I've been cooking Coq au Vin,

and no, I don't know why I keep capitalizing Coq or Vin, but I'm gonna since it's that good, for almost a decade. To some well seasoned cooks here that might not seem like very long but I've made it a lot. I actually first started making it when I read Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook and that thing was dated 2004 so, maybe more than a decade. Who cares. The point is that I've made it a lot, taken it upon as something I need to do well given my French heritage, and crafted my own way of doing things, and if you're looking for a near fool-proof recipe then this is a good one.

No, I dont use a rooster.
No, I dont use exclusive French wine from Bordeaux or whatever
Yes, it really is super bomb. 

Plus if you're like me and a disgrace to your own heritage for not speaking French AND you top that off by pronouncing Coq au Vin like "coke ow von" then Super Bomb Coq au Vin kinda rhymes. 😁

I wont go into a history lesson but I love Coq au Vin because like a handful (or maybe all?) classic French dishes if you look at how they came to be or the technique that's used you learn a lot about what matters in a dish. Case in point Coq is a male chicken. Roosters it turns out are not delicate delicious chicken like we're used to eating all the time today. Coq au Vin has roots in countryside France hundreds of years ago on how to get a rooster to taste good. Since a great chicken isn't the star of this dish -and yes, it tastes amazing and it's the main thing in the dish, I get it; just play along- it's all the components that go into the dish that make it either meh or BOMB. So if it's not the chicken then what is it? Wine. Time. Other things that can build depth of flavour.

Sit in.

Timing

You can make Coq au Vin in the same day. I'd highly advise getting up early enough to give the chicken at least some amount of time to do it's thing in the wine bath. Not in my recipe though. That's not Super Bomb Coq au Vin. That's Super Wrong Coq au Vin. Still saying Vin like Von. I'll stop.

You need a day and a half, two if you can pull your shit together. At a minimum the Day One stuff can be done the night before. I did it the night before since that's how I always do it but if you dont want to do that stuff during the night before doing it during the day or morning (but still, at least one day early) is fine.

Day One

You need your chicken cut into 'parts' and that emphasis is not me being stupid. When you go to the butcher or meat counter or whatever and ask for a whole chicken you should also specify that you want it cut into X parts or pieces. This will save you a lot of time and they do this for a living so it will probably be done well. You should ask for 'four' if you want the thigh and leg connected as well as the breast and wing or the obvious 'eight' for everything by itself. Now, you could always do it yourself and just get the whole chicken as is. Why? Well either a) you're super OCD about the cuts of chicken and want the skin cut just right to do a really nice browning operation so it's best if you do it, or b) you're like the big cafeteria and super lazy and have Instacart shop your chicken and you wound up with a whole one.

Alright, to get going take the bacon, dice it, and place it into a heavy bottom large saucepan or pot -something you can brown the chicken in without starting a grease fire. I use a 4-quart Le Creuset saucepan and it's the perfect size. Put the saucepan over medium/low heat. The goal here is we're going to render out the fat from the bacon to be used as the oil for browning the chicken. It should take about ten minutes to really get as much out as possible and you'll know as the bacon has completely cooked and is browned and crispy. Make sure to move the bacon around periodically to get even cooking and make sure the heat is not on too high to cause anything to burn. Brown = good, black = too hot.

Once the bacon is totally rendered use a slotted spoon or something that will allow you to scoop the bacon out but leave the oil. Place bacon bits in a dish and into the fridge; turn the heat on the pan to medium.

While you're waiting on the pan get your chicken out onto a cutting board and coat the skin sides generously with salt and pepper. There is no need to coat the non skin sides.

Wait about a minute or two for the pan to build up heat. You can test it by running your fingers under some water and then flicking water drops into the pan (from a distance). The water should cause an eruption of oil that should spray up above the hight of the saucepan itself. Not that high? Not hot enough.

