ANNOUNCER: The French Chef is made possible by a grant from Safeway Stores.
(sizzling) JULIA: These are veal scallops, escalopes de veau.
Quick to cook, delicious to eat, and here they are, ready to serve.
We're doing them today on The French Chef.
♪ ♪ Welcome to The French Chef.
I'm Julia Child.
Today, we are doing veal scallops.
Scallops comes from the French word, escalope, meaning a thin slice.
It's like a scalloped potato, sliced potato, so scallops of veal are slices of veal.
They cook awfully quickly.
About, oh, about, seven to eight minutes and are... can be sauced and served in all kinds of different ways.
I'm gonna show you several today.
Now, the first thing you have to think about with veal is that you have to get tender and delicious quality.
Veal, as you know, is preadolescent beef.
It's only five to 12 weeks old, that means that's under three months.
And best quality is a very, very pale whitish pink.
It's about the color of raw chicken, just a little bit pinker.
And, if it's milk-fed and of the right age, it is that pale pink color and it's tender.
But if it's grass-fed or if it gets older, becomes a calf, for instance, it gets increasingly rosy and fairly dark red.
So when you're picking veal, train yourself to look for its color and if you've got anyone, a friend who knows what veal is supposed to look like, take them along with you so that you can get your eye trained, 'cause once you know what the color is supposed to be like, you won't get the reddish or tough pieces.
And a veal scallop, the French veal scallop, is a slice of meat from the leg, it's a cross-cut slice, and the leg is often called the round of veal.
I'm gonna show you a picture of it.
Because when you're buying meat, you should try and familiarize yourself just as much with meat cuts as possible because a vague meat buyer is often open to terrible disappointments.
Now, here's a cross-cut of the leg or round and I've separated this because the round separates itself into muscles just as the older beef does.
See, this part here is the top round.
And this, which is next to the bone, is the knuckle, or face, or sirloin tip.
And here's the bottom round, here you see it, there's that little eye of a round, when you're picking your beef, which is cut that way, you'd often get the eye of a round.
And there's the bottom round.
But this piece here, the top round, and if you look very carefully, at a slice of beef-- veal-- you can see how these separations are, that's the best place to get your scallops from.
So, this just takes a little practice in looking and you'll be able to spot what they are.
Now here is a piece of top round.
I've got a wonderful butcher and he got me a beautiful pale pink, large veal and he cut me out what would correspond to the top round of beef.
As you can see, there aren't any muscle separations there, that's a solid piece of meat.
But, if you-- when you get-- I went to a supermarket, also, and got what was called cutlet, a cutlet.
I don't know why they call it a cutlet because it comes from the French côtelette, which means the rib.
But this was also cut from the round, or leg, but they took-- 'cause they don't-- I mean, it would cost an awful lot of money, I think, probably.
They took a meat tenderizer, like this, and they just go... Whap!
And that cuts, sort of, tenderizes it and because, on the other side, if you can see this piece-- (clears throat) There are these little filaments here and these really should be cut off, but they weren't.
So they could go... Whap!
Onto that and that would break off some of the filaments.
But if you can't get the proper piece of meat, you can use this kind perfectly well, the only trouble is that it curls up a little bit as it's cooking, but it will taste good.
Now, with this veal here, it's cut three-eighths of an inch thick and then it's pounded.
See, there you've got your solid piece of meat.
There's a little tiny separation there, but that doesn't make any difference.
And then, you pound it between a sheet of wax paper.
That one seems to be a little bit torn, but it doesn't make any difference.
And if you don't have a meat tenderizer-- I got this at some hardware store-- you can use a bottle or a rolling pin.
Here's a French one, which is very nice, you can use it either that side or that side or this side.
Then you just lay your piece of meat between wax paper and pound it.
That flattens it out a little bit.
And you want it flattened to a quarter of an inch.
The Italian veal scaloppinis are much thinner, but the French ones are a little thicker and one piece like that makes one good serving.
So we're now gonna to sauté them.
And I'm also gonna sauté some mushrooms along with it because we're gonna use them later on.
Now, as always with the sautéing, as we've done this several times, but I'll just keep on repeating it, you'll hear that they're sautéed in butter, when it's actually oil and butter.
I'm using a very light olive oil, which I get in my supermarket in a gallon container and then I just put it in bottles.
And then, butter, we're gonna use about a tablespoon and a half of butter.
And then about a half of a tablespoon of oil.
And you use the oil so that the butter will not burn, it fortifies it.
