Jacques Pépin makes Eggs Jeannette

- Hi I'm chef Jacques Pépin and this is "American Masters At Home".

I love eggs, I have hundreds of recipes with eggs.

This is a special one and it involves hard cooked eggs.

And it's not that easy to do hard cooked eggs the right way.

You have an egg like this on the rounder part of the egg I make a whole like that with a thumb tac like this.

That there is a little chamber it relieves the pressure and it prevents the egg from cracking in the water.

But it's not that important even if you don't do it.

Okay you boil the water, drop the eggs in it bring it back to a bare boil and because we call it hard cooked eggs not hard boiled eggs.

If it boils too much, the egg whites get tough.

So cook it for about nine ten minutes.

And after that pour out the hot water put cold water on top of it some ice and leave it there at least 10 15 minutes.

If you do that you will have beautiful eggs like this one.

How you can see there's no green around the yolk.

And because it was refreshed fast enough the sulfur left.

Now to peel it what you do the best thing is really to break it like that all around with a spoon.

And have a whole bunch of egg and then you go right under running water to clean it.

Okay so you put it underneath then you crack it so that to get not only do you have the shell but you have a skin underneath and you have to go under that skin.

And when you go under the skin here that's it under the water then it will peel very easily.

That's the way you peel your eggs.

I call those l'oeuf Janet, Janet is my mother.

She used to do those eggs when we were kids and I never seen them done by anyone other.

So the idea that you have your hard cooked eggs.

What she did was 20 center in there, yep okay.

You can cut your eggs the long way or across it doesn't matter really.

I have large clove of garlic, some parsley.

So I'll crush that garlic, the parsley, that goes together.

Now that mixture of garlic and parsley we call it in France persillade.

Persil is parsley and ail is garlic.

Persillade is really the signature of home cooking.

My mother would cook, and she was a terrific cook.

She'd saute some fish with persillade.

She'd saute some zucchini, persillade at the end.

She'd saute some tomato persillade.

Even a steak, saute the steak persillade.

So here I have the persillade that will go in there.

Here I will use this to crush this.

All right here I will put a little bit of salt pepper and a bit of milk, one two tablespoons of milk to make a puree out of it you know.

If I do a lot of those, a dozen a dozen and a half then I do it in the food processor, maybe a dash more.

Okay and then we're going to stuff the egg, restuff the egg.

Because we are going to cook the eggs after, saute them.

And what you want to do fill it up you always want to have a little bit of that mixture in there left to do a sauce with it.

So I have about probably a good one two tablespoon left of it we'll do the sauce with it.

First we're going to saute the eggs.

Olive oil and we put stuffed side down, you know, and they cook pretty fast.

And they get beautifully brown.

Now in this here I'm going to put a little bit of mustard.

Good French mustard here and a dash of water oh maybe a tablespoon.

(mixing against a glass bowl) And maybe even a dash of vinegar not too much.

And then the olive oil so I have a mustard sauce here.

That mustard sauce I have used it for one thing or another.

I emulsify it with this olive oil.

It is a taste of my youth, that's it.

So let me test this, a dash maybe another little dash of salt.

Okay those are cooking here you brown them only on one side.

I put my sauce in there and I'm sure that my eggs are done.

The best way to turn your eggs is just move them like this.

Whoop as you can see they are already done.

(sizzling) They beautiful Egg Janet.

Usually you let them cool off a little bit of course.

But here they are and this is a favorite at my house.

Not only with me, even my wife Gloria does it.

Claudine does it, we all do the Egg Janet.

My mother would be proud of me, happy cooking.

(peaceful music)