Add the first round of chicken skin side down. Note: there should be at least 1" between your chicken, the other chicken, and the sides of the pan; or more. The worst thing you can do here is overcrowd the chicken which causes a significant drop in the surface temperature of the pan which leads to a shitty browning experience. Give it a few minutes and then use a tongs to lift up the chicken to check on the browning. Once a rich, nice, goldeny brown remove from the pan and place into a bowl. Do not flip the chicken. Do not cook the non-skin side. Before you quickly replace another piece of chicken to the pan wait a minute -let that part of the pan come back up to a searing temperature. Assuming that you remove and replace chicken in rounds it's good to alternate the position of where you set the chicken down for temperature consistency.

All this hard work watching chicken, dealing with the heat, the noise. My God you must need a drink. Should probably do some quality checks on all the French wine you bought.

If anyone is over at your domicile right now watching you do all the work now is a great time to hold up one of the browned chicken pieces and examine it saying "got a really good Maillard reaction here." They'll ask what that means and just tell them is a technical thing in cooking like a pro.

Once all of the chicken is processed let it chill a bit in a bowl on the counter. On the one hand we dont want to let it sit too long since it's still pretty raw chicken and on the other we don't want to cover it still steaming and have it turn into a bacterial cesspool in your fridge. Maybe five minutes after the last piece comes off; you could always play it safe and stick it in the fridge uncovered initially.

Now, some recipes at this point would just tell you to add the wine to the bowl right when the chicken is done or still warm. I dont like this. The wine gets warm. It retains residual heat longer than if you just cool the chicken to fridge temperatures. That means the chicken stays warmer longer. No bueno. I used to do this and you can see a clear difference the next day. Hot chicken + wine next day is this murky, grease chunk, filled bowl. Cold chicken + wine next day wine picks up a little of the grease but otherwise everything looks OK.

Let the chicken get cold in the fridge for an hour, then add an entire bottle of wine. But, of course, you've been drinking out of the first bottle so you should just open the second and use that. Cover the bowl with film and back into the fridge. Set an event on your phone for sometime in the morning to move the chicken around in the bowl so that the wine gets even contact with all of the chicken surface.

Day Two

Hopefully you flipped that chicken; if not nbd I forgot too. Next time though for sure because you want the chicken to have an even soak of wine.

At this point you can choose to do this two ways:

One: Via pot on a stove, or

Two: Slow cooker.

Both are still gonna get you the Super Bomb Coq au Vin; I guess it depends on your preference and how much time you have. I personally believe the slow cooker method is better for the following reasons: 

Can run all day unattended
99.9% of the time does not burn
Slow cookers due to their slowness usually provide better slow-cooked texture in meat

But, you do need to start the slow cooker by 3pm if you plan on eating by 8pm; adjust as needed. You can however get a pot on the stove to simmering level much faster than a slow cooker which means you could reasonably start around 5pm and have similar results by 8pm. But remember, the point here is Super Bomb, not Regular Bomb, not just Coq au Vin. 

So whatever route you choose just make sure you account for the time you need now to get everything into the (crock)pot, up to temperature, and cooking. It'll probably take you an hour all-in to do the following:

Get all of your vegetables out, cleaned, and ready to work.

Take 1-2 leeks and discard the root base as well as the green leaf part and rinse the exterior. Now slice the leek into 1/4" or smaller increments. Take a prep bowl and fill it with water and place the sliced leeks into the bowl. Using your fingers separate out all of the concentric rings of the leek from each slice. Why? Leeks harbour a shitload of dirt. This will let you get all the dirt out. The leeks can chill in the water until later when they go in the pan.

So, I'm gonna say "some" as the unit of measure for a number of vegetables here because it's kinda up to you. You need them, but maybe you got one carrot left and want to use it -go for it. Just don't make the total mix like over dominated by one vegetable but feel free to bring something in or change the quantity slightly. I dont normally use a leek but I had some so I did. 

Take some celery that you either bought as 'hearts' or cut down to just the hearts. Turn it into fours: slice down the middle, now it's 2s. Slice those slices down the middle and now you got fours. As I mentioned in my chicken cutting tutorial having a nice knife for the job can be a real dealmaker. I'm using a really cool Japanese vegetable cutting knife. You probably cut vegetables all the time -why not get a knife that does them excellently. Dice those celery.

