How a Chef Makes Authentic Coq au Vin at Home

I'm a professional chef and I've made coq au vin more times than I can count, but it's a dish that I see made wrong more than any other online. So today I'm going to show you how to make a classic coq au vin at home. It starts with a chicken. A classic coq is a cockerel, not a chicken. So a cockerel is an old farm bird, too tough to roast and they would have braised it in red wine to make it delicious and edible. So you can't get hold of coq anymore. You can't get a cockerel. So get yourself an old chicken, a slightly older aged chicken. This is a hundred day old bird, slightly larger, much more flavour and it's perfect for a coq au vin. So the first step basically is we're going to marinate the chicken. You know, we're going to leave it in the red wine overnight with the mirepoix just to infuse the flavour. I said at the start I was going to show you how to make a classic coq au vin. There will be a couple of changes just because there are some things that are done in the classic recipe that I don't think make sense for the home kitchen. So we will change it slightly. So first we're just going to snap off these kind of knuckles where the feet were attached. So you've got a nice clean drumstick bone. Classically speaking, you would break this chicken down for sauté, which is into 13 pieces exactly. And it just doesn't make sense. Like this is a recipe for four people. How do you share 13 bits of chicken between four people? You can't. We're going to break this down into eight pieces. So you get two pieces each. There'll be two breast pieces and two leg pieces. So white and dark meat each. To start, you want to remove the legs. So just nip the skin, fold it back on itself, pop that bone out. And then this oyster here, really important that we take that off. When you cut chicken for sauté, you would leave the oyster on the carcass. And then one of the 13 pieces is basically a piece of carcass with two tiny bits of meat on. Which I always think is quite unfair if you get that cut. So we're going to take it onto the leg meat. Again, pop that bone out, follow that oyster around. And then just all the way down the carcass. That's your two legs, which we'll cut down into thigh and drumstick after. With the rest of the chicken, you want everything to cook at the same time. So we're going to leave the breast meat on the bone, which also means more flavour. But we'll get rid of the carcass. And this is what we'll use to make the chicken stock that we will cook the coq au vin in. So we'll leave all the carcass to the top. I'm going to leave the bottom half of the breast attached to the wings and then the top half attached to the breastbone. As you would if you were taking the breast off, cutting down either side of the breastbone. And as far down as our knife will go, we'll tackle that last little bit with some scissors. That is your breast attached to the bone. So that's going to cook nice and slowly like a piece of leg. So that's one piece done. Second side, again, down that breastbone and then using scissors. And that all goes to stock. And we'll just clean up these breasts slightly. So we'll remove, I think some of this rib cage is a bit excessive. Any sort of excess skin, any flabby bits of fat we can remove. So you've got one nice clean breast. Do the same with the other side. Now we're going to cut it into our eight pieces. I'm going to cut the breast into two pieces. A small piece of breast attached to the wing and then a slightly larger piece of breast. Cut nicely through the flesh. Chicken on the bone. We're going to leave it in a tray and that we're going to marinate in a second. And then for the legs, you've got a natural seam to follow. So just this sort of like white line. You can feel with your finger as well. There's a natural seam. So just using your knife, basically just, I mean, you can just cut straight through that. Again, removing any kind of excess fat or skin. Cleaning them up. And then this is kind of a very similar dish to the beef bourguignon we made. It's just a slightly more delicate, slightly slower braise. So the beef bourguignon we cooked for three hours. This will cook for just one hour, maybe slightly less than one hour. So we'll do a few little different things with the wine reductions and stocks and everything else. We are going to marinate the meat. Beef bourguignon we didn't because it's going to cook in the oven for like almost four hours. This one only gets an hour. So it's whatever we can do to get the wine flavor into the chicken. So we're going to lay out our vegetables on top, on top of the chicken. Nice shallow dish. Half a garlic clove, one carrot, a couple of celeries. Bokkegani. Coming on to the wine. This is a Burgundian classic. So we've got a really nice Burgundy red wine. Pinot Noir is famous from the Burgundy region. So definitely worth getting a nice Pinot Noir. Not essential, but this is quite like a delicate chicken braise. So a slightly lighter red wine works really nicely. I actually got this bottle when we went to Burgundy recently on a work trip. We were cooking at a chateau for a vineyard opening. So I got this from one of the wine shops. A nice bottle of light Pinot. And I mean, I'll show you the color of it. It looks like Ribena. You can see how like beautifully kind of see-through that is almost. Can you