Recipes to Rival – Coq au Vin

Please, do not be deterred by the alarming color.  This food is safe for human consumption, and delicious!

I’m getting this up a bit late – just got back from a two week long, out-of-town trip.  Thanks for your patience with me these past few months, folks.  I was hoping it would turn out to be a quiet year, but the universe had other plans for me.

This month, Temperance of High on the Hog chose Coq au Vin from Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook: Strategies, Recipes, and Techniques of Classic Bistro Cooking.  You can find the recipe here (my minor adaptations will be below the jump), as well as the R2R blogroll.  I followed the recipe pretty much to a “T,” with a couple exceptions.  First, I eliminated the pearl onions.  Master Chow, my honorable husband, will not eat them, so it would have been a waste of grocery money.  Second,  I made the dish with chicken legs and thighs.  Why?  Because I’ve made coq au vin before, and despite my best efforts, the breast meat turned out dry as a bone.

Temperance chose a great recipe – it’s easier than others that I have tried or looked at, and Bourdain broke it down to very manageable steps, although some of his instructions were a bit vague and required me to adapt a bit.  Reducing some of the red wine amped up the flavor, and adding a bit of flour to thicken the sauce really did wonders for the texture.

Another fun recipe from the R2R gang, and another lesson learned for me – just because you’ve made a dish before, go ahead and try it with a different recipe – the results just may be worth it!

Cooking Notes:  My husband really, really liked this dish – he said it was so much better than my previous attempt at coq au vin.  I used Trader Joe’s Charles Shaw brand Cabernet Sauvignon, and I marinated the chicken for . . . 3 days.  Yup.  You read that correctly.  I was so busy I couldn’t get to it, and I was afraid it had turned to mush.  Didn’t happen, and I think that was because I used thighs and legs.  Served it over brown rice.  This is definitely on the repeat list!

Coq au vin
Adapted from Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook: Strategies, Recipes, and Techniques of Classic Bistro Cookin

Serves 4

1 bottle/1 liter plus 1 cup/225 ml of red wine
1 onion, cut into a 1-inch/2.5 cm dice
1 carrot, cut into ¼-inch/6-mm slices
1 celery rib, cut into  ½ inch/1-cm slices
4 whole cloves
4 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
1 tsp. fresh ground black peppercorns
1 bouquet garni (thyme, parsley, oregano)
3.5 lb/1.35 kg of chicken thighs and legs
2 cups chicken stock (I had to add this because I didn’t have enough wine in the pot to come close to covering the chicken)

salt and freshly ground pepper
1 tbs/28 ml olive oil
6 tbs/75 g butter, softened
1 tbs/14 g flour
¼ lb/112 g bacon
½ lb/ 225 g small, white button mushrooms, quartered

DAY ONE

The day before you even begin to cook, combine the bottle of red wine, the diced onion,  sliced carrots, celery, cloves, peppercorns, garlic, and bouquet garni in a large deep bowl. Add the chicken and submerge it in the liquid so that all of it is covered. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.  Or, you could do like I did and let it sit in there for 3 days, and have your husband rave about the wonderful-but-not-overpowering wine taste that the chicken has.

DAY TWO (or is it DAY FOUR?)

Remove the chicken from the marinade and pat it dry. Put it aside. Strain the marinade through the fine strainer, reserving the liquids and solids separately.  Set aside one cup of the liquid.

Season the chicken with salt and pepper. In the large Dutch oven, heat the oil and 2 tablesppoons/28 g of the butter ( I used clarified butter here) until almost smoking, and then sear the chicken, turning it with the tongs to evenly brown it. Once browned, remove from the pot and set aside.  When the chicken has cooled enough to handle it, peel and discard the skin.

Add the reserved onions, celery, and carrot to the pot and cook over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally, until they are soft and golden brown.

Sprinkle the flour over the vegetables and mix well with the wooden spoon so that the vegetables are coated. Now stir in the reserved strained marinade. Put the chicken back in the pot, along with the bouquet garni. Cover and cook this for about 45 minutes over low heat.  Take off the cover for another 15-20 minutes to evaporate some of the liquid.

Remove the bacon from the pan and drain it on paper towels, making sure to keep about 1 tablespoon/14 g of fat in the pan.

Saute the mushroom tops in the bacon fat until golden brown. Set them aside.

Take the one cup of wine, and simmer until reduced by half, or until thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.  Add salt and pepper to taste, but be careful – don’t let it get too salty.  Set aside.

When the chicken is cooked through – meaning tender, the juice from the thigh running clear when pricked – carefully remove from the liquid, and arrange on the deep serving platter. Strain the cooking liquid (again) into the reduced red wine.

Add the bacon, mushrooms, and pearl onions, adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper, and swirl in the remaining 2 tablespoons/28 g of butter. Now pour that sauce over the chicken.