Jacques Pepin and Jean-Claude Szurdak make pastries in the back kitchen at KQED during the taping of Essential Pepin.

Jacques Pépin recently filmed his new cooking series Essential Pépin at KQED, which will premiere in fall 2011 on PBS stations nationwide. It breaks new ground from previous series due to its thematic nature, with whole shows based on subjects such as poultry, shellfish, soup, and fruit desserts and easy recipes that are practical for the home chef. This seasoned icon of culinary television shot 26 episodes in three weeks at a pace of two to three episodes per day; Connecticut, where Pépin calls home, was simply loaning him to us for that time.

Backstage, the kitchen staff, which included Culinary Producers Christine Swett and David Shalleck as well as Pépin's longtime friend and right-hand man Jean-Claude Szurdak, would arrive at 7:30 a.m. to begin preparing ingredients for Pépin to cook on set as well as duplicates of the dishes (or "twins"). Pépin himself was already well into kitchen preparations when we arrived on one of those final mornings at 9:30 a.m. We didn't expect him to take such a hands-on role in the production kitchen, but there he was, showing young chefs and interns his quick tips on how to break down a chicken and open and clean shellfish. He was relaxed and happy to answer their questions, offering a valuable mentorship.

A behind-the-scenes slideshow of the taping of Jacques Pépin's new series Essential Pépin.
Photos by Wendy Goodfriend

There was a brief moment to speak with Pépin after he finished prepping in the production kitchen and before he started filming his shellfish episode. We wondered what this pioneer of culinary television, who won an Emmy in 2001 for his work with Julia Child, thinks of the generation of food celebrities on television.

"Frankly I don't really do much [food TV watching]," he admitted. "I'm kind of addicted to news so it's more MSNBC, CNN, or something like this for me. But if you have an open mind you can always learn something from anyone you cook with -- sometimes you learn what not to do as well as what to do but you do learn something."

"Everyone looks at food in a different way, and when I go to the Food & Wine festival in Aspen, for example, there is 5000 food people there and then you have Lidia Bastianich, Mario Batali, Emeril Lagasse, everyone is there. And certainly I will have people who come up to me and say, 'Out of all the food shows on television, you are the best.' And the reason they say this is that the people who don't like me don’t come and talk to me. Only the people who like me come and talk to me. You'll have another group who will come up to, I don’t know, Bobby Flay and say, 'Hey, I look at all the shows on television, you're the best,' and so forth. And that's the way it should be."

"I like to have fun on television and for people to have fun and have a good time looking at it," he added, "but ultimately I try to teach something."

At last, it was almost show time. The Essential Pépin set blended a dream kitchen with peeks of an office study and a verdant backyard on either side. It looked amazingly natural, as if it was transplanted straight from his Connecticut home. The lenses of five large cameras were trained overhead and all around the stove area.

Dissecting the multiple angles splashed across a bank of screens in the control room, director Bruce Franchini and series producer Tina Salter patiently tweezed out inconsistencies that would disrupt the show's continuity, whether accidentally substituting chives for scallions or taking a dish out of the wrong oven. But while it was meticulous, it wasn't as serious as surgery in there; overheard, the opening strains of the theme from Rawhide ("rollin', rollin', rollin'!") sung by a crew member nearly each time the cameras and audio would start recording.

"Ooh, that's great," exclaimed Franchini, as Pépin dropped his crab cakes in hot oil in the next room. "We love sizzle, we love steam!"

The preparation of each dish took about 45 minutes to film. It was impressive to see almost no time wasted in the process. Both Pépin and his daughter, Claudine remained cool throughout the three hours it took to complete the first episode of the day; summoning up the poise to appear fresh even at times when they needed to repeat either a short step in the cooking process or a sentence or, in Claudine's case, when she needed to eat two oysters in quick succession. The same graceful professionalism was to be said of Claudine's adorable young daughter Shorey, who joined her mother and grandfather to adventurously taste some of the dishes on camera.

Being inside the studio as the episode unfolded was an exciting sensory experience for everything except our poor taste buds, which didn’t get to be indulged in the same way that our eyes, ears, and nose did. As Pépin dropped the beginnings of clam fritters into hot oil, the sizzle was amplified to an almost concert-like level. When he lifted the lid on the pot of mussels, which had been boiling in garlic-spiked broth, and poured in a measure of wine, the intoxicating scent seemed equally boosted, though we know there’s no such thing as smell-o-vision in real life.

After the cameras took their close-up "beauty shots" of each completed dish, they were whisked away to a back copy room that had been temporarily converted into a guerilla-style photography studio. Bay Area Bites Producer Wendy Goodfriend carefully shot pictures as Cara Miller helped David Shalleck style the plate with the use of tweezers and a delicate paintbrush dipped in water. The images will appear on the Essential Pépin website, which will feature all the full episodes online along with three printable recipes for each show. The website's launch will coincide with the program's premiere in fall 2011.