see that? So like in comparison to a normal sort of full-bodied red. Looks like kind of like summer fruit squash. And that is really nice for this chicken. So super delicate. Worth buying a nice one. We're going to cover the chicken in the red wine. There's a whole bottle, got half a bottle left. We'll put that in fresh when we sear the chicken. So we'll color the chicken, add the red wine marinade. We'll add this red wine as well and we'll reduce it right down. So for now that is good to go in the fridge for overnight. So chicken's had overnight in the fridge. And you'll see now the chicken is like chicken skin and meat is beautifully dyed. Blushing pink by the Pinot Noir. So we just pull all the chicken out and we're just going to dry that slightly. That's going to go into a seasoned flour and get colored in the pan. As we do for the Beef Bourguignon, there's a couple of small differences with the Beef Bourguignon which we'll go through. And that is more around the kind of reduction of the wine. So with the Beef Bourguignon, we didn't reduce the wine. We just put the wine in and then we cooked it for four hours. And then during that cooking process, the wine reduced. Where we're only cooking this for an hour, we're going to reduce the wine in the pan by half before it goes into the oven. Veg, we'll strain out as well. Keeping everything. So we're going to use this wine from the marinade. We're going to also roast the veggies off afterwards. Left nice and big. Same as the Beef Bourguignon so that we can pick it out nice and easily at the end. And there's lots of dishes that have the same garnish all from Burgundy. So you've got Oeuf Maret, which is basically a poached egg which is finished with a red wine sauce with mushrooms, onions and bacon. The Coq Au Vin is exactly the same. So nice mushrooms. Traditionally turned button mushrooms, but I couldn't get hold of any. So just these nice mushrooms are cut into quarters. About 200 grams of mushrooms. You've then also got the onions. So small baby pearl onions are absolutely impossible to get hold of in supermarkets. So if you can get hold of them, great. If you can't, do what I've done, which is these small little shallots. Same sort of thing. So you want the size of a kind of two pound coin maximum. Pour boiling water over the top of them and peel them. And then we're going to cook everything together in the pan. Braise it down slowly. And that is what we'll use to finish the sauce. The mushrooms are going last. We're going to start the onions and the bacon in the pan together. Last time with the Beef Bourguignon, we braised the bacon, the smoked bacon. But today we're going to cut it into lardons. This is a quick, delicate braise. You need to be able to kind of differentiate everything in the sauce. For that reason, we're going to cut the bacon into lardons. It's a little bit sort of smokier, a little bit saltier that way. So just sliced and then sliced through into thin little strips. That goes into the pan. We're going to render out some of that fat. And that's what we're going to use to braise the onions and the mushrooms in. I think about 200 grams of pancetta or smoked bacon as well. And then same as the Bourguignon, same as all of the French braises. This is the most important part. This is where we're going to build the layers of flavour. This is where we're going to caramelise everything. This is where we can deglaze all the flavour into the sauce. So this is the stage where you need to take time. Start with just a little dribble of oil, but all of that fat is going to render out of the bacon. So don't worry too much. Bacon goes into a nice kind of medium heat pan. Slowly bring that up temperature with the onions. And we're probably going to cook all of that together for about 10 minutes before we add the mushrooms. The mushrooms just need a quick five minutes at the end. This has been cooking now about 10 minutes. The pearl onions or shallots in this case, and the pancetta are really nicely cooked. The pancetta, all the fats rendered out of it. Nice colour, caramelised, beautiful colour on the onions. And they're nice and soft. So now we can go in with the mushrooms and we're just going to basically give them a nice little bit of colour. Gently cook them. And that's the garnish that will finish the pockaband. Everything's cooked. Mushrooms, onions, bacon. I'm going to put that into a small bowl and cover it with a cartouche. And that's just going to kind of gently steam and finish cooking. It's going to stay nice and warm. And then that will be ready when our chicken's cooked. Comes out of the oven. This will go in and finish our pockaband. So we can put that to one side. That's just going to sit happily there for a while. Leave the pan on a nice low heat. And we'll go straight in there with our chicken. Chicken into seasoned flour. Exactly as we did for the bouillon. And that's just going to basically help us thicken this finished sauce. But it's also going to protect the chicken when we're colouring it. So knock off any excess flour. And then that just goes into straight into a medium heat. Skin side down. And we're just going to colour the chicken. Nice golden brown. Follow that with the vegetables. And then we'll reduce the red wine. And then into the oven. All the chicken is nicely coloured. You can see it's kind of, it's golden brown. I