Take some onions (maybe not more than two) and cut the top edge and bottom root edge off. Slice it in half and peel just the outer skin off to get down to the raw onion but don't take so much that you're wasting onion. There's a cool French technique here which is fun to practice where you angle your knife to follow the angle of the surface of the onion so that each incision is basically perpendicular to the surface of the onion. You sort of cut in what I visualise like an amphitheater into the onion. Do this lengthwise (top to base) to the onion but don't cut the entire length so that you leave a small portion at the top (where your fingers should be) which holds it all together still. Once done now dice the onion by cutting across the cuts you just made.

Yes, I am aware there are really cool folk who in the beginning do not cut the root portion off, instead when cutting the onion in half they do it top to base and then hold the remaining root section when you're doing your first initial cuts across the onion. This a) provides a better base for holding the onion during chopping, and b) makes an easier discard at the end when you've done all the dicing and need to mince up that area you didn't cut fully. However, I've tried this method many a time and think it's actually slightly longer in process than what I just described. So poop.

Now that we've gotten past the onion ugliness, do what you did with celery but with some carrots. And BTdubs I usually just wash and quickly hand scrub the carrots if you're buying good quality organic carrots which I sure as shit hope you are. There's nutrients from soil in the skin of carrots. I realise it's very little but why peel them? Just chop the top and usually-beatup bottom and go from there. Dice them carrots!

Take some mushrooms- I really do advocate 1lb (or more!) from the store because it's less than a pound after you wash and de-stem them. All you need to do to these is quarter them; super easy. Please don't slice them. If you slice them they'll really break down too much during the cooking process and you wont be able to distinguish them in the final product. Quartering them keeps them small but they still retain texture and take on a lot of flavour. If you like mushrooms or really want to take this dinner a long way into leftovers then I would go extra nuts with mushrooms. They, as I just said, take on a ton of flavour and add a lot of mass to the dish so that if you have them with a little bit of chicken for leftovers it seems more substantial.

OK, all your vegetables should be prepped, placed neatly into prep bowls, and you've cleaned off your workspace because no one does a good job in a mess. Right??

Get out the same heavy saucepan you used to brown the chicken and take one out of two tablespoons of butter into the pan on medium/low heat and melt the butter. The butter should melt and bubble when it's reached the right heat for you to begin adding vegetables. As a slight technique note: it's likely your butter will fully melt on one side of the pan. When it does toss it over to the other side by angling the pan and the very hot unbuttered surface will probably cause it to bubble immediately. So, now you've got both the optimum temperature in the butter and you've coated all the pan. Look at you.

Add the onions. Move them around the pan getting them coated in the butter. Do it with an old wooden spoon because that's what the angry french ghost cook who's watching you would want. Don't look up. Keep reading. You'll scare him.

Sautè the onions. You like that accent on the e? Well it's the wrong one. Sauté the onions. Dont even screw that up again.

The onions at that temperature should take like ten minutes to really go translucent, which is a fancy word for sorta see-thru. You can't rush this and you don't want to burn them so please please please take it easy on the temperature. If you're getting browning edges on the onions within the first few minutes it's too hot dial it back.

Now while you're waiting on the onions it's time to get things going in the crock pot. Take the entire bowl of wine-chicken and dump it into the crock pot; set the temperature to high or whatever equivalent you have. It's gonna take time to come up to temp while you're doing things so why not. Take that entire bag of frozen pearl onions and dump it in there too. Don't like pearl onions? Nbd use however many you want. I just have no other use for them so they all go in. Use your hands if you're cool or some other apparatus to mix in the onions and mushrooms with the wine-chicken so that none of the chicken is on top of each other. You want to do this so there's a nice flow space for liquids and other things around the chicken.

With the onions looking good add the carrots and celery. Move them around to incorporate what's left of any butter coating. Now make a small vacant circle in the middle of the pan and add the second tablespoon of butter. Get it melted and then drain the leeks, maybe give them another quick rinse/drain, and then add them to the pot and re-mix everything to capitalise on that additional butter. Give it another 5ish minutes to really get everything in the pan to that ultimate sautè level.

Wrong e again. Seriously.

