Classic COQ AU VIN | Chef Jean-Pierre

Well, welcome back to our channel friend. Coco van today. Chicken in red wine, an old classic. It's wonderful and easy to make. Chicken braised in a delicious red wine. Stay tuned. I'm going to show you exactly how to do it. Don't forget to give us a thumbs up if you like the video. Subscribe to the channel and don't forget to ring the bell so you get a notification every Thursday when I do a new video. Stay tuned. I'm going to show you exactly how to make this Coco van. Well, hello there friends. Coco van, a famous French chicken dish that I've made for, I don't know, 40, 50 years. I've made so much of it. It's one of my favorite chicken dish. Chicken in red wine that I'm going to serve with mashed potatoes. But first, this is a new kitchen. This is a new studio. The studio is not finished yet. We still got a lot of construction going on. If you could see what's behind those camera. You would be amazed that we can actually cook. It's quite an undertaking building a whole new studio, and we're doing it, and it's going well, except it's taking forever. So thank you for all of you wonderful, wonderful comments, supporting our channel. You guys have been great. We're so happy we're doing this. So I'm excited to come up with this beautiful recipe for you today. It's so simple. You're gonna love it. For those of you that have never been to my channel, I want you to understand something. This is not one of them tic-tac-toe channel where you watch a recipe for like 35 seconds or 40 seconds and two minutes or three minutes, and you don't have any idea what the chef is actually doing. Here, we explain everything. We have a lot, a lot of you that are cooking with us live at home. You watch the video, and if you like the dish, you decide you're gonna make it, and then you turn the video back on, and we do it with you. So this is live cooking. We take a chicken, raw chicken, and we're gonna do it until the end. We may take a little while to cook it, but you'll see, you'll understand the whole concept. So we prepare first. If you want to do this, this is a great way to do it. First, you gotta get your mise en place. What's mise en place? This is mise en place, friends. It's all the ingredients. Ready, chop. Before you even start cooking, you want to enjoy cooking, you want to have fun cooking, make sure you do your mise en place. That means you get all the ingredients ready, and only then, and only then, can you pour yourself a glass of wine and decide to start cooking, but not until then. So that means, what do we need? Well, you click below the recipe, below the video, there is a link that says, see more. Right below that, you'll have a recipe link. You'll click on the recipe link, you'll get to our website, you'll download the recipe, you have a plate, you do your mise en place, and when you're ready to do the dish, you bring the family in the kitchen, and we'll all do it together. So I'm assuming that you're gonna have your mushroom, you're gonna have your onion, you're gonna have your butter, you're gonna have butter, and today, today, friends, we're gonna be using clarified butter. Now, I'm making a video, I haven't made it yet, but I'm making a video on how to make clarified butter. We'll talk about that in a minute. Bacon, or pancetta, or lardon, and this is basically pork belly. You don't want it? Don't put it in, don't worry. Parsley, bay leaves, thyme, garlic, chicken, chicken, chicken, and we're using dark meat, and we'll talk about that in a second, and flour. And now that we have all of our mise en place ready, let's start cooking. All right, first thing we do, friends, we put a little salt and pepper in the flour, okay? And you do that at home, same exact deal, okay? You can put also a little chicken, a little salt and pepper on the chicken. Okay, don't forget to put it in the flour, and mix it up really good, right, really simple. And then we're gonna dust the chicken in the flour, okay? That's all we're gonna do. We're just gonna dust it in the flour, and this flour, then we're gonna have on the chicken. It's gonna roast, and also it's gonna help us with thickening the chicken, the sauce, you see? That flour right there is gonna help us thicken the chicken. It's gonna help us thicken the sauce that we're gonna make with it, the wine sauce. In this new studio, friends, I have no more gas. We have no gas in this part of the town, so we have to cook with electric, and I have an induction cooktop. So it's gonna be interesting. We're gonna do it together. First thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna sauté the chicken here, and I'm gonna start the pot right here, and for fat, I'm gonna use a little bit of clarified butter, not much over there because I'm gonna put the lardons. I'm gonna put the pork belly right here, and the fat is going to melt, and I'm gonna use that fat. Let's put the whole thing, and I'm gonna use that fat to sauté my onion and my mushrooms. So I'll talk about the ingredients in a minute. Let me get used to this thing going on over here because obviously it's cold. It's taking a minute or two. I have an induction cooktop. Those takes a little while to get used