Episode 1: Coq Au Vin

This recipe originally appeared on my facebook page as "Eric is bored at work, so here's a recipe for some random shit. Episode 1: Coq Au Vin"

Someone was asking me about this the other day, but I forget who. Also, cortney at one point suggested I write crap about food, and I'm bored and trying to stay awake at work waiting for a DBA to get his shit together. So here goes, the first entry in what may or may not be an ongoing series (depending on how many of my recipes I can remember sober)

Coq au Vin, if ya don't know, is a traditional french stew. "Rooster with wine", literally. Apparently back in the day the french peasants would get hungry, all the hens would be dead from the plague or un-slaughterable 'cause they were egg-laying, and so they would go grab the old rooster from the yard and eat his ornery ass. Since the rooster was typically a) old, b) lacking the fat of the younger chickens and c) full of spite they stewed it for a long time in wine to soften up the meat. I don't know where to buy rooster these days (actually, that's a lie, fox and obel will order it special for you, but that's pointlessly expensive) so I make this shit with regular old hen. It's good, doesn't taste the way you expect it to if you just think "chicken" and "wine" and combine the flavors in your head, and is best made in a stupidly labor intensive way, as you have an excuse to drink red wine for hours and butcher meat.

This is an adaptation of a recipe I put together for Amanda a year or so ago, edited with an eye towards doing it the "right" (read: hard) way, and updated with some changes learned through practice. I was going to put in some notes on how to make it in a more "quick and dirty" fashion, but fuck that. Make it once the hard way and the easy way (short version: buy chicken pieces instead of whole, and buy pre-made stock) should be obvious.

Here we go, first, ze materials:

A Bottle of red wine. Don't skimp on the wine, it's half the point of the dish, and using $4 hooch will get you less than optimal results. I like to use Rex Goliath 47 lb Rooster Pinot Noir for what should be an exceedingly obvious reason, but any full-bodied red will do.

Another bottle of wine, for drinkin. Cheap hooch is perfectly acceptable in this case. Hell, buy a box of franzia. I don't care.

One 5ish-lb chicken. I've tried both roaster and fryer versions, didn't really make a difference, just don't use one of those perdue frankenbirds, they are completely tasteless.

A pack of thick-sliced bacon, I prefer the non-smoked kind for this recipe, but whatever man, you're doing the work.

Veggie wise, you should pick up: 4-6 celery ribs, 1 bulb garlic, 2 large yellow or vidalia (sweet) onions, 4-6 carrots, fresh thyme, bay leaves, 1 medium shallot, 1 Pkg pearl onions (once peeled, should fill a cereal bowl, and no, the color doesn't matter), 2-3 of those 8oz plastic containers of mushrooms. Try to avoid the "generic mushroom" if you can. Crimini (baby bella) are great, shitake are great too, so are oyster. I usually get one pack of each, but if you're not big on mushrooms or like a certain kind go to town. I would suggest avoiding using 24oz of oyster mushrooms, it can give the dish a wierd fish-like flavor.

As in all tasty things, you will also require salt, pepper, and a bunch of unsalted butter.

Ok, pour yourself a glass of wine, get in the kitchen, and let's start...

About 6ish hours before dinner butcher your chicken. Yes, six hours. This is "the hard way", remember? Give yourself the extra time if you've never butchered a chicken before and are nervous. Pro tip: The ribcage should NOT be attached to the breasts when you are done. You want to separate the wings, the legs, the thighs, and the breasts. Set em aside. Mince the shit out of that shallot, set aside. Peel and chop half of your carrots (set aside), and wash and chop half of your celery ribs (set..... aside?). Quarter one of your onions, and roughly chop the other (set over yonder). At some point, you need to wash your mushrooms and peel your pearl onions. You can blanch them (the onions), but I find doing it by hand without blanching builds character.

Take the carcass of the chicken, toss it on a baking sheet, and stick it in the oven under the broiler for about 20-30 minutes to brown the bones. Dump the carcass and whatever juice is on the pan into a large cookpot. Grab the giblets and neck and put those in as well. Toss in the quartered onion. Snap the other half of your celery stickes in half and toss those in. Peel your remaining carrots, chop em into halves or quarters, and toss those in. Peel five or six cloves of garlic and put those in the pot as well, along with a few sprigs of thyme, a couple bay leaves, some parsley (if you've got it lying around) and a generous pinch or two of salt and pepper. Fill the pot with water, bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a rolling simmer, and ignore. You're making stock, basically, so if you know how to do that already, just ignore my instructions and roll with it.

Go to the liqour store and buy another bottle of wine, 'cause you and I both know that you've already finished off the drinkin bottle, and we need the other bottle of wine FOR THE DISH!

