Ingredient

Coq au vin

Coq au vin was a way of making an old cockerel edible: a tough, sinewy bird, marinated and braised for hours until it surrendered. Modern chicken is young, tender and cooks in forty minutes, which means the classic method applied literally produces dry, stringy meat in a very good sauce.

The problem with modern chicken

A cockerel had a great deal of connective tissue and very little fat, and it needed three or four hours of wet cooking before its collagen converted to gelatine and the meat became tender. Everything about the traditional recipe — the overnight marinade, the long braise, sometimes thickening with the bird's own blood — follows from that.

A supermarket chicken is a young bird slaughtered at a few weeks old. It has little connective tissue to convert and it dries out long before three hours is up. Cooking one for the traditional time gives you meat with the texture of string.

Two adjustments fix it. Use legs and thighs rather than breast — dark meat has more fat and connective tissue and tolerates braising, while breast is dry in twenty minutes. And cook it for as long as the meat needs and no longer, building the sauce's depth in other ways: good stock, properly reduced wine, hard-browned lardons and mushrooms, and reducing the sauce at the end.

If you can get an older, slower-grown bird — a boiling fowl, a proper free-range cockerel — the long method works as intended and is worth doing once.

The method, adjusted for a modern bird

1. Use chicken legs, thighs and wings. Leave the breast out, or add it much later.
2. Render lardons or thick bacon in a heavy casserole until crisp, and lift them out.
3. Dry the chicken pieces, season them, and brown them hard, skin side first, in the bacon fat. Take your time — pale chicken makes a pale dish.
4. Lift them out and soften chopped onion and carrot in the fat, then add garlic, tomato purée and a spoonful of flour.
5. Deglaze with red wine, scrape the base clean, and reduce it by a third or so.
6. Return the chicken and bacon, add stock to come most of the way up, with bay and thyme. Simmer gently, covered, for around forty minutes until the meat is tender and pulling from the bone.
7. Separately, glaze button onions in butter until browned, and fry mushrooms hard in another pan.
8. Lift the chicken out and keep it warm. Reduce the sauce hard on the hob until it coats a spoon — this is where the depth comes from now that you are not braising for hours.
9. Return everything, fold in the garnish, and finish with chopped parsley.

Variations worth knowing

Coq au vin blanc

Made with white wine — a Riesling or a white burgundy. Lighter, and arguably better suited to modern chicken. Common in Alsace.

Coq au Riesling

The Alsatian version, often finished with cream. Very good and much quicker than the red version.

The blood

Traditionally the sauce was thickened and enriched with the bird's blood, which gives a dark, glossy, faintly metallic richness. Rarely done now, and beurre manié or a hard reduction stands in.

Marinating

Traditional overnight in the wine. Useful for a tough old bird, largely pointless for a supermarket chicken, and it wets the skin so browning suffers.

Flaming the brandy

A splash of brandy set alight before the wine is common. It burns off harshness and looks dramatic. Optional.

The garnish

Lardons, button onions and mushrooms, all cooked separately. This is the non-negotiable part of the dish's identity.

What goes wrong

• Dry, stringy chicken. Breast meat, or too long a braise. Use legs and thighs and stop when they are tender.
• Pale, insipid sauce. The chicken was not browned hard enough, or the wine was not reduced.
• Thin sauce. Lift the meat out and reduce hard, or whisk in beurre manié.
• Flabby skin. Inevitable in a braise. If it matters, brown the pieces again under a grill before serving, or take the skin off entirely.
• Sharp, acidic sauce. The wine went in and was not given time to reduce and mellow.
• Everything the same texture. The garnish went in at the start rather than at the end.

Common questions