to it, friends. I don't know if you ever had cooked with those. They're wonderful, but it takes a little while to get used to it. So I got my clarified butter. Why use clarified butter instead of regular butter? Well, I made enough video for everybody to understand, but you may have missed some of them. So let me tell you about the butter. Butter is very simple. Butter is made out of milk, water, and butterfacts. The idea of clarified butter, why can't we cook a steak in butter? Why can't we cook a piece of chicken in butter? Because there's milk, and milk protein burns at 250 degrees. So I can't cook a piece of chicken in regular butter because it'll burn. Chicken needs 375 to cook anyway, so it would burn. That's why you use clarified butter, and clarified butter can go up to 450-480 degrees without burning, which is more than enough temperature for us to cook this chicken. So I like still to get it about 350, so it's nice and hot, and I like to use my digital thermometer because the idea of doing the chicken to browning the chicken, friends, is for two things. One, because we need to caramelize this flour over there, so it's nice and golden brown. That's number one. And number two, it's gonna give us so much more flavor. See that the thing is not so hot right over there. I gotta get used to cook with this thing. My whole life I cook with... Here you go. Let me put it on as high as you can get. There you go. We're gonna wait a second, but when you put something in the pan like I just did right there, and it's not hot enough, what do you do? You wait. You wait a second. Oh, this one is working. Look at this guy. Look at this guy right there, folks. This one is doing just fine. It's just this guy right there that takes a little while to wake up. So when you're using induction, you have to make sure that all your pots are induction friendly. Not every pot works on it. And this guy right there, this enamel cast iron pot is doing quite fine. I'm gonna lower the heat just a little bit though, because it's going a little too fine. And you see right there, now this chick, this lardon right there, is going to cook for 45 minutes to an hour with the chicken. So we're gonna be just fine in there. Alright, so as soon as this is really hot, and this chicken is eventually, I'm not gonna touch it. I want to wait for this to get hotter. It's taking a little while, but it's coming. And then we're gonna put the onion. Alright, now you can use a regular onion if you want. I got pearl onion right there. You can buy them fresh. If you got nothing else to do, you can peel them. You can buy them in a jar, but if you buy them in a jar, don't buy the one in vinegar. Those are for cocktails. You want to buy the one that are in water. Make sure you drain all the water out, okay? And, or you can use Cipollini onion, or you can use a regular onion, okay? And we're gonna put them in there, and we're gonna caramelize them so they taste better. Let me take the flour out of here, because we don't need it. I need my flour, my tongue though. And let's see how we're doing. This, this, guys, you gotta learn how to make this. We're not even close. And it's okay, because we got busy with this pot right here. So we can continue doing this, and then we're gonna put the mushrooms. But first, we gotta caramelize the onion. Because an onion is not caramelized, don't taste like anything. So we're gonna caramelize them. And I have everything ready for the next thing. We got thyme, we got garlic, and for those of you that have watched videos before, you know exactly what I'm doing with the garlic. We're gonna weigh mushrooms. A lot of questions about, sometimes I tell people to slice the mushroom, sometimes I tell them to quarter them, or to egg them. And they want, they're asking me why, why? I'll tell you why, it's very simple. First of all, this is a very big mushroom. We gotta cut it. If I were to slice it, this mushroom, and it cooks in there for 45 minutes, you know what's gonna happen to it? 45 minutes later, this mushroom is gonna pulverize. For 45 minutes later, we're not gonna get very much left out of it. So that is why we wanna quarter them, so they cook and they maintain a nice texture and a nice shape of it. Otherwise, they get down to nothing. Oh, I think this chicken is moving. Let's see what we got. Okay, we got a little color. Oh yeah, oh yeah. We're getting there, friends. You see, look. There you go. Look like the middle of the pan is a little hotter than the side of the pan. But you see, this is what I'm looking for right there, friends. Let me put this right here, and let's see how we're doing over there. We're doing good, we're doing good. You see? Oh yeah, baby. It's coming, it's coming. We're gonna get more caramelization of the onion. So, let's go back to the mushroom. I cut a little bit of the... I was gonna call it a tail. It's more like a stem. Right? I cut a stem off. I don't want to argue too much. Have you ever tried to eat one of them? They taste like nothing. So now we wanna quarter them. What's the best way to do it? Oh, if it's really big like that, you may wanna cut them in six or eight pieces. You cut it this side down. Not this way. It's