Essential Pépin the book will contain 750 recipes and 200 of Pépin's own illustrations as well as a three-plus hour DVD that Pépin says will amount to a wonderful "apprenticeship" for any home cook. The television series uses approximately 150 of these recipes. In all of these concurrent projects, his techniques can be used to cook from any book or straight from the heart.

Follow Pépin on Facebook and Twitter for more news and timely updates. Visit Jacques' official website at KQED Food. And for a fascinating timeline of the life of this culinary icon, be sure to read his autobiography and visit the archives of KQED's TV program Jacques Pépin: The Apprentice — Then & Now.

KQED celebrates master chef Jacques Pépin's 75th birthday with a series of events, benefiting KQED and the production of his upcoming new TV series The Essential Pépin.

Thursday, September 30
Celebrate Southern France's cuisine with Jacques Pépin and Chef Roland Passot at Left Bank Brasserie in Menlo Park. A wonderful time is guaranteed when these two French friends get together both in and out of the kitchen. Join KQED for a Bonne Fête Dinner and Live Auction with KQED host Greg Sherwood. Auction items include dinner with Jacques Pépin, seats to watch the taping of his show in the KQED studio, two pieces of Jacques' original artwork and a farmers' market tour followed by brunch at Chef Roland's home.

Left Bank Brasserie view menu (pdf)
635 Santa Cruz Ave, Menlo Park
6pm Happy Birthday Dinner and Live Auction
$150 per person
Get Tickets

Saturday, October 9
Join Jacques for "Fantastic Food, Terrific Techniques and a Tempting Taste" and be present for a taping of a special TV fundraising show. Experience all this in the enchanting underwater fantasy setting at Farallon Restaurant. Jacques demonstrates recipes, chats with Chef/owner Mark Franz and KQED's Greg Sherwood. You can sample the food and join in the toast with mimosas and a surprise birthday cake for Jacques.

Farallon Restaurant
450 Post Street, San Francisco
10am to noon OR 1pm to 3pm
$95 per person
Get Tickets

Thursday, October 14
Wine and Sustainable Seafood Hors d'oeuvres Reception
Toast and sing happy birthday to Jacques Pépin in San Francisco while basking in the panoramic views of the Bay at this spectacular setting. Chef/Owner Mark Franz, Executive Chef Parke Ulrich, and Executive Pastry Chef Emily Luchetti will be there to help celebrate.

Waterbar*
399 The Embarcadero South (between Folsom and Harrison)
6pm - 8pm Wine and Sustainable Seafood Hors d'oeuvres Reception
$125 per person
Get Tickets

*Waterbar will also be offering a Jacques Pépin Inspired Special Menu on October 14. For dinner reservations, call 415.284.9922

Reservations for Jacques Pépin's 75th Birthday celebrations are available through City Box Office at 415.392.4400 or cityboxoffice.com

Sometimes it's best not to tell your dinner guests what you are about to serve them.

Sometimes you should just watch their eyes light up as they try that first bite, and then reveal what you've prepared.

This is one of those dishes.

Tonnato, otherwise known as tuna sauce, is a classic summer dish from the Piedmont of Italy, the northwestern part of the boot.

The Piemontese have been making tuna sauces for centuries. Sophisticated food lovers flock to the Piedmont every year, partly to try distinct regional dishes such as vitello tonnato (veal with tuna sauce).

Yet if you were to tell your dinner guests that you were serving whipped tuna and anchovies as part of an appetizer, some of them might be tempted to say, "Can we just move onto the entree?"

Although there are endless variations on tonnato, every recipe I've seen includes tuna, anchovies, capers, olive oil and some type of acid, either lemon juice and vinegar.

At Oliveto, the restaurant where I work in Oakland, Chef Paul Canales makes a silky smooth tonnato by blending the basic ingredients with trickles of cream and olive oil.

At a recent dinner, we served it with sugar snap peas, cauliflower and other vegetables.

There are other interpretations. Vintage recipes call for whipped hard-boiled eggs in a tonnato, whereas some modern recipes include mayonnaise (homemade only, please). Jacques Pepin adds a little Dijon mustard to his tonnato, a French corruption that would likely spark riots in Italy.

Whatever the combination, your goal is to create a glistening sauce that is rich with the flavor of tuna, seasoned by background notes of capers and anchovy.

My version has a more rustic texture than what is served at Oliveto, but it is similar in taste and execution. You can see how I served the sauce with some vegetables from my garden, including squash, green beans and tomato.

Feel free to put your own twist on this dish and accompany it with a variety of vegetables or meats, such as chicken or turkey. But try not to skimp on the basic ingredients. High-quality tuna (or canned tuna), anchovies, capers and olive oil are essential.

