Jacques Pepin Vinaigrette, deconstructed.
Jacques Pepin Vinaigrette came from his very entertaining Facebook channel. Frustratingly, there’s no way to locate specific recipes but if you scroll through the feed you’ll find some gems, like this old episode of Jacques and Julia Child making hamburgers. (She called him “Jack” and yes, she was fluent in French.) But back to the recipe, he uses less vinegar than we would but the extra mustard more than offsets the extra oil for a very nice balance. Makes enough to dress a large family size salad.
Ingredients:
1 t garlic, very finely chopped
1 t good Dijon mustard
¼ t Kosher salt
Couple grinds black pepper
1 T red wine vinegar
4 T good olive oil
Summer salad with red onion, fennel bulb, shiso, cherry tomato dressed with Jacques Pepin Vinaigrette.
Method: chop the garlic on a cutting board, then sprinkle salt on top and grind the flat of a chef’s knife against it to break garlic down further; use the edge of the knife to slide salt and garlic into a bowl. Add other ingredients and whisk thoroughly to combine. Build your salad on top of this, toss, and add garnishes as desired.
“Jack” My hero! I ate at his restaurants in my youth. Stayed at his motels a few times too. I like his FB, but, FB, their usual nonsense… April 5 2020 is the video. I think…
You mean Howard Johnson, yes? In one of his episodes he shares the HoJo version of clam chowder. My own Jack story is that my ex-wife’s company was a major sponsor of the local PBS station when we lived in San Francisco and as a perk we got a private session with Jacques Pepin. He taught us the garlic smashing technique I frequently use in my own recipes (chop the garlic, sprinkle with salt, smash and scrape with the flat blade of a chef’s knife for maximum flavor) and some decorative orange slicing.
Yep HoJos. I was a bit young for Le Pavillon. I could have made it to La Potagerie. The restaurants had passed their prime when I ate in them, but OK. Except for ones on the NY State Thruway, they were bad.
I ate at the last HoJo’s in the world in Lake George a few years back. The guy who was running it at that time was a veteran from the days of the “real” Howard Johnson’s and had tried to recreate the menu as much as possible. I was not aware of the Jack connection at the time or I would have asked about the clam chowder. Now it’s an AYCE sushi place.