easier this way. Look. And you go down, right? And now what you gotta do is one, two cuts. See? That would be six. One, two cuts. And if they're small, you cut them in quarters. You see right there? And you're gonna see, after 45 minutes to an hour, they cook really nice. Really, really nice. Pretty simple, right? Have you noticed how everything is so simple? A child could do it. Hey, can you see this? What's happening in there, folks? I hope you can see in the back. There's a lot of smoke coming up over here. I hope you guys can see what's going on. You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna move those spots. I'm gonna move this one over here and this guy over there. Okay? And I'm gonna lower this heat right there, because this guy right there is almost done. And this is the one I gotta pay attention to. Okay? So look. You see? See, look. Our lardon is looking beautiful, golden brown. Our onion is starting to caramelize. It is now time for us to add the mushrooms. So, let's put a little more salt and pepper in there, eh? Let's put just a little bit more salt and pepper right there. And let's put our mushrooms. That's gonna help the salt and pepper, especially the salt. It's gonna help the mushrooms extracting their water. Because mushrooms are made out of what? Water! We know water is the enemy of food, friends. We wanna get rid of that water. So that's what we're gonna do. We're getting there. We're getting there, you see? And the beautiful thing, I hope a lot of you are in the kitchen right now, with the kids, in the kitchen doing this thing. Because it's really cool. I gotta tell you, years ago, years ago, like 45 years ago. Let me see. Forty some years ago. First day I opened up, I bought my restaurant. July 26th, 1976, a few years ago, right? Let me turn this guy off right there. I had just taken over a restaurant, and it was a fondue restaurant. It was called Zenny's. And I decided I'm gonna introduce, you know what? Let me go back to my story in a minute. I'll tell you in a minute, because right now, I gotta go. I'll tell you where I gotta go. You see, look, look. Everything is nice and golden brown. The mushrooms are releasing a great deal of water. The lardon is doing quite well, you see? All the flavor right there. Now we're gonna put the garlic. How long do we cook the garlic for? Let me turn this off. This is off. This is off. Okay, good. How long do we cook the garlic for? Only a few seconds until we smell it. So this is the garlic puree that we made. For those of you that have not watched the video about the garlic puree, you gotta watch it, folks, okay? It's really cool. If you don't have garlic puree, just put a couple of cloves of garlic chopped up when you cook. How long do we cook it for? Until we smell it. Oh, if you could be here right now, you could smell it. It smells amazing, so that means we smell it and we put the wine. Oh yeah, baby. Now, don't ever put a wine you're not willing to drink. Remember, if you can't drink it, it don't get any better if you cook it 15, 20 minutes or 45 minutes. Quiet the country, Robbie. If you can't drink it after 45 minutes later, it's gonna be like blech. It's gonna be even worse than what you started with. Look at that chicken, friends. You see? Now we're getting there. So, while the wine is reducing, because now we need to reduce the wine. We need to reduce the wine. That means we need to reduce, we need to bring it to boil. Let me go back to this thing. Let's bring it to boil. We need to reduce. That means we want to get all the alcohol out of it. When you're cooking a wine like this in a braising environment, you want to get rid of all the alcohol. And the best way to do that is to bring it to boil. And look, it's about to happen. You see? We're gonna bring it to boil. You're gonna see it. You have to reduce. It doesn't matter what wine you're using. I mean, as long as it's a good wine. You can use a French wine. You can use Cabernet Sauvignon. Traditionally, to make Coq Au Vin, you should use the Fleury, which is a Pinot Noir. You should use whatever wine you want to use, as long as it's a good wine. You can use Cabernet Sauvignon. You can use Shiraz. You can use your favorite red wine. It doesn't matter, as long as it's a good bottle of wine. Don't go in there crazy looking for a special wine. Just use your favorite wine. If you like to drink it, cook with it. And if it's a little expensive, then just put a little bit in there. But trust me, Coq Au Vin means chicken in red wine. So we have it, and it's right there. So we're gonna cook it. We're gonna do it this way. So far, it's very simple, right? So let me put a little bit of fresh thyme in there. It won't help reducing the alcohol, but it'll help extract the flavor out of it. So we're gonna add the fresh thyme. And the wine is cooking, and it's cooking, and it's cooking. And until the wine is completely cooked, we're not gonna put the chicken in there. We're not gonna put anything in the pot. So, one more thing about the chicken. I take the skin off. When I braise the chicken, which is what I'm about to do here, I take the skin off. I take the skin off because the skin is only good if you're roasting the