And then another thing-- this is just like sautéing the beef, if you remember our first program on boeuf bourguignon.
You want to make sure that the meat is dry, so dry it in paper towels.
If it's wet, it won't brown.
This is only gonna take about eight minutes in all to sauté.
And now we have to wait until our butter and oil get very hot.
And we will again look at the butter foam.
This was just the same problem you'll always run into as when we did the omelette, so you just have to wait until the foam foams up.
And we're gonna do the same thing with the mushrooms.
I'm gonna sauté them in oil and butter.
So we will see the same business of butter foam.
There.
Now, the butter foam is beginning to subside a little bit, but I'm just gonna wait a little bit longer, and then the meat goes in.
We have this veal cutlet I got at the supermarket.
I'm gonna sauté that, too, and you'll see what happens.
You'll notice that it curls a little bit.
There.
Now, our butter foam here is just right.
So I'm gonna lay in the veal.
Another thing you always want to be careful of is that you don't crowd the pan.
You want to keep your fat always hot, but not burning.
In other words, you don't-- you can tell if it's burning if it's turning a dark brown.
So just keep regulating your heat.
I'll put in another piece.
And we still have room for another one.
Now, that's all you want to put in.
If you're gonna do more veal than that, you'd have to use either two pans, or when the veal is done, you would put it on a side dish and then sauté some more.
And now, for our... do our mushrooms while the veal is cooking.
These are about two cups of sliced mushrooms here.
And, as you remember, with mushrooms, we've done them so many times, but I'll repeat it again, there's a little dirty tip there, you just cut that off.
And then, if the mushroom cap is separated from the stem, you bend it like that to remove it, and then you put all your mushrooms in a bowl of water and do like that to them, and then put them into a sieve to let them drain and then dry them in a towel.
And then to slice them, just remember you hold your knife like that and your hand like that and just slice down that way.
There.
I'm using about two cups and we're gonna do that for our second recipe, but I'm gonna get them sautéed now.
See our butter is hot and we just pour in the mushrooms.
And shake the pan.
Get a pan with this style of the sloping sides and the long handle 'cause it's so easy to shake things.
And now, these should be turned.
Then if you find that you need a little more oil or butter, just add a little bit.
You want to keep the pan just filmed.
And keep shaking the mushrooms.
When you get used to cooking, you can do two or three things at once.
Then in the mushrooms, we're gonna put in some shallots or green onions.
These are the shallots.
There's one unpeeled and that's peeled.
It's just a small, mild onion.
And if you don't have shallots, and they're often hard to find, particularly in the summertime, use a green onion.
This is sometimes called a scallion or a spring onion.
It's just an onion which hasn't gotten a bulb on the end of it.
Use that.
Cut off that.
And then cut it off to just about where the green begins.
Then cut it in half.
And those two parts in half again, lengthwise.
And then just line them all up, holding your knife again like that and gathering them with your fingers, just cut it right down like that.
And if you hold your fingernails back like that, you won't cut your fingers off.
This is the kind of thing that just takes a little practice.
Now, we're gonna put about a tablespoon of shallots in with our mushrooms.
That always gives them a little bit more flavor.
These are gonna get a little more cooking, so they don't need anymore cooking than this.
That's about two minutes.
So I'll put them to the side and we'll use them later.
Now, take a look at our veal.
You can very easily tell when the veal is done by pressing it with your finger.
You should get used to using your fingers a lot in cooking 'cause it's the best way of telling how things are done, particularly meat.
Now, veal is done when you press the top of it with your finger and it has a slightly rubbery quality.
It's not squishy like raw veal.
You see, that's only been just a few minutes and it is now done.
It's also done when the juices all run clear.
You can tell also by how a steak is done by pressing it with your fingers, just a matter of a little practice.
So now, these are done and I'm gonna put them in a dish.
Well, I guess I'll put them in a side dish so as not to mess up our nice serving dish.
Now, the nice thing about these veal scallops is that you can sautée them ahead of time and get your sauce all made and then heat them up just before you're going to serve.
Now, we have... we pour out the fat from the pan.
And then there's this nice, brown juice in here, coagulated juice, which is the treasure of your kitchen and we're gonna deglaze that with...
I'm gonna use some port, you can use Madeira or vermouth.
And if you don't like to use wine, you can just use a little stock.
I'm putting in about a quarter of a cup.
And then you scrape all of this up... with your wooden spoon or... and then all of this nice, coagulated juice dissolves in the sauce.
