Andrew Zimmern Cooks: Coq Au Vin

One of the easiest weeknight dinners you will ever learn how to make and something that should be in everybody's battery of recipes is coq au vin. Chicken with red wine. Simple, easy, classic great French food. I adore this recipe. A whole chicken cut up into parts is where you start. It all goes into a ziplock bag with rosemary, bay leaves, garlic cloves, thyme. Strain this out, we're not gonna let this wine go to waste we're actually gonna cook with it. And we're gonna cook with those garlic cloves, and we're gonna cook with those herbs. A little bit of oil and then one at a time, just lay your pieces of chicken, we want to get some nice browning on that. Look at the caramelization from the sugar and the wine. That is stunning. Let's add our bouquet garni and our garlic. Add our celery and our carrot. Going to add our onion. I'm going to add the onion in halves, I am using these vegetables for their aromatic properties and their flavor. But I'm not going to serve those vegetables with it, I'm really going to show you two different ways to make coq au vin. Separate these little twin lobes of shallot here. Cut them into thin rings. Pepper. Some coarse salt. Cup, cup and a half of tomato depends on how you like it. And then the wine, that we marinated the chicken in. And all we want to do is bring that to a boil. Once this is cooked for about 10-12 minutes and the wine has reduced by about half, add your chicken stock. And bring it back to a boil. So now that it's back to a boil, we clamp a lid on it. Cook for 45 minutes, an hour make sure the chicken is nice and tender. So this has been braising for enough time so the chicken is nice and tender. And it's lovely because the fat from this has gone into the sauce and is almost emulsified in it. I'm going to leave my bouquet garni in. I've got all those big pieces of vegetables. I'm just going to raise the temperature on this to a nice strong simmer or low boil, and let it reduce by about half before I strain it. You can serve all these pieces of carrot, celery, onion, and garlic and herb and have it be sort of rustic and family style. I do that most of the time at my house. However, you want to do coq au vin for a fancy Friday or Saturday night dinner party, or just want to sort of zhush it up a little bit. Strain out all those vegetables, because all the flavor has gone out of them. Those carrots don't taste like carrots anymore, they taste like the sauce. Same with the onions, same with the celery. So one of the things that I think is fun to do, is just to make some brunoise dice of those vegetables. So you have that fresh, crisp, tender sweetness from them. So by cutting the carrots into planks and then cutting them as wide as they are, I can make perfect little tiny squares. I've already done some shallots and some celery. And those need to cook in the sauce. But they don't need to cook for very long so when I'm reheating my chicken that's been out of the sauce for about 25 or 30 minutes, I can cook those vegetables and we'll have, yet again another layer of flavor in there. You'll have that cooked sweetness from the vegetables that have been in there for an hour and 15 minutes, and you have this fresh, crisp, tender set of vegetable flavors. We return this sauce to the pot. And we add shallot. Celery. Carrot. Season a little bit. And now we let that reduce. I do love reheating in the sauce as it reduces because it puts that gorgeous gravy and vegetable glaze all around our braised chicken. And you want that thickness of the sauce to glaze the chicken and it takes ten minutes for it to heat up and it takes ten minutes for this to reduce, so everything should come together at the same time. Ten minutes later, twelve minutes later our sauce is perfectly reduced. I recently got back from a trip to New Orleans, and I went to some of the classic old restaurants like Galatoire's and Antoine's. Restaurants that have been open in some cases, since before the Civil War. And they served a lot of fish dishes and crab dishes on toast, to catch all the drippings and gravy, and I forgot how great gravy and meat dripping on to toast really is. So throw some chicken on there and then take your wonderful sauce and just spoon it over. This is just fantastic, I mean if you don't want to eat that I can't help you. This is so good I would serve this to Daniel Boulud without flinching, and I think he'd have a little tear.

Channel: Andrew Zimmern

Views: 29,312

Rating: 4.8290596 out of 5

Keywords: andrew, zimmern, Cooking, Culinary, Literacy, Kitchen, instructions, How, to, Yum, delicious, favorite, eating, meal, Travel, Channel, family, azcooks, easy, dinner, French, Chicken, Ziplock, thyme, strain, garlic, Coq Au Vin, shallot, seasoned, Travel Chanel, Red Wine, Zhush, Carrot, Shallot, salt, pepper, gorgous, braised, toast, New Orleans, classical

Id: qksBUoThdtM

Length: 5min 25sec (325 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2017