This Coq au Vin Will Seal the Deal | With Babish

[00:03] It's our third date. The one where you come back to mine's so I can cook for come back to mine's so I can cook for you. But who knows? I'm wearing probably this exact shirt, textured t-shirt with tighter arms so I look buff. I'm

[00:15] drinking whiskey on an empty stomach cuz I'm nervous. And I'm making you cocoon because let's face it, there's nothing that gets a third day done like cocoon. that gets a third day done like cocoon. [Music]

[00:45] This episode is sponsored by Challenge Dairy, the new butter in my kitchen. it, is in the same family as Danish crearyy, but Challenge has innovated the in four tablespoon chunks so you can throw it into your noodles, your pan

[00:59] butter to elevate this date night cocoon. So whether you're tackling a weekend cooking project like this dish, or getting dinner on the table quickly, For more info on challenge and find yourself some butter cubes, scan the QR

[01:13] code or head to the description. Cocoon doesn't just sound romantic, it is doesn't just sound romantic, it is romantic. It's deep, dark flavors earned with time and heat, passion, and you can communicate that to your partner with

[01:26] every bite. Sex stuff. So, what does mean? Literally translated, it means with wine, which isn't just what I call my Saturday nights. It's also literally rooster or with wine. Roosters are

[01:41] very, very tough birds. They're pretty much all dark meat. So, they need a slow and low cook, which is where this recipe came from. Nowadays, very hard to get rooster and it's not terribly good. So, our best bet is to use dark meat

[01:53] thighs. You could also use drumsticks, but I prefer the thighs because I want crispy skin on my cocoon. And given that this poultry will be partially submerged, the only way to make sure that all my skin is crispy is to use

[02:06] thighs. So, first thing we have to do is trim and dry brine these thighs. So, I'm cutting off any excess skin. So, if you have any huge kind of hanging chads like have any huge kind of hanging chads like this one, you can just clamp lose it.

[02:21] Now that these guys are trimmed up, we're going to dry brine theming out on both sides with just a light little layer of salt. This is virtually always a good idea with any kind of meat. Uh especially things going into a braze

[02:34] because it's going to help it retain moisture and stay tender and not dry out over the long cook time. So, these guys are going into the fridge for at least 6 are going into the fridge for at least 6 hours. Ideally, 24, even 36. And because

[02:46] this is television, of course, I have swaps. This is what's going to look like after about 6 hours. You'll see that the the skin almost becomes a little more translucent. It dries out, becomes a little glossy, and it's got a tacky,

[02:59] almost semi-sticky texture to it. All ideal. All what we're looking for. Now, it's time to address the other dark meat in the room, the bacon. Ideally, you want to get slab bacon, whole pieces that you can cut into ladon, which are

[03:11] these big crispy hunks. All I could find in this case was some nice thick cut. If you use thin bacon, that will still work. It will definitely impart the flavor, but this has a better chance of staying crispier. Normally, cocoon is

[03:25] not a dish associated with crispness, but I think that it adds a whole other dimension. So, this bacon is going into a cold pan. Try to get everybody out into a relatively even layer. And to this amount of bacon, this is about a/2

[03:38] this amount of bacon, this is about a/2 lb. I'm going to add about maybe a/4 cup of water to a/3 of a cup. So, I'm putting this over medium heat. And I'm not just the bacon on the bottom of the pan is going to have its fat rendered

[03:51] and it's going to help us get crispier bacon. Then, I'm going to uncover it, remaining fat will fry the bacon the rest of the way. You'll also notice that temperature. the bacon is not spatting or sputtering. There's a lot of foods in

[04:07] high heat fast. Otherwise, you won't get good browning. Not the case with bacon. If you fried this bacon hot and fast, the fat would not get the chance to render out, and you'd end up with a crispy exterior and a kind of flabby

[04:20] interior. That's nice for snacking, but for this case, I want these guys to be crunch, or as you Americans would call it, crunchy. Now that the bacon's looking pretty much done, I can pour it out into a sie, reserving the bacon fat.

