Coq au vin

Ingredients

• Chicken, jointed1.5 kg
• Dry red wine750 ml
• Smoked bacon — in lardons150 g
• Button mushrooms300 g
• Small onions250 g
• Carrot2
• Garlic4 clove
• Plain flour2 tbsp
• Chicken stock300 ml
• Thyme and bay3 sprig
• Butter40 g
• Salt and pepperto taste

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Cover the chicken with the wine, carrot, garlic and herbs and leave it in the fridge overnight. In the morning lift the meat out and dry it, keeping the wine.

   480 min

2. 2

   Render the bacon in a casserole and lift it out. In that fat, brown the chicken hard on all sides, in batches.

   15 min

3. 3

   Dust with the flour, stir and cook for two minutes. Pour in the marinade with its vegetables and the stock, bring to the boil and skim.

   6 min

4. 4

   Braise covered over a low flame or at 160 °C for an hour. The sauce should barely tremble.

   60 min

5. 5

   While it braises, fry the onions in butter until golden, and separately the mushrooms over a high flame until they colour.

   15 min

6. 6

   Add the onions, mushrooms and bacon to the pot, give it ten minutes over a low flame and check the sauce for salt.

   10 min

About the dish

The dish was originally made with a rooster — a bird tough enough that there was no other way to eat it. Hence the wine and the long braise: acid softened the meat over hours. Modern chicken is tender, so the time comes down and the wine stays for flavour.

The wine has to be one you would drink. Cooking wine with salt in it gives a salty sauce there is no fixing later, and a cheap sour wine stays sour — reducing concentrates, it does not improve.

The garnish, mushrooms and onions, is cooked separately and added at the end. Braised with the chicken they give up water and lose their shape.

Worth knowing

• — Coq au vin is markedly better the next day. The sauce deepens overnight and the meat takes on the wine.
• — If the sauce comes out thin, lift the meat out and reduce it hard — thickening with flour at that stage is too late.
• — A Burgundy or another Pinot Noir sits closest to the original, but any dry red without heavy oak will do.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

680 kcal

Protein

48 g

Fat

38 g

Carbs

16 g

Useful for this recipe

• Oven Temperature Converter

More from France

• Ratatouille — A Provençal vegetable stew where each vegetable is cooked separately before they meet — otherwise it turns to mush.
• French onion soup — Soup from onions, stock and cheese-topped bread. All of the flavour comes from caramelisation, which takes forty minutes rather than twenty.
• Crème brûlée — A yolk custard baked in a water bath under a lid of burnt sugar.