As the commonly cited (and thoroughly apocryphal) story goes, the Celtic Gauls sent a rooster to Caesar during the Roman occupation. Legend has it that Julius Caesar himself introduced a version of coq au vin to France. Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY Mastering this one technique leads to many excellent dinners. Case in point: Boeuf bourguignon, another French classic, is essentially coq au vin made with chunks of stewing beef instead of fowl. No matter what kind of wine you pour into your pot, the method of simmering it with chicken or other meat is applicable across the kitchen. But Burgundy’s version, made with its local wine, is the best known across France and all over the world. In Beaujolais, the young dark purple nouveau wine gives that dish the name coq au violet. The Jura and the Champagne regions also have their own recipes cooks in the Jura sometimes substitute morels for the more common white or brown button mushrooms.
In Alsace, a dry riesling is used, resulting in a lighter, brighter sauce that is often enriched with a little cream or crème fraîche stirred in at the end. There are variations of coq au vin all over France, each a celebration of local wines both red and white. The young, tender chickens of today cook more quickly than those earlier birds, but they are imbued with similar lusty flavors. The wine, which reduces as it cooks, also takes on the other flavors in the pot, in this case brandy, mushrooms, onions, bacon and herbs, along with the savory fond - that is, the caramelized bits on the bottom of the pan that you get from the initial browning of the chicken. When the bird is slowly simmered, often for hours and hours as the oldest recipes suggest, its sinewy flesh slackens, growing soft and aromatic, and easily yielding to the fork.Īs the simmering wine seasons the chicken, the chicken seasons the wine, helping transform it into a savory sauce.
In a traditional coq au vin, which hails from the Burgundy region, wine is used both to tenderize what was traditionally a tough old rooster (a coq in French) and to imbue the meat with its heady flavor. That initial browning creates the foundation of the sauce, lending complex layers of flavor to the final dish. You brown the meat, add liquid to the pot, be it water, wine or stock, and then set it over low heat for a lengthy simmer. Braising chicken in wine is an age-old tradition, and a method used all over France.
0 kommentar(er)