chicken, or if you're grilling the chicken. But if you are going to pan sear it like this, and you're gonna put it in there, you don't need the skin. The skin gets all greasy and things, and it doesn't have any texture. It only has texture if you grill it or if you roast it. This way it doesn't have any texture. So I take it off, but I leave it on the bone. The chicken on the bone. And the reason why I leave it on the bone is because the bone is gonna give it flavor, and also the chicken doesn't shrink as much when it's on the bone. So it's nice and moist. It stays more moist when it's on the bone. And if you do it correctly, the bone is gonna come right off anyway. It's gonna fall off the bone by the time you eat it. So you don't need to worry about the bone. And you see the wine is reducing, reducing, let it reduce before you put anything. We're gonna put some chicken stock in there when we're done with it. And then we're gonna let it cook for 45 minutes to an hour. So now, I gotta tell you this funny story. Years ago, when I bought the restaurant, it was a phony restaurant, and I decided, I said, I'm taking over this restaurant, I'm gonna introduce them to French food. So the night before, I took chicken and I marinated it in red wine. Because when you make a Coq au Vin, you're supposed to do that. You're supposed to marinate the chicken in red wine. And then you do it this way. So same deal, except you marinate it with a bouquet garni, fresh herbs, and a thyme, and you can put oregano and basil, and basil, not basil, bay leaves. And you let it marinate overnight in red wine. What happened when you do that? The chicken turns purple. Yeah, yeah, it turns purple. So the next day, I said to the waiters, I said, today we're doing a Coq au Vin, chicken in red wine. Most of them had no idea what it was, because they were all from Springfield, Ohio. And they never had Coq au Vin before. And they never knew, they didn't know what it was. So we serve the first dish, and the first customer that we serve it to was a regular at the restaurant, I didn't know. And he cuts into the chicken, and he tells the waiter, he says, waiter, the chicken is purple, I don't eat purple chicken. So the waiter comes to me and he says, chef, I'm sorry, but the customer said the chicken is purple, he doesn't want to eat it. I said, it's supposed to be purple! It's marinated in red wine overnight. So then, another waitress comes in and goes, chef, the customer don't want it in the kitchen, it's purple. All of a sudden, I said, okay, we don't sell Coq au Vin anymore. So the next time I made it, I didn't marinate it in red wine anymore, and it came out normal color. But if you want to do a traditional Coq au Vin, you would do that. Alright? So, so much for my story. So now, we're going to take the chicken, because the wine has reduced. And I mean by reduced, about reduced, about half. Okay, so, you're putting two cups of wine, reduce it down to a cup. You put four cups of wine, reduce it down to two cups. Roughly. Reduce the heat now. Now we're going way too fast, so we're going to reduce the heat. And now, we're going to put some chicken stock. Chicken stock right here, we're going to pour that on top. Basically, remember, we are braising this chicken. And we're going to put a couple of bay leaves. Couple of bay leaves right there. And we're going to let this cook, friends, for about 45 minutes to an hour. And this is, you can put a cover on it. And cook it very slowly, keep an eye on it. Like every 15 minutes, just keep an eye on it, make sure you're not too hot. Go to it like a medium heat. But be careful. Make sure you take a wooden spoon and you check in the bottom of the pot, make sure nothing is sticking. Okay? And if you think that your sauce is a little too thin, which could be a little too thin, we're going to wait for the flour from the chicken to come out and then decide. You can also put a touch of a little cornstarch to fix the consistency at the end. Or you could put a beurre mariniere, or you could put a little flour, but if you were to put a little more flour, you would have to do it now, not at the end. So we're going to let it cook for a little while. I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll let it cook for 15-20 minutes. And then we'll see. I'll show you a little trick on how to add flour before it's finished. Because if we're going to add flour, we've got to do it now. Or at the beginning anyway. At least 15 minutes before it's finished. We can add flour at the end. At the end, cornstarch, arrowroot, tapioca powder, any other thickener but flour. Flour needs to cook. So we're going to let that cook. And let's come back in about 15-20 minutes. I'll clean up the whole kitchen, it looks nice. And then we'll decide what to do if we're going to put flour on it, or if we're going to wait until the end and put just a little cornstarch to fix it. Okay? Alright, so we'll be right back. Okay friends, we are back. It's been about 15-20 minutes. We can now determine, is it going to be thick enough? Is it not going to be thick enough? Let's look at it, decide together. Here we go. Let's look at it. No, it is not going to be thick enough. No