[04:36] Spread these bits out on a paper towel where they can just sit and as they cool, they're going to become incredibly crispy. And then we're left with our bacon fat. You can see that there's some particulate in this detritus from the

[04:49] bacon, but it's all on the bottom. So, if we just sort of spoon the fat off the top, we can use it for frying the chicken and bolster the bacon flavor in our cocoa van. So, now it's time to prep our veg. And as you can see, we have the

[05:01] usual French stew suspects. We have onion, celery, carrot, garlic, mirua, garlic, and I like to add it a little secret ingredient, parsnip. Parsnips add a delightful sweetness that you might not expect in Coco Fun. But enough about

[05:15] that. You said that your friend Beth was being super weird. Tell me more. So, for sized pieces so that they cook at relatively the same rate.

[05:27] Last up, the garlic. I've got three big cloves here. I'm going to slice them very thinly, lengthwise. You can see the cross-section of the clove in a lovely way, and I think it's just going to add more dimension to the look of our dish.

[05:40] Traditionally, bouquet garnney is a little bit of parsley, thyme, sometimes rosemary, and bay leaves tied up inside a leak leaf. But we live in the modern cheesecloth. Basically, what we're doing here is making a homemade tea bag with

[05:55] all of our herbs inside it so they don't end up in the sauce, but we get all to add one of my little secret ingredients, some dried porchini mushrooms. What this is going to do is impart that lovely

[06:08] mushroom flavor without having to actually put mushrooms in the braise and them ending up all mushy and slippery. Pile all of our herbs in there. I'm also going to throw a couple peppercorns in here. Now, you could just tie this with

[06:21] string, but if you don't have any string handy, you can always just grab yourself an extra length of cheesecloth. You can just use this bit of cheesecloth as a piece of string. And just like that, you got yourself a little little tea bag, a

[06:36] little flavor bomb that we can throw in there and discard after the fact. Last thing we got to talk about before we start cooking is booze. This is of course cocoon. That means with wine. So, we need wine. For the wine, we

[06:48] need a fullbodied red, like a pino noir or a burgundy. If you don't know what wine to use, go to your local alcohol dealership, and ask the dealer where the full-bodied reds are. When it comes to cooking wine, generally the cheaper the

[07:01] complexity of an expensive wine. It's just a waste. Then we've got cognac or brandy. This is optional, but it makes you look really cool cuz we're going to cocoon flavor. We just need a little splash of it. The amount of chicken that

[07:14] we're using, four thighs, about a pound and a half. I'm going to get about a cup and a half. I'm going to get about a cup and a half of red wine at the ready. Wine is a nice deep cherry red that's going to translate to a lovely color at

[07:26] the end of the cook. Now, on to the question of stock. Like most things in life, it benefits the most from homemade, deeply gelatinized stock. trying to make this on a week night for dinner for eight screaming kids and two

[07:41] screaming husbands and four screaming wives. It's you guys are a mess, honestly. Like, you got to get this whole polycule like tied down. So, my go-to recommendation is this better than bullion. This stuff makes 38 cups of

[07:55] stock per jar. It stays in the fridge for a very, very long time. And it actually tastes good. Like, it tastes like chicken. Taking about a teaspoon's worth. You need a teaspoon per cup of water. And I'm just going to mix it in

[08:07] there. Now, to bolster this stock and create a better imitation of homemade stock, we're going to add some gelatin. That is the prized prize of making stock yourself is that you get natural gelatin extracted from connective tissue and

[08:21] bone and stuff. So for one cup of stock, I generally do one to two teaspoons of little tricky. First off, make sure that you're using cold or room temperature liquid. And let's pour this into a bowl. That's going to give us much more

[08:36] surface area so that we can sprinkle this evenly and it can incorporate more naturally. Just keep going slow. You don't want powder to settle on top of the gelatin as it hydrates. As you can see, I've got no lumps. I've got no

[08:52] pockets of powder. This is just fully bloom gelatin, which we're just going to let sit for a minute to properly hydrate before using in our recipe.