haven't gone too dark with it. You just want a kind of nice, nice colour on it. Don't go crazy. Obviously keeping the pan nice and brown. Not laying that bond at the bottom of the pan burn. That will obviously make your final sauce bitter. So trying to keep everything nice, golden, delicate. This pan now is ready for our wine. We'll just add a little splash of water. Which will just cool down the pan enough that the wine doesn't burn when it goes in. So this is our marinated wine. You can see it's kind of gone a little bit milky and cloudy coloured. Which is fine. So that goes into the pan first. Finish the rest of this bottle of wine. So this is obviously just good, good quality red wine. That's a whole bottle. And we're just going to scrape the base of that pan. Making sure we get off all of that flavour. And we'll just reduce that down by half. It's only going to be in the oven for an hour. So it won't have time for that sauce to like naturally reduce. So we're going to do it in the pan here. The wine's been in. It's reduced. The base of that pan is nice and clean now. We're just going to add the chicken back in for the last bit of the reduction. So let's get all the chicken around the pan. There's obviously a load of flour on here. So we kind of want that to dissolve into the red wine as it reduces. That's obviously going to thicken our end sauce. So all the chicken bits in there. Leave a little bit of space for your mirepoix. Which is going to sit on this side of the pan. Squeeze all that in there. Sandwich a little bouquet garni in there somewhere. And then we're just going to continue with that reduction. So it needs to still come down a little bit more. And then we'll add our chicken stock. And that can go into the oven. This has had, I mean, about 10 minutes on the stove. All that red wine has reduced by half now. You can kind of see it's almost kind of sauce consistency now. A lot of the flour that was on the pan or on the chicken has kind of gone into the sauce. And we're kind of halfway there with the sauce now. So that is ready to add our chicken stock. So nice brown chicken stock. Again, this you just want to add. Come up to about two thirds of the way up the chicken. You want the top of the chicken still poking out of the stock. So not completely, completely covered. About there is about right. And we'll just bring that to the boil. Cover it with a cartouche. And then that goes in the oven. I've got the oven at 150 for one hour. Chicken has had an hour in the oven. Looks lovely. I mean, you can see all this kind of fat's come to the top now. And that's just from the chicken, from the lardons. So what we'll do, we'll strain off all the liquid into the pan. Reduce it down. We'll skim off all that fat. Add our garnish, our lardons, onions and mushrooms to the pan. And then we are ready to plate. So we'll just pull this chicken out. That will just sit nicely. That'll stay warm while we just finish off these last few steps. Chicken is all just beautifully cooked. It's not completely obliterated. It's just cooked. I would say, you know, slightly more cooked than it would if you did like a roast chicken or something. But it's not falling off the bone. There's still some bite to it. So that will all sit happily now for the next kind of five minutes while we finish things off. And then to finish this sauce, we're just going to strain everything into a pan and start to reduce it. Okay, so we can get rid of all of that. Coq au vin sauce has been reducing now. So you've got a really nice coating consistency. So it just coats the back of the spoon. Another lick of the finger, mum. That is perfect. So we're going to go in now with the vegetables that we cooked earlier. You can see there's kind of a bit of stock, which is just, you know, where the mushrooms and onions have sweated and cooked. We're not going to add that. So let's just scoop the vegetables out straight into the sauce. And then we're going to finish with a little bit of chopped parsley. And that's going to go over the top of our cooked chicken. So that is your finished Coq au vin sauce. This is loaded chopped parsley. And then we'll pour that back over our chicken. I'm going to plate this up family style. I think this is a dish that is made for the middle of the table. So we're going to put it back into the original dish. Four bits of breast in opposite corners. Leg, thigh. And then we'll just go over the top with this beautiful Coq au vin sauce. I'll do it this way so you guys can see. We've got the onions, the mushrooms, the pancetta, that beautiful red wine jus, which we used the Pinot Noir from Burgundy. And then that middle of the table, big bowl of mashed potato. That is how you make proper Coq au vin. Okay, so in a bowl, bon purée, plenty of butter. I think this is the best accompaniment for a Coq au vin, but people do serve it with egg noodles, pasta, rice, you know, any kind of starch really, to be honest. So we'll go in with a nice dollop of mash. Go for one drumstick. Nice piece of breast. And then just kind of that bourguignon garnish. So you've got your mushrooms, sprays, baby onions. And then we'll hit it with plenty of that Pinot Noir red wine sauce. That chicken is absolutely delicious. Just flaking off the bone. You've got that delicate red wine, salty lardons, buttery mash. I think that's the ultimate chicken braise.