problem. This is when we can do many things. The first thing we could do is we could add a cooked roux if we had one. We'll get to this eventually, I promise you. For all of you that watch my channel, I'm going to show you everything I've learned in 50 years in the kitchen. And a cooked roux is the easiest way to thicken this. We could do it at the end. It's like cornstarch, except it's flour and butter that are cooked. So we can add it at the end without having the starchiness of the flour. We don't have that. So what do we do? We're going to put a little flour. And how do we put flour in here? Well, if you've watched my channel before, you know exactly what I'm about to do. But if you've never watched my channel before, you're here to learn. And here we are. We're going to teach you some new stuff. First thing you want to do is you want to get the flour. And then you want to take flour right there and you're going to put it right in there. I was about to scare. I know you guys that have watched it before, you know you don't scare. You know exactly what I'm about to do. But for those people that have not seen the channel before, they say, Oh, this guy's crazy. Well, some people say that. We take a strainer right there, friends. And we use that technique at all times. We take a little bit of flour, we put it in a strainer. And we just push it in. We just push it in. And the flour is going to incorporate perfectly well. And voila, all the lumps are staying in the strainer. And you're going to see, we're going to put a little more flour. And don't worry about lumps, you're not going to have any. They're all going to stay in the strainer. And we're going to have a beautiful sauce. Let's mix it up a little bit. You'll see in a minute, it's going to look beautiful. Let's see what we have. Actually, it's all in. And now, all of a sudden, we are starting to take the texture that we're looking for, friends. You see? This is what we're looking for. So let's take this out of the way. And let's look. And here we have it. You see the chicken is starting. It's got a bit of a way to go. I would say another 25 to 35 minutes. 25 minutes, somewhere around there. Until the meat is starting to fall off the bone. And we know we don't have that yet. But you see the texture. All of a sudden, it's beautiful. So we're going to put a little bit of parsley now. And then we're going to let it cook. And then we'll put a little bit more parsley. So we get a little nice parsley flavor to it. That's part of the deal. That's the classical way to do it. We're going to let that cook for a little bit longer. And then we'll come back in about 25 minutes. And we'll check it. And then we're going to eat it with mashed potatoes. We'll come back in a few minutes. Alright friends, we are back. About 45 minutes later. This Coq Au Vin is ready. Let's go. Let's check it out. Let's take this out. The meat should fall off the bone right now. Now, not necessary. If you don't want to. But I'm going to put a little bit of cognac in there. It's traditional to do it. So I hate to break traditions. And if you see the sauce, friends. It's thick. Thick enough. You can certainly add a little bit of butter in there if you wanted to. Nobody would complain about that. Maybe some people would. But not me. I'm not complaining. I got a little plate here with a little mashed potatoes. Because I love mashed potatoes. And to me, Coq Au Vin should be served with mashed potatoes. So I'm going to put one right there. And then I'm going to put a thighs right there. That's all I'm going to do. Just like this. And of course I messed up the plate. But that's okay. That's why we got cleaning rags. Alright. And then we're going to take a little bit of the sauce. Just a little bit of the sauce. We'll put it on top of the potatoes. Just a little bit of the sauce right there, friends. And make sure you put some mushrooms in there. Oh yeah, baby. Put a little mushroom with an onion in there too. So you can see them. You can see the onion. You can see the mushroom. Get it right in there. Very simple. You don't have to make it fancy. You can put a little bit of chopped parsley in there. Just a little bit. It doesn't have to be too fancy. So we can just go in and just do a little bit of parsley in there. Put as much sauce or as little sauce as you want. Let me turn this off. So we're done. And then I like to really, really, really make sure there's a nice amount of sauce. Make sure your plate is nice and clean, friends. And voila. You got Coq Au Vin. Okay. Best moment of the day. Look at that. That chicken just falls right off. Look at that. It just falls right off the bone. You see? Look. It falls right off the bone. See right here? Look at this. It falls right off the bone. Oh, baby. I'm so hungry. Mmm. It's delicious. And with the mashed potatoes. Mmm. You guys got to try this. This is really amazing. I mean, really. Mmm. Make it. Use good wine. Mmm. Serve it with mashed potatoes. Mmm. Serve it with noodles. Serve it with roasted potatoes. You can serve it with so many different things. Enjoy. Remember, subscribe to the channel. Ring the bell. And give us a thumbs up. We'll see you next week. Thanks for watching.