[09:11] hot, hard, trying to say. [Music]

[09:24] Plus, we have everything prepped and ready for the braise. So, you know what time it is? That's right. It's time to get cooking. You didn't know I had that tattoo, did you? So, the first thing we have to do is get our chicken skin nice

[09:37] and crispy. This might sound weird, but I am putting these chicken thighs into a cold pan, skin side down. So, this is going to be a little weird, but I'm going to have to do this over here. And that's because this burner is bigger,

[09:49] and we need good solid even heat, especially with a pan this big. So, I'm starting over like medium low flame. When you're learning how to use never to do this. So, you're told to get the pan ripping hot so that food doesn't

[10:02] stick. And basically what this is doing is it's going to render all the fat out liquid fat that the chicken starts to fry in. And then once you've got a lift off the bottom like this is a non-stick pan. Now, there's probably a/4

[10:18] I'm going to turn up the heat a little bit. Any pale parts on the outside, I'm just tilting that fat right into it so that it basically just deep fries. As you can see, when it's ready, it lifts right off. It's beautifully golden

[10:34] brown. Look at those. Dear God, they smell delicious. They look delicious. And they're just completely even. What we have here are two very important things. We have a whole lot of chicken fat and we have fond. We don't need all

[10:47] want to incorporate some bacon fat. So, I'm going to pour off a decent amount. Leave maybe, I don't know, 2 tablespoons in there. I'm going to add a little bit of our bacon fat. We want to get this over medium mediumigh heat. Now, we're

[11:03] going to sauté. As these start to release moisture, you'll see that the fond starts to scrape up already. So, yeah, I've got these bits right here. get them off. So, make sure they're covered with vegetables. They won't

[11:17] burn. Now, you can see as the vegetables have released moisture, it's starting to come up off the bottom. All right, our veg is looking great. It's got nice color in it. It's got nice caramelization. So now the next three

[11:31] additions are going to happen in rapid succession. First up, our slivered garlic. Just sauté for about 30 seconds. We just want to get some garlic smell in the air. Now I've got about one tablespoon of flour. Now I'm sprinkling

[11:44] cheaters r because it sticks to the veg. You can see that they're getting pasty. We got our tomato paste. I'm going to do about 2 tablespoons worth. Mix that in. Let it start sticking to

[11:56] Fun. That's going to taste incredible. Look at that. And now for the scary/f fun bit. I'm going to add big old splash of brandy. of brandy. And then lame it. Flambe is not for the

[12:09] faint of heart. It's dangerous. But I like danger. And as much as I like danger, you can do it more safely by turning off your stove's flame and something that keeps your hands away from the flame. And then turning the

[12:24] flame back on once the alcohol is burned off. As long as there's liquid in the pan, nothing's going to burn. But as soon as that evaporates, we need to get to scraping cuz all that stuff is stuck.

[12:38] There we go. Now for the rest of the stuff. We have our chicken stock. We thickened to an almost gravy like consistency. So, we're on the right consistency. So, we're on the right track. Then we're going to add our wine.

[12:52] 1 and 1/2 cups. This is our gold color here. Brownish red. So now we're going to bring this up to a simmer and we're going to reduce it. I want the veg just peeking out a little bit. At this stage, we can also add our sort of tea bag. The

[13:06] going to turn this down. In fact, I'm going to turn it off. I'm grabbing our already quite crispy chicken thighs. These need to be nestled down in there. making sure that the skin is above the water mark.

