Coq a Vin

It’s been a while since this blog posted

The slaughtered rooster has successfully been consumed in the French farmhouse style of cock in wine. The meat marinated in “Barefoot” pinot noir red wine for just over 24 hours. Bacon was rendered into fat and crispy bits, pearl onions and quartered mushrooms cooked in the bacon fat (with a little added avocado oil since I felt it needed a tad more fat). Those bits were removed, the rinsed and dried rooster meat slapped into the searing hot dutch oven to get some flavor built up on the outside of the meat. After a few minutes of searing, added carrots, celery, the onions, mushrooms, and bacon, as well as a bay leaf and sprig of thyme, before pouring in another 750 ml of pinot noir. Then it went into the oven at 325 for 4 hours.

At the end of 4 hours, out came the dutch oven, all the solid food got separated out for plating, the herbs and celery put off to the side for throwing away (they’d given all the flavor they had). With only a small amount of liquid left, I turned a burner on high and began to reduce the liquid down. I added a pat of Kerrygold butter, and a teaspoon of cornstarch mixed in with a third of a cup of cool water, and whisked until the sauce reduced down to a dark, thick, smooth syrupy texture.

Results, I enjoyed the dark meat, my wife enjoyed the breast, and the kids managed to eat most of what was in front of them. The sauce was arguably the best part, as the wife asked if I could make the sauce for pouring over some juicier more standard chicken breasts rather than the tougher rooster meat. Honestly it shouldn’t be that hard to replicate the sauce using onions, bacon, herbs, chicken stock, and a lot of time to reduce all that liquid down into thick sauce.

The dark meat tasted much “beefier” than what you would expect from chicken, more like a game fowl than a domestic fowl. Not bad, just different, and rather enjoyable if you like the heavier flavors of mature goose or turkey which the rooster resembled.

The wife and I decided that this type of cooking has potential, but it probably wouldn’t be a normal thing for us (after all, the 1.5 liter bottle of pinot noir set me back a solid ten bucks and change, so while it was good and tasty, it’s an expensive way to make a tough old rooster a relatively tender meal).

Coq a Vin, the rooster meat comes out very dark from the pinot noir. Wasn’t concerned about presentation, so we ate off of paper plates and I paired my serving with German ale (I know, must be heresy or something).