 50 of them that it's worth it.

For me, I slice it (knife taps rapidly) and put that in my salad.

Now the back, (knives clatter) I look at the first leaf of the salad, and the first leaf of the salad around, usually the top, is pretty tough, so I'm going to remove this.

The rib is pretty hard there, so I cut on each side of the rib.

(lettuce crunches) It mean that I have the top of the salad.

I have those two piece here and the rib.

I'm using those two piece and discarding this.

Now, I'm doing that basically, mostly, whoop, all around (lettuce crunches) my salad.

This is very difficult to get a salad well done.

When I have done that all around at the second layer, I cut maybe a little bit of the end if I think it's wilted.

Now, I cut in the center of the stem.

Now, I keep the stem.

The stem is more tender at the second level.

(lettuce crunches) And finally, after I have done it a couple of times around (lettuce crunches) like this, then I take the whole heart and cut it directly (lettuce crunches) on the heart like this, but the important part is that I don't want to bruise the salad.

Now, basically what you do after, and even the small leaf, you can leave them whole, you have to put that in a lot of water.

In a lot of water.

And what people do very often, they have a big bowl of water, they smash it in it, then pour the bowl into a colander, which, of course, put all of the dirt back into the salad.

So not only though you have to have enough water when you mix it to have that much water underneath so the water, the dirt fall down, you lift it out of the water gently without pressing it like that.

If we're pressing, you destroy the salad, and you put it into a spinner that I have here.

And the spinner is a great (spinner rumbles) thing because it will remove the extra water that you have in it because remember, if you have two or three tablespoon of water left in that thing, what is going to destroy your dressing?

You know the amount of water that you may have hid spinning around, it will destroy the dressing, so be sure it's dry.

Be sure that you mix it at the right moment.

That is, just before you serve it.

And this is what a great salad is.

In French, sometime the leek are called les asperge des pauvre, the asparagus of the poor 'cause leek are very inexpensive as opposed to asparagus, which are very expensive.

But in the US, I would think that leek are probably as expensive, if not more, than asparagus.

So I wanna show you how to clean a leek properly.

You see, the leek, I use practically all of the green, too.

In fact, when I get them from the garden, I don't even cut the end as it has been cut here.

So the only thing which is removed is that first part here.

(leek creaks) Then I look at it, and I probably would remove (knife clatters) that first layer because (leek creaks) it looked pretty tough and fibrous.

As you see, it's very dirty.

Now, it probably tender up to here.

Now, it start getting damaged here, so I will cut that here.

Now, the second leaf, I look where it's light, light green.

I'll go probably up to here, (leek creaks) the third one here, and so forth.

So the idea is not to remove the whole thing as I see done in many kitchen.

The idea is to as it's more and more tender, to keep what's tender (leek creaks) and the center part there, (leek crunches) you know, lighter green is tender.

Now, I don't throw that out.

I wash this carefully, and I put that in a special, usually I use that, at home, into one of those half a gallon or quart of where I buy milk, those carton of milk.

When it's empty of milk, of course, I wash it out and keep it in the refrigerator, in the freezer, and put that in there along with the juice of tomato or whatever.

Next time I do a stock, I grab this and put it directly into the stock.

So now what you do, you want to cut that open with a knife this way (leek squeaks) to really expose the center and wash it carefully, but you see, you want that nice pale yellow or light green color.

You wash this, and this is what you want.

What you want to do.

I'll put this one here.

I have a lot of dirt on the table, as you can see.

(knives clatter) So you clean it out, and I'll take this one which is washed here.

And we can see in the same way, so you really have to wash in between to take all of this.

Now that part of the leek here, you know, the top part of the leek is usually cut this way or we do it vinaigrette.

In vinaigrette, you know, (knife taps) so you can leave it all like the asparagus or otherwise cut it like that for soup or different type of thing or garnish or stuffing or whatever.

(knife taps rapidly) So this would be a sliced leek that you cut across, you know?

Great with soup.

For me, the greatest soup of all is leek and potato.

Now, you continue doing the whole leak this way, but if you wanna do a julienne, for example, then you use only that part of the leek for the julienne.

So, for the julienne, you keep that part of the leek, and you cut it in half.

(knife taps) As you can see, it's already being organized by Mother Nature in nice slice.

Sometime, look at this one, it's slightly fibrous in the center, is a bit tough so I remove it.

I would think that my julienne would be big enough this way.

I mean, long enough like that, so I cut it in half, and I keep it like that, as I say, and fold it again in half, (knife taps rapidly) bring it this way and start slicing it.

We'll refer to a julienne.

A julienne (knife taps rapidly) is the name of a lady called Julienne Dau Blaise that goes back to the 18th century and especially Nouvelle cuisine.

A lot things cut into tiny strip like that we call a julienne, huh?

Again, carrot, leek, (knife taps rapidly) anything like that, we cut mushroom, we cut into a julienne, which is what I have here.

So you know with one of those, I still have as much as that you do quite a lot of julienne.

That, you can blanch, of course.

Serve as a garnish to your soup.

Serve that with a poached fish.

You can use it quite a lot.

(jazzy piano music plays) 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.