[13:21] And it's headed into a 350° Fahrenheit oven for anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour until the chicken is tender, the skin is crisp, and the vegetables are nice and soft and fully cooked. Now, on to the matter of the mushrooms. And all

[13:34] we really need for this are the mushrooms, some salted challenge butter. That salt is going to help draw moisture out of the mushrooms faster so they fresh thyme. Time and mushrooms go

[13:46] amount of mushrooms, I'm going to do about a tablespoon and a half of challenge butter. Add our mushrooms. Also, mushrooms love to suck up fat a toss to make sure that everybody gets a little bit of fat. This is actually

[14:01] not a good opportunity to cover the pan. Let the mushrooms steam, which will draw instead of the ones that are just in contact with the bottom of the pan. Now, when we remove the lid, you'll see ton of steam, shrunken mushrooms,

[14:16] and water. Something you might not know about mushrooms is that they're very, very wet. And all that moisture needs to evaporate before they can brown and the mayard reaction can occur. Now that they're starting to pick up some color,

[14:29] cooking. I'm going to add that chopped fresh thyme. Let that get a little bit of heat. Just add a whole new dimension to the mushrooms. All right, there are lovely golden brown butter fried mushrooms. Now, for the pearl onions,

[14:44] because they're way more convenient and they're just as good. Being honest, I'm going to sauté them in the Julia Child fashion, which means they need to be dried with extreme prejudice cuz if they're covered in water, when you add

[14:58] them to the hot pan, they are going to put a scare into you. They're going to you're not invincible. Over in the non-stick, I'm going to heat tablespoon and a half of butter. Add our very dry

[15:10] pearl onions. Toss them around in the butter so that the butter doesn't brown. moments cuz we want to get some nice browning on them. All right, they got some nice color, some nice browning on them. So that means it's time. We're

[15:22] them. So that means it's time. We're going to add one cup of beef broth. the stove top for about 30 minutes. Our onions are nice and tender. So now I'm

[15:34] going to uncover them and let most of this liquid cook off until they're very soft and jammy and have a nice thick sauce enveloping them. As you can see, our onions have become a lovely shade of golden brown. Most of the liquid is

[15:51] cooked off and now they're just in this very thick, very rich sauce. I'm going we're ready to serve. So, we're going to serve our cocoa van with some buttered noodles. But not just any buttered noodles. The best buttered noodles by

[16:04] virtue of my new favorite sauce in the whole wide world, Burmont. Sounds sexy because it's French. So, it is. But it's also a versatile and staple butter emulsion that your pasta is just begging for.

[16:24] going to evaporate. That's absolutely fine. And now we're going to turn down turn this down all the way to low. We're going to start adding our challenge to do is add butter little pieces at a time, keeping it over hilariously low

[16:38] heat. Just enough to melt the butter until we have a thick creamy emulsion. Look at that. It just creates this gorgeous shiny, thick, stable butter sauce. And there you have it. Burmont sauce. It's It's got the consistency of

[16:53] an Alfredo sauce. You've never seen butter sauce like this. We're going to it sit until we're ready to eat and we've got our pasta cooked. Then I'm going to pour this over the pasta. The heat from that could split it. In which

[17:06] case, add a little bit of pasta cooking water. It'll come right back together.

[17:20] clearcut. All right, the timer just went off for our cocoavon. Let's take a peek. Oh, it cocoavon. Let's take a peek. Oh, it smells nuts. It looks beautiful. So, I'm

[17:32] going to remove the chicken carefully, trying not to get any sauce on that skin. Being out of the steam bath is going to help the skin crisp up even further. Now, this guy we're going to aggressively reduce. You can see how

[17:44] much it's reduced. You can see the water mark here from where the liquid was. I'm going to reduce it by half again until it's a thick glossy sauce. As you can see, the chicken has browned up beautifully and it is

[18:00] glassy crisp on the on the on the outside. I'm actually going to throw these into a 400° Fahrenheit convection oven and give them just literally 2 or 3 minutes to put a final crisp on that skin. Okay, that's looking like the