Take the third bottle of wine and add the whole thing into the pot; move stuff around to full mix it in. Find your package of demi-glace and dont follow the instructions on the packet. Take 1/4-1/2 cup of hot water from the sink and place it in a prep bowl. Squeeze or transfer or move or whatever ALL of the demiglace to the hot water and use a spoon or whisk to get it all completely dissolved. Demiglace (not sure why I hyphenated it earlier) is amazing. When you get it all mixed in with the water add it to the saucepan with the wine and vegetables and mix further. Give it a good smell. Wow demiglace can really take a dish to the next level; just smell that. I got hooked on demiglace because of Bourdain's Les Halles recipe. In his book he uses demiglace in a number of dishes and really goes on and on about how amazeballs it is. I didn't care. Didn't have it. Didn't know where to look. Then I put on my long trousers one day and found it in the store and will not ever make this dish or several others without it. Make it and freeze it. Buy it. Steal it even. Get it. Got it?

Sauté. Nice!

I'll stop after this but demiglace is key to today's buzzword of umami. Demiglace will give this dish that umami element. If I had two packets of it when I did this post I would have used two. I'm done now.

Bring everything in the saucepan up to a simmer and then transfer it all to the crock pot. This is nice because now you're bringing already-hot liquid to the crock and less time wasted waiting for it to come to temperature. Add a pre-made bouquet garni to the pot and give everything a good shaking-stir to make sure it's all combined. If you couldn't find bouquet garni in the spice aisle you can quite easily make some by buying all the fresh sprigs of seasoning and then tying it together with some butcher string and tossing it in.

If you're doing the stovetop pot method you probably thought I forgot about you. I did not. Well I did for a little but it's OK. Basically rather than getting everything into the crock pot you can go ahead with the wine/demiglace/vegetable saucepan and then either add the mushrooms/onions/chicken/wine to that same saucepan or if it's not big enough transfer everything to whatever pot you want to use. Bring the new master pot up to just a simmer -be careful! You dont want to burn anything so don't go all full blast with heat and then dial it back. Start with like medium and then scale down to low if possible.

Serve however you want. Other roasted or steamed vegetables on the side can mix nicely with the dish but it's typically served just by itself preferably with some equally Super Bomb Bread. Oh and wine. That's like bottle number four by this point. Just get a 6-pack and collect 10% off at most súpermarkets.

MATERIALS LIST

• Meats
  • One whole organic chicken
  • Two slices of bacon
• Organic Vegetables
  • One leek
  • Four celery
  • One onion
  • Two carrots
  • 1lb of crimini mushrooms
  • One bag of frozen pearl onions
• Seasonings
  • Kosher Salt
  • Cracked black pepper
  • One bouquet garni, or:
  • One stalk of sage leaves
  • Four stalks of thyme leaves
  • One bay leaf
  • One stalk of rosemary
  • Bundle said herbs together with butcher's string
• Dairy
  • Two tablespoons of butter cut individually
• Booze
  • Four bottles of wine:
  • At least two the same used in the stock and two you plan on drinking[1]
  • For the wine that's being used in the dish I use a French wine from Bordeaux typically from the area of Haut Medoc. I prefer wines from here because Bordeauxs usually have enough body to bring a lot of flavour to the chicken overnight. During the stewing process with the vegetables I flip the tables and send the old man French ghost cook into a frenzy and use Vino Nobile. Should you do this? Entirely up to you. 

[1] Wine: the dish will taste like trash if you use cheap wine. Dont believe me? Cool, go search what happens when you use cheap wine in stews and make your own choices. While it does make the overall dinner expensive go buy $20/bottle french -hopefully Bordeaux or Burgundy wines. The difference between 'cheap' versus 'OK' wines is huge. It is not, however, directly proportional to 'OK' versus 'expensive'.

[1a] If you studied this page at all you'll notice my rant on origins of amazing food like this and "countryside" and implications this was not an expensive dish. So, if it's not to be expensive, how can you use $20/bottle wine? The answer is that you can and can't. Coq au Vin can be made with cheap wine. Although truthfully the local cheap wine of countryside France is amazing; so there's that. Super Bomb Coq au Vin however cannot be made with domestic US cheap wine. So, just like other caveats like organic chicken, certain core qualities can make the difference.