Home & Lifestyle, Food

Seasonal Vegetables

Lesson time 15:29 min

Chef Crenn shows you how to make a classic French comfort food, parmentier, using zucchini, onions, and carrots instead of meat. Prepare a smooth potato puree to use in the dish and top it with cheese in individual ramekins or a larger serving dish.

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Topics include: Seasonal Vegetables * Potato Puree * Deglazed Vegetables

Dominique Crenn

Teaches Modern Vegetarian Cooking

Turn vegetarian dishes into statement pieces with celebrated chef Dominique Crenn. Explore her techniques through a tasting menu of elevated recipes.

Preview

[MUSIC PLAYING] CHEF: Come with me and look into the aureate light. OK, so for the Sunday dinner at home, back in France, my grandmother and my mother used to make this dish, kind of a Hachis Parmentier. It's a classic French comfort food prepared with potatoes. Hachis Parmentier was made with meat. I'm going to show you a version of it with just vegetables. It's comfort food and it's easy to do. It's just potato puree, different types of vegetables, seasonal vegetables that you just cook down, back in the oven with a little bit of cheese and coming out. And this is just heaven in your mouth. So we are we going to cook the potato, so any type of potato. I like to use-- you can use the Yukon Gold. You want to always start with cold water. And you don't want to overcook it. So the trick with potato is you can take a knife-- I'm going to take some out of the water. So the texture that you're looking for-- using my tweezers, you just go inside. It's soft. Yes, it's still kind of holds a little bit, so you know this is perfectly. If suddenly you put your knife or tweezers into the potato and it's just falling apart, it's totally overcooked. So I think the potato is very well cooked right now. So I'm going to turn that down. And we are going to start the process of making potato puree. So what we have here, we have some room temperature butter, some warm milk here, that I warmed up. You can season it the way you want to season it. Some will add some garlic or any type of herb in it. I didn't add anything. I want to keep it very clean because I want the vegetable to shine through the mashed potato. So first, we are going to use a ricer that will rice the potato. A ricer helps smooth the potato by forcing it through a sheet of small holes the size of rice grains. And I'm going to show you how to make the best mashed potato. You want to make sure that there is no water on the cooked potatoes, so just make sure you really drain the water. See, there is still a little bit of the water. You don't want that. I think we're good here. Put it in your ricer. And we're going to do this in stages. So you start to rice. And what I like to do, I'm going to add a little bit of butter to it. I'm just going to incorporate the butter with ricing the potato. OK, this is beautiful. I'm going to just add a little bit more here. Ricing is good also for your muscles. This is your workout of the day. You can do that with your kid. Nobody's going to get hurt. I think it's kind of fun. Then I'm just-- keep adding the butter here. Once again, the butter needs to be room temperature. The butter can't be too cold or can't be too mushy, OK? So we're just pushing down. What is also good with the Parmentier that we're going to make, you can make it the day before and put it in the oven the day after. This is delicious also. So you just want to get that goodness out. Could be messy, but it's OK. Cooking sometimes is messy. So now w...

About the Instructor

With three James Beard awards and a three-Michelin-starred restaurant, Chef Dominique Crenn has transcended traditional vegetarian fare by treating cooking as a kind of poetic expression. Now the celebrated chef invites you to discover inspired vegetarian cooking. Following a full tasting menu of recipes, learn how to elevate your techniques, minimize waste, and turn vegetarian dishes into works of art.

Featured MasterClass Instructor

Dominique Crenn

Turn vegetarian dishes into statement pieces with celebrated chef Dominique Crenn. Explore her techniques through a tasting menu of elevated recipes.

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