Coq Au Vin - Chicken Braised In Red Wine | Classic French Recipes

Welcome back everyone. Today, after popular demand, we're finally making the Coq Au Vin recipe. Now, if you don't know what a Coq Au Vin is, it is a traditional French dish. It is basically pieces of chicken that have been marinated and then braised in the oven in a red wine and cognac sauce. The whole lot is then served with a garnish of onion, mushrooms, and bacon. Now, how's that sound? Welcome back. So, the Coq Au Vin recipe. Now, let's get a few things out of the way before we start. First off, translation. Coq Au Vin. What does that mean? In French, that means a rooster cooked in red wine, and it is actually true. The original recipe uses a rooster and not a chicken. In this version today, we're going to be using a chicken, but in fact, we should be calling that recipe a chicken cooked in a Coq Au Vin style because cooking with a rooster, like we are cooking, a rooster is really different. It's a meat that's tough, it's gamey, and it takes much, much longer to cook. And this is one of the reasons, including me, last time that I've tried, why it fails because we tend to overcook the chicken and the sauce is never reduced to the level required. So, this is a few tips for now. Now, also, this recipe, the Coq Au Vin or the chicken cooked in a Coq Au Vin fashion is not the type of recipe you're going to make on a whim on a Saturday saying, oh, what am I going to cook tonight? I'm going to make a Coq Au Vin. No, you're not. It's not because it's a difficult recipe, but it's a very time-consuming recipe because there's a lot of elements, such as marinating the chicken in red wine overnight for more than 12 hours and preparing a stock beforehand. Really, these two things take time. Now, happily for you guys, I've got two videos, one for the marinade that I've prepared already and another one on how to make stock. So, before you start that recipe, make sure you watch this video so we are all ready. Now, like I said, this video might be a bit longer than usual. We're going to take our time to make the real thing, the proper way, the way it's done in France. Let's get started. And now for the ingredients for our Coq Au Vin. So, the first thing you may notice on that screen here is this. Why is that glass right in the middle? What is it doing here? Well, this is actually a French cognac, a Courvoisier cognac. As you can see, I was sitting before with that bottle of cognac, and it was not for my drinking habits, but just a small reminder that this recipe actually uses a lot of cognac. There is cognac in the marinade, there would be cognac in the sauce, and cognac to make a flambé. So, a lot of cognac in that recipe. Now, for the ingredients, I've put everything on the screen and in the video description. And as you can see, surprisingly, you don't have much. A bit of pancetta or bacon, I've got some pearl onions we're going to caramelize, some mushrooms, and parsley. Basically, the rest is all the ingredients for the marinade, so chicken with the red wine, there's carrots, shallots, onion, and bouquet garni, and all the ingredients to make my stock. So, as you can see here, I've prepared already half of it, my chicken, and I've got my stock. And the rest is basically cooking the dish. So, it's not that difficult, but just a bit time consuming. So, let's begin. The first thing we're going to do is to filter our stock. So, you take your cold stock, remove the pieces of chicken, actually the bones, and we're going to filter it. Now, what I mean by filtering is taking all of your stock and pass it through a sieve. Now that we have our stock base, still very liquid, we put it on a low heat on the side, and we're going to leave it to reduce while we continue the recipe. And now for the marinade. This is a crucial step in the making of the Coq Au Vin. A lot of time you will hear people making Beurre Bourguignon, they will say when you have a marinade, when you try to then cook the meat in oil to start with, it becomes like a lot of liquid and it boils instead of really fry. This is because you haven't dried your meat. Okay, what needs to happen, every single piece, you remove all the garnish, onions, whatever, and we're going to dry the meat with kitchen towels. Very important. So, you're going to really make sure every single piece of meat has been totally dried off so that it can shallow fry afterwards and colored nicely. This is what you should get. Nothing soggy, no juice, nothing. You're going to repeat the process with every single piece. This is my result after I've dried my meat. Of course, I've removed the kitchen towels, I've put it in a clean tray, and as you can see, there's absolutely no juice whatsoever. Maybe a little drop over here, but away from that, it's dry. And now for the marinade, we're going to repeat the same process as the stock. So, I remove the bouquet garni and we're going to filter the marinade the same way. So, you're going to pour everything in. So, like the chicken before, you would have guessed it, you take all of your vegetables or your onions and garnish and you're going to dry them. Same thing. When this is done, you're going to put this marinade that you've got also to reduce on the back of the stove while we continue with the recipe. So, make sure that all of your garnish, it's quite dry. All right, all done. So, let's recap. This is the first step for the first part for the Coq Au Vin. We've got our meat that has been marinated, it's dry. We've got the garnish that's been also separated, it's also dry-ish. We've got the actual marinade that we're going to bring to the boil and reduce for at least 10 to 15 minutes. And same thing for the stock. That's before you even start cooking the meat. The second part consists of preparing your marinade and your stock. And by this, we mean that we're going to have to clean the marinade and reduce it to make sure it's nice and clean. And the stock, same thing. We're going to make sure it's clean on the top, remove the scum, reduce it and thicken it. Now, the first thing with the marinade, before it boils, you see these? These will start to appear at the top. And you want to remove