Dijon mustard? Only if you want to trigger a riot.

Tonnato with Summer Vegetables

Serves: 6-8 appetizer-size portions

Ingredients:
12 ounces of fresh ahi tuna (or canned tuna)
6 anchovy fillets, rinsed and dried
1/4 cup olive oil or more
1/2 cup cream or an equal amount of milk and unsalted butter at room temperature
3 tablespoons capers
1 tablespoon lemon juice
Vegetables of your choice
Salt and pepper

Preparation:

1. Cut up and cook your vegetables, either by steaming or blanching. Try to include some that remain crunchy, like string beans or carrots and cook them in separate batches until just tender. Plunge in an ice bath and drain.

2. If using fresh tuna, add oil and tuna steaks to a skillet and heat until just barely bubbling. Maintain that gentle heat, turning once or twice until tuna is just cooked through. Do not overcook.

3. Add tuna and oil (or canned tuna) to blender or food processor. Add other ingredients, except for vegetables, and blend until smooth. Add additional cream or milk if mixture is too thick. [edited for clarity]

4. Your final sauce should be smooth enough to barely pour, without being runny. If still too thick, add more olive oil. (Go on. Just add it. It's good for you.)

5. After checking for seasoning, pour or spoon your tonnato onto a plate, arrange your vegetables in an artistic fashion and serve.

Note: Tonatto can be made in advance and refrigerated for a day or two. The flavors will meld and enrich the sauce. Bring to room temperature and rewhip before serving.

KQED's October issue of The Guide has a little piece about the new Jacques Pépin show, More Fast Food My Way, premiering this Saturday. I must to admit to snorting when I saw that the article's timeline of a day in the life of the show started at 10:30 a.m., because the back kitchen was there between 7:00 and 7:30 a.m., and Jacques himself was in not too much later.

We'd all be prepping, and he'd come in for his coffee blanched with Straus cream. After a few sips, he'd quietly look around at what we were doing and that's when we knew it was our time. Laura Pauli (Cucina Testa Rossa around these and other parts) told me that every morning working on this show -- she's worked on past shows with him -- was nothing less than a private cooking lesson with Jacques Pépin. She could not have been more right. Except, they weren't just cooking lessons, they were lifelong memories.

Going down the line, Jacques would answer any questions we had about the recipes and explain in detail -- often demonstrating or watching and correcting -- exactly how he wanted the fish portioned or how much of the broccoli he wanted trimmed. Because Jacques is the eternal teacher, he wanted to demonstrate his prepping and cooking techniques as much as possible on the show. He didn't want everything done for him, all neat and tidy and magic-of-television perfect. So, if he had a special way of drumming out pomegranate seeds that hadn't been filmed yet, he wanted to be able to do that.

Sometimes things would change mid-stream and the prep we had done in the morning was tossed. For instance, maybe the recipe called for 1 cup leeks, diced. Well, 1 cup leeks, perfectly diced went out to the set. But maybe while going over the episode's blocking, it was decided that we had enough time for Jacques to show how to clean and dice leeks. As food runner (the other half of my duties), it was my job to dash back to the kitchen and grab or holler out for undiced leeks, make sure the ends were trimmed just enough (not all the way, but tidied up the way Jacques liked them), and run them back to the set.

A few episodes later, I finally learned that the way to keep me from constantly running hither and yon was to have all ingredients in every possible form at the ready. If the recipe called for 1 cup leeks, diced, I had 1 cup leeks, diced. I also had whole leeks and even a few whole leeks with some -- but not all -- diced. Options.

Working on the show was one of the most amazing experiences of my life, made even better by Jacques' patience and professionalism. But Jacques has a professionalism that isn't cold or diva-ish. He's professional in that it was almost unheard of him not to get the episode on the first take. Not just the segment, mind you, the entire episode. He also doesn't need a script; it's just all right there on the tip of his tongue and the front of his brain.

However, he's warm and appreciative. He's kind. He's generous. There would be a wine on the set that he particularly liked and after shooting the episode, he'd bring it to the back kitchen because he was so intent on all of us experiencing it. He was interested in talking to people about them, not about himself. He spent a long time at our wrap party talking to my husband about his career as a mathematician. He spent a dinner out asking me every detail about how I got involved with food and what I want to do next.

Later, I'd realize that he spent so many early morning hours with us in the hot, cramped kitchen because that's where he really wanted to be, in the thick of it, teaching.

Jacques Pépin: More Fast Food My Way premieres Saturday, October 4, at 10:30 a.m. on KQED TV.

The website launches October 2 and you will be able to watch video episodes online, download recipes from the show, view a behind-the-scenes slideshow of the production process and get program information.

