Star chef’s roast vegetable tart solves holiday problems
Thanksgiving represents a test for even the most organized cooks. Some glorious farmersmarket vegetables might upend your side-dish plans; a guest’s latebreaking special diet will test your menu. And that’s in a normal year.
The pitfalls are higher than usual this time around, as people adjust to smaller celebrations and intermittently stocked market shelves. What everyone needs this year, whether they know it or not, is an expert to see them through.
Let me suggest Jacques Pépin, one of the world’s best, and best-loved, cooks. The 84-year-old chef has helped the likes of Julia Child to improve their already formidable kitchen skills.
Pépin has a new, nontraditional cookbook out, one that features several notable chef friends. It’s offered as a benefit to becoming a member of the Jacques Pépin Foundation, which supports culinary training for people facing employment challenges because of such problems as homelessness and previous incarceration. The foundation funds more than 20 organizations that help people find employment. ( JPF membership starts at $40 per year.)
“Cook With Jacques Pépin and Friends, Volume 1” is a kind of online recipe subscription service-meets-flashy chefs cookbook. It features videos of many of Pepin’s illustrious friends cooking their favorite recipes at home. There’s Eggs Three Ways from activist chef José Andrés, Spinach and Beef Salad from “Top Chef” star and “Taste the Nation” host Padma Lakshmi, a Squash and Crab Curry from Kwame Onwuachi. There are a handful of recipes from Pépin himself, including a veal breast roast with vegetables.
Each recipe is accompanied by an entertaining video of the chef making the dish, telling stories and offering tips. “The chefs in our book include many friends, and some of the best chefs I know,” Pépin said via email. “To see them all together in this digital book, and to have their support for the JPF and culinary education is really terrific.”
One of the book’s most showstopping recipes — one that will win Thanksgiving bragging rights, even if family and friends are admiring it through a screen — is a dead-simple roast vegetable galette from Justin Chapple, culinary director-at-large at Food & Wine. His dish maximizes the produce that highlights many a Thanksgiving table: sweet potatoes, red potatoes, carrots. They’re enclosed in an easy-to-make rustic crust with folded-over sides. The result is spectacular.
And the galette does double duty as the main course for anyone who is avoiding meat. “It can be a side dish for people who eat everything or a main course for vegetarians,” Chapple says. “It’s not like, ‘Here, you have to eat this mashed squash as your dinner.’ Instead, it’s ‘Here’s a beautiful tart.’ ” Moreover, it’s a clever, out-of-the-box extension of classic holiday ingredients that this food writer hasn’t seen before.
Chapple keeps it simple, forgoing any complicated béchamel sauce or custard, and uses sour cream and Parmesan as the base. This makes for a rich, creamy, salty contrast to the flaky pastry and the colorful vegetables, whose flavors dance from sweet beets to nutty parsnips. Pépin, who made a plum galette famous at Food & Wine in the ’90s, approves.
“Justin is a talented, passionate cook, and that’s reflected in his delicious savory galette. It combines two of my favorite things — flaky dough and seasonal vegetables,” he says of the recipe.
It’s also perfect for this year’s holiday season — as good looking as it is big — and easily cut in half if your guest list is smaller than usual.