Now for the real cookin, which starts about Two and a half-ish hours before you want to eat. First, a word on pots. I don't know what kind of pots you have at home that will work for stew, but I recommend using a dutch-oven type thingy, if you've got one. If you don't, then any old stewpot will work, but try to avoid a nonstick pot, as you lose the crusty fond stuff that comes from these first couple of steps, and that lowers the deliciousness from 11 to 10.

Okay. First, toss the package of bacon into the freezer for about 10 minutes, then get out a big heavy knife and cut it in half. Put one half away for some other day, then chop the bacon into 1-inch squares. Put one and a half tablespoons of butter into your stewpot on low heat. Once it's melted and has stopped bubbling, crumble the bacon in and turn up the heat a little. Cook the bacon over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until it gets a nice golden brown color, but isn't quite crisp. Remove the bacon with a slotted spoon and set aside. You probably also want to grab a spoon and spoon off a couple of tablespoons of the bacon grease, but I leave that to you. Season your chicken pieces on both sides with salt and pepper. turn the heat to medium-high, until the bacon fat and butter are smoking. Cook the chicken in your stewpot, in the bacon and butter, until it is a honey-color, almost to the point you'd consider it "golden brown", but not yet "crispy". You want there to be little brown bits stuck to the bottom of the pan, but you are not trying to cook the chicken the whole way through. Flip and repeat until the other side is the same color. Remove the chicken and set aside. Repeat, as you probably can't do it all in one batch.

This next part is optional, but fun, especially after you've been drinking. If you're feeling frisky, once all the chicken is honey-colored on both sides, take the dutch oven off the heat, toss all the chicken and bacon bits back in, dump 1/2 a cup of cognac on that shit, set it on fire with a kitchen match, and then once you get the fire out, remove (once again) the chicken and the bacon.

Now we start adding vegetables. Dump in your minced shallot and chopped onion into the fat and butter left after cooking the chicken. Medium/Medium-High heat. Use the moisture from the onion to deglaze the pan, getting all the good fond bits up. Cook until the onion is translucent and beginning to brown.

And now we magically turn this whole thing into stew! Put the chicken and bacon back into the pot, try and arrange it so the chicken is all at the same height. Dump the entire bottle of wine into the pot. Yes. The entire bottle. Seriously. The whole damned thing. DUMP IT NOW!

Thank you. You can open a third drinkin bottle now if you would like.

Dump your chopped carrots into the pot. Turn up the heat to medium-high, until it starts to simmer. Now, remember that pot of dead chicken bones and water we started a while ago? Grab a ladle, and start ladling the boiling/simmering chicken stock over the contents of your stewpot until the chicken is completely covered with liquid. Add a dash of salt, a dash of pepper, stir it around a bit, and bring to a high simmer.

You can chill for about fifteen or twenty minutes now.

That's enough, time to go back to cooking.

Melt a couple of tablespoons of butter in a large saucepan. While your butter is melting, toss the chopped celery into the stew, stir it a bit, and reduce the simmer slightly.

Once the butter is melted, add your peeled pearl onions. Stir em around until they begin to turn golden, then dump in your mushrooms. Sprinkle about a tablespoon and a half of flour over the mushrooms and onions. Oh, did I forget to mention flour? Too fucking bad. It's a kitchen, it should have flour in it. Your kitchen doesn't have flour? Your grandmother must be so fucking proud of you. Stir regularly over medium heat until the mushrooms and onions are both golden and almost to the point of turning crispy, and the flour is cooked.

Dump those onions and mushrooms into the coq au vin orgy happening in the stewpot. Stir that shit.

All you have to do now is keep the mixture in the dutch oven at a good simmer until about 30 minutes before serving. Ideally, it's been 90-120 minutes since you finished adding chicken broth. You probably want to flip the chicken at some point. I don't know if it helps or not, but it makes me feel better, and this dish is all about feelings, right?

At that T-minus 30 mark, remove the chicken and set aside on the same plate you used before. Yes, the one that had half-cooked chicken on it. We're adding an element of danger and reducing our water consumption. Don't you care about the earth? No? Ok, then use a clean plate, earth raper. Turn up the heat on the contents of the stew pot a bit, back to a high simmer, and dump in any free juices on the bacon storage plate, or the chicken storage plate. Stir frequently and reduce. Once the sauce looks all velvety, coats a spoon, and tastes like you think it should, it's ready. Put a piece of chicken on a plate, ladle the reduced stew/sauce over it, and Salt and pepper to taste.

Congratulations, you've made Coq au Vin the hard way. I recommend serving with roasted potatoes, but that's your call. Also, I recommend seeing a doctor about your drinking problem.

Cheers!