[18:13] sauce of my dreams. Look at that. Kill the heat and get served with buttered egg noodles, which is lovely. I like to use a really nice macaroni style pasta, just little pieces

[18:26] of pasta that I can just bathe in butter and just scoop up with all my wine and vegetables and chicken. I have this very beautiful crest deallo. I think that's was how you say it. A lovely sort of fluted macaroni. Uh, and it's been cut

[18:42] going to get starchier pasta water and the butter is going to cling to it better. cooking them in not very much liquid. starchier pasta water in case we need to bolster this butter sauce. Now, we can

[18:57] discard our herbs packet. I'm going to place it in a mesh sie and really press out all that liquid cuz everything that's in here is going to be laden with of the oven, I'm going to add a bunch of mushrooms and bacon to the sauce. We're

[19:12] mushrooms and bacon to the sauce. We're hanging on to some for garnish. That is proper cocoavon sauce. I'm going to start warming this back up before the chicken comes out cuz I want to rest it right in here for service. Now, these

[19:25] right in here for service. Now, these are crazy properly crispy. Am I telling you that I'm a thigh man? I mean, I didn't intend that at all, but I mean, I didn't intend that at all, but I totally am. Like, big time. Like,

[19:40] that's it for me. The chicken thigh, but also your thigh. kill the sauce cuz it's bubbling. I don't want it to boil off any further. Nestle these guys back in there. Just remind them where they came from. Pasta is almost done. And I really

[19:52] don't want this to break the sauce. So, I'm going to do it over here off heat. Yeah, sauce is still creamy and thick. That's emulsifying together with the pasta cooking water, creating one of God's own gifts. Hit it with a

[20:07] little bit of kosher salt, freshly ground pepper as well. Okay, time to plate up and eat. Get our beautiful buttered pasta in there. Then we've got

[20:19] buttered pasta in there. Then we've got our lovely cocoon sauce. That sauce is noodles and you're going to die a happy person. Crispy chicken right over top. Nestle it into the sauce like that. Hit it with some of our jammy caramelized

[20:33] pearl onions, some of our sauteed mushrooms, and of course, some of our crispy bacon bits. I'm going to garnish the chicken with parsley and garnish the the chicken with parsley and garnish the pasta with chives. There you have it. An

[20:48] pasta with chives. There you have it. An absolutely stunning bowl of cocoon, a classic French poultry braise. And you might have had cocoon in the past, but I unless you just made it along with me watching the show. But enough talking

[21:01] about it. Let's try it out. Super creamy, glossy pasta. Sweet, rich, jammy onions. crispy. Actually, crispy skinned chicken thighs, but I'm on a fully

[21:13] chicken thighs, but I'm on a fully loaded bite. Come on. favorite slow and low dishes. It's packed with all different kinds of flavors and textures. One of the most richly richly flavored

[21:27] stews or brazes you're ever going to have. The flavor combination is stupendous. The herbs accentuate all this rich meaty flavor and then you get this hit of bacon in there and then the onions, the jammy sweet onions. It's a

[21:42] whole experience this thing. This dish is an is is an experience to be had. hope you enjoyed. I hope you try this for yourself because it's a little labor intensive, but in less than 2 hours you could have this on the table, which

[21:55] again is labor intensive, but you know, you could be cooking all day and not have a meal like this. I love you, too. Oh, you meant the chicken. You love the love you, too. I was talking to the chicken as though it were a person

[22:09] because that's how I feel about meats. I am a a vegan. I've loved working with to partner with another butter in the same family, Challenge Dairy, the one with the elk on it. Challenge is special because all of their dairy farmers are

[22:23] made in California, meaning from cow to butter is no more than 48 hours. This fresh and that Challenge is sustainable new butter cubes. Challenge is perfectly portioned and ready to be grabbed for

[22:37] to show you what we get up to next with more butter. For more info on Challenge scan the QR code or head to the description. Well, I think this went really well and with your permission, I'd ask you to my bed.