Then I'm gonna also put in some more of these shallots or onions, about a tablespoon there or a little bit more.
That always gives a nice taste.
Then I'm gonna put in some brown stock or you can use canned beef bouillon or you can use cream, if you'd like.
If you use cream, you wait until your wine has boiled down almost completely.
And then you just boil the cream in it.
And we're also gonna use some tarragon flavoring.
Tarragon is a perfectly lovely herb.
I met someone the other day who was in the supermarket who said she couldn't find any tarragon, but all the big herb houses put it out.
And if you don't find tarragon, ask your grocery store to get some because they all put it out.
I'm gonna put in about a half tablespoon.
And tarragon is one plant that you can grow now and you have to buy it in the plant, sort of a small plant.
And it takes root beautifully in a sunny place.
And you'll have it all summer and then the next year, it comes right back up again.
It's just a lovely flavor and if you haven't tried it, do.
We are also going to thicken this sauce using cornstarch, which is one of the best quick thickenings.
If you were in a restaurant, you'd have a readymade, thickened brown sauce that was perfectly delicious, but not many of us have time to do all of that today.
We're gonna end up with about, probably, less than a cup of sauce.
So, we'll use about a... sort of a large teaspoonful of cornstarch.
And then this, you want to mix with a paste.
You can use a little bit of water.
I'll use a little bit of port wine.
If you want your cooking to taste French, you always use wine, but you don't have to use it if you don't like it.
Now, mixing that all up.
And then, when the sauce is reduced enough, you just pour this in.
And then if you find that it hasn't thickened enough, you can just add a little bit more and stir it around.
And you want it just to have what they call a very slight liaison.
And I'm not sure that I'm gonna have enough there, so I think I'll put in a little bit more.
That's the nice thing about cornstarch, you can keep adding it.
This time, I'll add a little cold beef stock to it.
It's better to add too little at first than too much, because if you had to thin it out, then you'd just have to use a lot more beef stock and what you're doing now is concentrating your sauce.
I'm gonna put in a little bit more.
And now... we're almost ready to serve our veal.
As you can see, that has just a very slight liaison, just enough so that it will cover the veal.
And when the sauce is just the way you like it, you put the veal back in again, put some salt and pepper on it.
A little pepper.
And then I'm gonna lower the heat there and then just put the veal in.
Now at this point... you want to... ...put the sauce all over the veal.
And then, at this point, you can just leave it and leave it uncovered and when you're ready to serve, you would then put your sauce over heat again and let the veal just heat through until it was warm.
In this case, we're now gonna make it ready to serve, so you just put your veal in your serving dish.
See, that's awfully quick to do.
And then, as a final thing, you can butter your sauce.
I should have really reduced that sauce a little bit more, but at least, you get the idea of it.
See, now it's still a little bit too liquid.
I didn't want to spend all that time letting you watch a sauce reduce.
Now this butter, you see, I'm just swishing it around in the sauce, like that.
And that gives that final French taste, which is so lovely.
And then the sauce just goes over the veal.
But after you've put the butter in, you have to serve it immediately 'cause you can't reheat the sauce again.
There.
Now, that you can serve with sautéed potatoes and green beans or whatever you'd like.
And now, we're gonna do another... another version of veal.
And this is a veau gratinées.
You can use-- We have these veal scallops that we did at the beginning.
Or you can use cold, leftover roast veal.
And in this, we're going to make a sauce... a velouté.
This is the same sauce that we've used several times.
We used it on our sea scallops, but of course we didn't... we didn't use, um... we used fish stock for this.
And this, we're going to use meat stock.
And this is one of our mother sauces.
Uh, béchamel is done the same way.
You start out with a roux of flour and butter.
And we're gonna make about two cups of sauce, so we want four tablespoons of flour.
And you put in as much butter as you need.
It's always less butter.
About, say, three tablespoons of butter for four tablespoons of flour.
You can always add a little more butter.
You just want enough so that when you stir it up, it's gonna make a paste.
It's the flour that's the important part of it.
And then you want to let it cook for about two minutes, very slowly, so that the flour cooks.
And once that you've gotten the flour cooked, you're not gonna have any pasty taste in your sauce and you don't have to keep simmering it for a long time.
So remember, whenever you're seeing a recipe for one of these white sauces, they usually say melt the butter and stir in the flour and then pour in the liquid.
Remember to melt the butter, cook the flour in the butter for two minutes, and then add your liquid.