Go to kqed.org/morefastfoodmyway

Bonjour mes amis -- my apologies for the delay in posting this today. I've had an enfer (hell) of a time getting Blogger to upload my pics but I think all is well in cyberspace. Nothing a mid-afternoon glass of wine can't resolve :) A little culinary bird told me that Jacques Pepin was going to be in town. One of his stops was an informal sit down with the SFPFS (San Francisco Professional Food Society) moderated by Laura Werlin, artisanal cheese aficionada, at the Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill.

Mother Nature must be a Jacques Pepin fan because we were treated to some of the most gorgeous views imaginable set against a screaming blue sky. Jacques was in town promoting his latest book, Chez Jacques, which means "at Jacques' home". He did a meet and greet for a good hour then had a sit down interview followed by a reception where the Fairmont culinary team treated us to some of Jacques' recipes from this book. Here are a few of his words of wisdom, snippets, quotes and delightful humor.

• In this book, Jacques focused on recipes from his home, hence the title, recipes that he cooks for himself and his wife or a big group of friends. He states, the point of eating is sharing food with family and friends, with sharing comes conversation, talking around a table. He quotes anthropologist Levi Strauss who claims that cooking food is nature transformed into culture.

• Jacques claims he is egocentric, egocentric to the food he loves. He goes on to explain that this is natural because you can't escape yourself because you are unique. If you like a restaurant, it is more a reflection of your tastes, aesthetics, preferences, palette, experiences than on the restaurant itself.

• Laura posed the question: "How far should we go to buy our food?" Jacques replied, the best food is always going to be the closest food, similar to the best table in a restaurant being the one closest to a waiter.

• Another question asked about food trends in restaurants such as molecular gastronomy. His response was that chefs are thinking too much, turning it into fashion vs. trend. For example, Il Bulli is breaking new ground but locally no one would know what the dish is. If he took a dish out into the street of the town, no one would be able to identify it. He compares it to a haute couture Parisian fashion show. When you see thee crazy fashions, you think no one would ever wear it but eventually the techniques, such as the foam phenomenon, will trickle down and morph into mainstream dining.

• When asked about the Food Network and how chefs are now superstars, Jacques humbly refutes that chefs shouldn't take themselves so seriously, that we are all just soup merchants. Most chefs are basically craftsmen and technicians and some have extraordinary talent such as Thomas Keller. Jacques is also concerned with the lack of actual information on the Food Network - 24 hours a day of food shows but not one minute on actual factual information tackling today's culinary issues such as childhood obesity, diabetes, etc. There is no nutritionist, no investigating, we don't know anything about anything and the Food Network needs a show such as 60 Minutes that investigates and reports on food issues that are so prevalent in this country.

• An audience member asked Jacques the qualities of a good chef. He immediately fired off the following: hardworking, prompt, always there, attentive, fast, a good technician, and can work and get along with other people. These, he states emphatically, are more important than anything, even creativity. Once a chef is a master technician and if he has talent, then he can become an artist. Only then can he take everything he's learned, all his knowledge and experience and his own sense of aesthetics and start creating.

• Jacques tests all his own recipes along with his very discerning wife and assistant Norma. If they don't like it, the recipe doesn't go in the book! His collaborator on most of his books and shows, Susie Heller, also tests all his recipes in her home kitchen to ensure consistency.

• Jacques's next project is called The Artist's Table where he interviews accomplished artists, musicians, etc. to discover how their specific art translates to food and wine. He recently sat down with Itzhak Perlman who discussed the importance of food, using food synonyms to discuss how his music will sound and his love of cooking. When talking about the marriage of art and science, Jacques claims that you can't reduce a recipe to a scientific formula because every recipe incorporates that one chef's techniques, imagination, instinct and talent. If he gives the same recipe to 10 different people, he will get 10 different versions of the same dish because each person will naturally incorporate these traits.

• When asked about his favorite memory of Julia Child, Jacques smiled and laughed. The first show they did together had no recipes so it took them 2 years to write the follow-up book because the editors would have to replay the shows over and over to get exactly what they were putting into the dish. Another memory involves a visit to the set by a local sponsor, Kendall-Jackson. The producer Goeff Drummond, before the taping, confirmed with Jacques that they'd pour a glass of wine at the end of the segment. When the time came, Jacques poured himself a glass of wine and offered one to Julia. She graciously declined, declaring that she preferred a beer! The same thing happened when the Land O'Lakes sponsors were on the set. Jacques and Julia were making a pie crust and Jacques took out the butter. Julia announced she was going to make her pie crust with Crisco!

• A poignant ending to the evening came when Jacques talked about how blessed his life is, how he is able to do what he loves for a living and if he could come back in a second life, he would come back as Jacques Pepin. The audience burst into applause in heartfelt agreement.