Coq Au Vin - Chicken Braised with Bacon, Mushrooms & Red Wine

hello this is chef john from food wishes comm with coca vaughn that's right it does translate to coq with wine but don't worry we're going to use chicken I mean come on you can't find rooster in a grocery store these days but anyway despite it's very French and fairly an appropriate name this praised chicken and wine dish is incredibly delicious and unbelievably simple and if you're a fan of fonds stay tuned we're going to use three Fonz to make this recipe but before we get to that let's go ahead and start by seasoning our chicken and for this I like to use bone-in skin-on chicken thighs and I have six here and these were huge so they were a little bigger than I'm used to we're going to go ahead and season both sides generously with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper and what we'll do when those are sufficiently seasoned we'll just set those aside you can just leave them out at room temperature and we're ready to move on to the bacon step so I'm going to toss a whole bunch of sliced bacon into a cold skillet set on medium heat and what we're going to do is cook this bacon until crisp and as I mentioned earlier we're going to be doing multiple phones here so this is fond number one the bacon caramel is Asian and when we get to that point let's go ahead and remove that bacon with a slotted spoon leaving the fat in the pan at this point we're in a cranked our heat up to high and brown the chicken so I'm gonna place that in skin side down and I mentioned earlier I was using particularly ginormous thighs for this so my pans a little crowded here and when you combine a crowded pan with a surface that's already kind of sticky from cooking the bacon you're gonna have a very good possibility of the skin sticking which as you can see my kind of did but you know what it really wasn't that bad most of more okay except that last one that pretty much lost all its skin but I was stubborn I scraped it off the bottom and put it on top where it would have been but that's okay that didn't bother me at all do I seem bothered no and the reason is because this is going to be braised in that red wine sauce it really doesn't matter so you're gonna Brown that skin side best you can you're going to flip it over for a minute brown the other side and then we're going to remove the chicken from the pan and you'll see we've created our second Fond first the bacon fine and then the chicken Fond and then I want you to drain all but one tablespoon of the fat we want to leave a little bit in there because the next step is our third and final Fond that we're going to make with the vegetables so I'm to toss in some sliced shallots some diced onion which traditionally should be pearl onions and I'm also going to toss in a whole bunch of quartered mushrooms it will also toss in a big pinch of salt and of course many of you know it's going to happen here the salt is going to draw water out of the mushroom and the onions which is going to leak out and deglaze our double fond from the chicken and the bacon and then that goodness is going to get absorbed by the vegetables which will then caramelize themselves to form our third and final fond I mean look at that how ridiculously good is that going to be and then once our vegetable mixture looks like that we're going to make a very small very quick roux so I'm going to toss in a little chunk of butter hey this is a French recipe after all and then just a little bit of flour like a rounded teaspoon and we'll stir that in and we'll just cook that flour for about a minute just to take the raw edge off and if you want you can double that room if you want a thicker sauce something closer to a gravy that's not my style all right I want more of a lighter style kind of pan sauce texture to this so we'll cook that flour in the butter for a minute and then one of the stars of the show the red wine we will deglaze with some decent red wine okay you're only going to use about a third of the bottle here so you're gonna get stuck drinking the other two-thirds so get something decent and we'll take our wooden spoon and we'll stir that in obviously scraping all that triple fond goodness from the bottom and I'm going to stand there stirring until it comes back to a simmer it's going to kind of thicken up a little bit at this point I'm gonna go ahead and throw in some herbs some fresh thyme sprigs and if you want to do that thing with that string where you tie them all together so you can just fish them out at the end go ahead or you can do what I do and not do that those are pretty easy to find and pick out later and then next up we're going to make it rain bacon whatever you have left because you probably ate some of that didn't you how did I know I hear things so let's stir in that bacon and I'm going to guess to say that red wine has reduced by about a third something like that it's been simmering like that for a few minutes and then for our last steps here let's go ahead and pour in some chicken stock or broth and it probably wouldn't be a bad idea at this point to make sure your oven is preheated to 375 and then last but not least before this goes in the oven we will Nestle our chicken thighs back in because as soon as this mixture heats up again and starts simmering we're going to go ahead and pop it in and if you want to give it a little base before it goes in go ahead I did seems appropriate and then we're going to place that pan uncovered in the center of our 375 degree oven for about an hour or until the chickens tender and speaking of optional basting about halfway through I do like to open the oven and give those a little basting just go ahead and spoon over that braising liquid and again that's optional you don't have to you decide you are the Ace of Base and after about one hour at 375 that mine looked like this that looks pretty good but kind of greasy but don't worry that's the next step so we will remove the chicken to a warm serving platter if you want to throw a lid on that or some foil to keep it warm not a bad idea and we'll place our braising liquid on high heat bring it up to a simmer and what we'll do is we'll reduce that down for about five minutes I want to concentrate those flavors I want to thicken up a little bit and while that's happening of course you're going to skim all the excess fat off the top okay some recipes we leave it but this is not one of those and of course have you seen any of those thyme sprigs pull those out and that is pretty much it except of course you're going to taste for seasoning especially salt other than a pinch with the mushrooms and some on the chicken we have not seasoned this because they're salting the bacon there's a little bit of salt in the stock so you got to be careful but you'll want to taste it adjust here and once it looks great and tastes great you're ready to serve up so in transfer that sauce over those still warm thighs possibly garnish with a little more fresh thyme and it was smelling so vantastic I had to stop and eat some before the final plating and who knew something cooked with onions bacon mushrooms and red wine would be tasty but it was of course the only problem with eating out of the pan here is you can't see that amazingly beautiful sauce so let me plate this up properly on some garlic mashed potatoes I did some little gem lettuce with a mustard vinaigrette to kind of balance the richness I knew people that are freaking out right now go ahead and use a side plate but I'm not afraid to get some sauce on my lettuce I mean come on but anyway like I've already said just incredibly delicious and don't get me wrong as good as that chicken is this would be worth making just for the onion bacon mushroom mixture alone it's that good all right so if you really want to experience culinarily speaking what it truly means to rock out with your you-know-what out I really hope you give this recipe a try so head over to food wishes comm for all the ingredient amounts and more info as usual and as always enjoy

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 1,058,453

Rating: 4.9526711 out of 5

Keywords: Coq Au Vin (Dish), Chicken (Animal), Wine (Industry), Bacon (Food), Rooster (Organism Classification), Food, chef, john, foodwishes, dinner, French, entree, Bacon, Mushrooms, Brasied, Cooking, food, recipe, recipes, French Food (Cuisine), Red Wine (Food), Restaurant

Id: 2QuVUjCyWbU

Length: 6min 43sec (403 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 28 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/MayIReiterate]

Chef John is amazing, it's definitely not cheating. :)

[u/ninjanato]

Id like to see more of his stuff on this sub. Hopefully it will lead to good discussions

[u/JoinMyWorld]

He's an amazing chef, but what the hell happened to his voice and tone...