Coq au vin (aka, another episode of Hap cooks drunk) · 2:51am Jul 24th, 2018
Those of you who have bad enough judgment to associate with me on discord will probably recall many picture spams of foodstuffs in various states of completion. I post recipes. Some of you have even been brave enough to make them!
Well, this is night 16 of broken cooktop. Our gas range is sadly out of commission. This means no boiling, no frying, no toasting. We're down to oven, microwave, crock pot, and pressure cooker.
So, naturally, I picked the most complicated dish I could find, to cook in nothing but a pressure cooker. Coq au vin (rooster with wine). Here's the ingredients:
- 4-5 lbs of chicken leg quarters or thighs
- 1 1/2 lb mushrooms, quartered
- 4-5 yellow onions, quartered
- 4 carrots, quartered
- 2 stalks celery, quartered
- 5 cloves garlic, crushed
- fresh thyme
- bay leaf
- 2 Tb tomato paste
- 6 oz bacon or salt pork or pork belly etc., diced
- tapioca flour
- 2 bottles of red wine (preferably pinot noir)
- 2 cups chicken broth
Let's get started!
Firstly of things, let's get our chicken. I used four leg quarters (thigh with drumstick) but in hindsight, I'd say to go with boneless thighs. The chicken fell apart and the bones got mixed in with everything else and was kind of a minefield. You do not want to use white meat like the breast, as it will be too dry. Coq au vin is a braising method to make old, tough birds edible and tender.
Season both sides liberally with salt and pepper. If you think you used enough, go back and do it again.
Now, put them in a ziploc bag with some of that red wine, at room temperature, for a few hours. Now is a good time to make that mashed potatoes or rice that you'll serve this dish over.
Now, the classic recipe calls for lardons. Which are basically cubes of uncooked pork fat. Like pork belly, etc. Essentially the fat chunks from bacon. So I used bacon. Because it was what was in the house. And who the hell is going to complain about bacon?
Chop it up!
Now, let's take the onions, and cut them along all three axes. That makes eight parts. Quartering sounds like the wrong word, but... Eighthering? Octering? I don't know.
Now, the mushrooms:
Alton Brown's recipe called for button mushrooms. Which are just immature white mushrooms. And white mushrooms are just albino portobello mushrooms. So I used white mushrooms because they're cheaper at the grocery store. But because they're older, I cut off the end of the woody stems, then quartered them.
And cut the carrots into 2-inch lengths, then quarter those:
Now, let's start frying the pork. Stove is bork'd, so I am frying this in the pressure cooker.
While that's frying, let's dust the chicken. I ended up using about 2 Tb per quarter.
Dusted! And fried! Let's pull out that pork and leave the fat in the pan.
fry those onions in that delicious pork fat!
Let's just dump that into the same container as the pork. We're going to add it all together later.
Brown the dusted chicken in the same fat. You don't need to get the chicken cooked, just crisp up both sides a bit.
Now, the mushrooms! They'll really soak up the fat, so you'll probably have to add 2-4 (or, you know, like 8 or 12) tablespoons of butter to keep them from burning. Meanwhile, prepare your seasonings. A few sprigs of thyme, and a couple of bay leaves. Six or so garlic cloves. Also seen, is the wine for deglazing (the wine from the marinade, plus extra to make 1 cup), and the tomato paste for later.
Now that the mushrooms are done, let's deglaze that pan with the wine. Pour it in and scrape the pan! The delicious fond is made up of amino acids and caramelized sugars from the frying foods, formed from the maillard reaction during cooking at high temperature. It is water soluble, and more soluble in acid than bases. So wine makes a great deglazing liquid! Scrape it up!
Now, layer up the veggies (the cooked ones and the carrots and celery, too!) and the chicken in the pot!
Add in 2 Tb of tomato paste, all the crushed garlic, the bay leaves, the thyme, the chicken broth, and all the rest of both bottles of wine.
There we go!
Wait... where did that third empty bottle come from?
Now, cook them in the pressure cooker for 15 minutes (after it gets to full pressure), and "vent naturally" which means don't turn the vent on for like an hour or whatever. When that's done, pull everything but the broth out, and simmer it down (all my simmering pics went away when my phone crashed!) to about 1/2 to 1/3 of it's original volume. Add some starch dissolved in broth or wine if you need to thicken it up.
This was amazing.
We need to have some sort of cooking and drinking camp at my house or something.
It looks amazing! Well done.
Yum! I need to get back to using my instapot!
Clever and well done.
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It was amazing!
4906732
Here's a recipe for you!
4906786
Very well done. Falling off the bone...
That does indeed look delicious!
I'm cooking for one these days, so when I do cook, I tend to be a lot lazier about it, unfortunately :( But I've grown very fond of my slow cooker, since I can dump a bunch of ingredients in in the morning and have a roast and veggies waiting when I get home from work. It has the same sort of "problem" as the pressure cooker, though: tenderizes everything so outrageously that it falls right off the bones.
The trick is selecting meat for which this is a bonus.
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Remind me to give you my slow cooker pulled pork recipe...
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Already one of my favorites, but I'd love to try an alternate recipe!