those as much as you can to make sure you're going to have something clean. So you go through this, you can use a spoon like I'm doing, or you can also use one of those. I'm not sure if that's super efficient. But you see, you can scoop quite a lot of it. If you've done a good job, you should get something like that, as you can see. Sorry, my hand is maybe in the way. It's just basically the wine. So we're going to leave this to reduce for 10 to 15 minutes now. And now for the stock. I've cleaned the top like the wine. And the recipe calls for a reduced stock that has been thickened. So of course, I've got my beloved beurre manié, equal amount of butter and flour that I'm going to use, and put a little bit of it in there. It has to be slightly thickened. So I put the beurre manié in, it has to boil, and I'm whisking the whole lot until it incorporates. I've just put virtually just a few grams of my beurre manié. You can do the spoon test, and this is what you should get. You see, it's nice and brown. It's thick, but it's still kind of liquid-ish, let's say. But as you move, you can see it's got that thickness to it. So nothing more than that. And now for the fun part, the cooking of the cork oven. We're going to cook the meat. So before we start all this, make sure you preheat your oven at 200 degrees Celsius, or 392 Fahrenheit. And this is my setup, just to show you how I work. A bit of butter and oil in one pan, cast iron, Le Creuset. I've got my reduced and thickened stock. I've got the reduced wine here. This is the tray I'm going to use to put the pieces of meat when they're lightly brown. And I've got my meat ready on the side. Let's get started. Okay, so we're going to color the meat. We're going to start with these pieces here on the skin first. And you put them on there. And we're going to let them color for just a few minutes. Once you get a bit of coloration, you're going to turn around your meat. All done. When they're ready, you basically take them and reserve them on the tray. And you repeat the same process with all the other pieces. Now, for the garnish, same thing. You take the dry garnish, put everything in, and give it a stir. After two minutes, you're going to put your pieces of meat back on. And we're going to make a flambe. And now for the flambe. Be careful if you do this at home. You have to crank up the heat. Make sure the whole pan has to be very hot. I've got a bit of cognac here. I don't know if it's going to work. A little bit in there. Whoo! Let's burn this thing. Quickly, the flames are coming down. And now you can just give it a little stir again. Turn your heat back down. And we're going to add the wine. Now, first step, we pour in all the reduced wine. And we're going to turn the heat back on medium and leave this to reduce again slightly. Final step, you're going to complete your top up with the stock. So you take your thickened stock. Mix it well. I'm just going to top up. And don't put too much. We can always add some later. And we're all done. I'm going to put this back in, my bouquet garni, to add some flavor in the dish. I'm going to put a lid on and cook this in the oven at 200 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes. Now that the coq au vin is in the oven, we have time to prepare our garnish. We're going to start by making the caramelized onion. Take a pan. Pickling onion or pearl onion. Doesn't matter what you call them. Notch of butter, which is like about one teaspoon. I'm adding as well roughly a bit less than a tablespoon, as you can see. Maybe half a tablespoon of sugar. And a little bit of water. Don't even cover the onions. When that's done, heat on medium, paper lid. I'm going to leave this to caramelize. For the pancetta and mushrooms, take a bit of oil in the pan. And we're going to flash fry the pancetta first. Hold on. When the pancetta is nicely colored, you reserve it on the side. And in the same pan, you're going to fry the mushrooms. When the mushroom have got a nice golden color, you put the pancetta back in, give it a mix, and let it cook for another one or two minutes, then reserve it. Finally, if you want, this is optional, you can fry some little croutons for decoration. That's if you really want to make it by the book. All right, all done. Got my mix here. My bread is ready. The onions are not yet ready. But I'm going to let them go while we check the chicken, because it should be ready by now. So the coq au vin, it's a dish in which you don't serve the garnish with the sauce. So as always, what you need to do, you need to separate the meat. You remove the bouquet garni. So you're going to put the meat on the side in a tray. And you're going to filter your stock or your sauce through a sieve in another container so we can finish the sauce. So as you can see, same process. I keep my garnish. I'm going to discard it. I'm going to reduce my sauce and add the extra garnish into it. And I've got my meat. It's going to sit here for five minutes on the side to rest. And now let's finish that coq au vin sauce. The first thing you do in French cooking when you have a sauce like this is to taste it to see how far you are with salt and pepper. There's enough salt. I think I would put a little bit of more black pepper. It's still a bit thin. So what I'm going to do, of course, like always, beurre manié. That's the first thing. Next, very quickly, the spoon check. Is this thick enough? You take it. You check with a spoon. You need napping consistency. You can see that line. You're good to go. You're now ready to add the rest. You take half your garnish. All in. Mix well. After that, a dash of cognac. And bring back to the boil. When the sauce reaches the boil, you're basically done. You can add, if you want, all the chicken back into the pot with all the garnish and everything you've cooked and serve it on the table as one pot. Or, like I'm going to do, you can dress it up step by step. I'll do that on the camera. Would you believe it? My microphone just died for that sequence. So basically, guys, I'm going to leave you with my dressing up of the coq au vin. I hope you had fun doing that video like I did. And I'll see you all next time. Take care.