And I'm using here two cups of a chicken stock.
And you take your roux off the heat-- and this is hot-- and you pour it all in at once.
I'm not gonna pour all of it in, because we're gonna have two, but you pour in the amount and then beat it up.
And then we want it to simmer for about a minute, and that's all.
But a good trick is, in making a sauce, it's always easier to thin it out than to thicken it up.
So, if you're gonna use, say, two cups of liquid in a sauce, put in about a cup and a half, and then let it come up to the boil, so it's thickened.
And then, if it needs thinning out, then you can thin it out with the extra sauce.
But if you have to thicken it up, then you have to use a flour-butter paste and all kinds of things like that.
And what you want is a fairly thick sauce for this.
And here are some finely minced onions, which have been cooked slowly in butter.
And I'm gonna put these into the sauce.
That's about half of a cup.
And they need to cook in the sauce for about five minutes.
And that's just gonna come up to the boil.
And we'll take that off.
And then we have our mushrooms, which we sautéed.
That is about two-thirds of a cup of sautéed mushrooms, and they go in, too.
Now, one thing with this, uh, I was using a veal and chicken stock, but if you want to use canned chicken bouillon, well, there are some very good brands on the market.
The thing to do to make it taste as though it were your own is to take two cups of it, and then a quarter cup each of very finely minced onions and carrots.
And then, if you like, about a quarter of a cup of dry white vermouth, and let that simmer very slowly together until it's again reduced to two cups, and then strain it.
And that gives it a lovely taste, very much, so you'd think that it was entirely your own original making.
There, now, that's come up to the simmer there.
We want to let it cook slowly for a minute or two.
And what we're gonna do with this veal is to... We have the veal and we have some slices of ham.
And then we're gonna cover them with the sauce, and then they can be gratinéed.
And you can do all of this way ahead of time, in the morning, or even the day before, if you'd like.
Whenever you're gonna gratinée, put a little butter-- this butter has gotten awfully soft-- in your pan.
And if you don't want to get butter all over your fingers, just take a little paper towel like that.
And this is an oven-proof porcelain dish.
What a very useful kind to have.
And then, you put the veal in.
We're first gonna put in a spoonful of sauce.
You want to taste the sauce to see how it is.
I'll take out my tasting spoon.
Very good.
Be sure that you always taste the sauce, because it's just too bad if you've gone to all that trouble, and then you haven't gotten quite the right flavor.
And put a spoonful or two of the sauce into the pan, and then just arrange your veal.
Use your fingers, it's much easier.
And I'm alternating these with thin strips of boiled ham.
And that makes a very nice dish you can use... you can use it for leftover chicken also.
Then just pour the sauce over.
And here's a little grated Swiss cheese.
And sprinkle that on.
And you can then set it aside or put it in the refrigerator, and when you're ready to serve it, just put it in a hot oven, for about 20 minutes, and then you're ready to serve it.
This is the one that you saw at the beginning, which I've already gratinéed and then left in the oven.
You want to be sure, in doing a dish like this, that when you-- when it's heated, it's bubbling and the top browns, but then, you don't want to overcook it after that.
And we're serving our veau gratinées with steamed rice, buttered peas, hot French bread, and a red Medoc Bordeaux wine at room temperature.
So that makes a lovely little dinner for four.
Now, to review on the veal, you can see how terribly quick that is to cook.
But it's not gonna be top eating unless you have gotten your veal of the very, very pale pink color.
So, just train your eye on that.
And also, if you get a cutlet of veal and you can see it's one of those big round cuts-- cross-cuts of the leg-- you can separate it yourself into its natural muscle divisions, and then you'll get a much neater-looking piece.
And remember, again, when you're sautéing, get your butter hot, have your meat dry, and don't crowd the pan, and then you won't have any trouble.
And the deglazing sauce, that was that tarragon sauce that we did, as you remember, you poured the fat out of the pan and then deglazed it with your wine and stock, and thickened it with cornstarch.
So, that is a very easy way to do.
And remember, too, if you do things ahead, get them cooked, but then, just before you're going to-- Don't reheat them too much.
I think you will find this a perfectly delicious dish and not at all difficult to make.
Next time, we're doing French salads, French dressings and mayonnaise.
So that's all for today on The French Chef.
This is Julia Child.
Bon appétit.
Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH access.wgbh.org ♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: Julia Child is co-author of the book Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
The French Chef is made possible by a grant from Safeway Stores.