Jacques Pépin Makes Shrimp-Stuffed Portobello

(upbeat music) - Hi.

I'm Jacques Pépin, and this is "American Masters at Home."

When I worked in Paris in the '50s, I remember doing escargot, or the snail, in French, and instead of putting them in the shell, we used to put them into individual mushrooms.

We also put them in artichoke bottoms, so you could eat the whole thing.

So that gave me the idea.

For that dish, I have lots of portobello mushroom here, and I'm gonna stuff them with shrimp, and a kind of butter that is garlic butter too.

So what I want to do here is really remove the top of the portobello here.

It's a bit too much.

And I could actually use some of them back in the stuffing, or if it's too much, I use it for something else.

So a dash of salt on top of it, pepper, salt, pepper, a little bit of olive oil.

Pour that on top.

And then we'll put that in the oven at like 350, at least 20 minutes.

We'll see what it looks like.

So in that, I have shrimp here.

As you can see, I have large shrimp.

When you remove the shrimp, you remove the shell like this.

And what I like to do at the end here, take the end of it and press the end of it and pull out the end of it like this.

Sometimes it doesn't work, but usually I get the flesh of the tail in there that people tend to throw out, I've got here.

So here I have eight shrimp, which is about four per person.

This will be our main course.

So those are about, I would say five, six ounces here of shrimp.

I'm going to cut them into cubes, like this.

And when you get that type of thing, you can do a lot of variations with that.

You can stuff it.

You can put scallop.

You can put salmon.

You can put, in fact, not fish.

So I'm putting that in there.

Yep.

So then I'm gonna put some bread in it.

Could put bread crumb, but I'm gonna put that type of bread.

So I have eight shrimp and I add, if you want to know, let's say one cup of shrimp, as you can see, diced.

I'm gonna put... Not breadcrumb really, but put them in tiny...

I never throw bread out.

Always use it in one way or the other.

Might be a bit too much here.

What do I have here?

Close to half a cup, yeah, of bread.

Then garlic.

Chop it, a bit coarsely like this, and I'll put parsley in there.

So parsley, I probably will have two tablespoons of chopped parsley there with the garlic.

Remember, when you chop this way, rock your knife.

A lot of people, even chefs, go this way, crushing it.

And it's fine, but more important, remember that when you cut, you cut this way by cutting.

So if you chop this way, you put the front of the knife first.

When the back of the knife goes in, you automatically do that type of cutting, which cuts better than just crushing it.

Okay.

That will go in there.

You can do a gratin with this, with that mixture here, without the mushroom.

It's perfectly fine.

I'm gonna put salt, probably half a teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of pepper in there.

Good.

I will put a good, I would think, two tablespoons of butter, and maybe a tablespoon of olive oil.

And that will be a mixture of, as I say, that you can use, as a gratin by itself, put it into an individual small gratin dish, brown in the oven to serve.

That's what we're gonna put on top of the mushroom when they come out the oven.

To finish them up, of course you can do those mushrooms out ahead, even the day before.

And you can even arrange that on top.

In a restaurant, what I would do, I would cook the mushroom.

I would prepare it on top of the mushroom in the refrigerator.

When I have one order, I take one, put it into the oven.

Okay, so now my portobello, as you can see, are about cooked.

They're still quite firm.

So when you're ready to proceed, you want to put that on top.

That's a hefty portion.

Okay, quite a lot.

So that would be, of course, a main course.

But you know, very often those things, you can always say, "I'm gonna do that as a first course," so you cut down the portion by half, and you do it as a first course.

That will go back to the oven.

Now again, 350, probably 15 minutes.

Maybe more.

We'll see.

Okay.

So the shrimp have been cooking 15 minutes here.

You can see, I can transfer that to a plate like this, or actually leave it in there.

I have beautiful juice, butter coming down here.

So, you want to use it either this way or leaving it there.

And this is the portobello stuffed with shrimp.

Happy cooking.

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Thank you, and happy cooking.