Alsace & the North · Main
Coq au Riesling
- Intermediate
- 45 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, aromatics blooming from the first bite, with a clean, bright snap.
Ingredients
- 1 free range chicken, 1.8 kg, jointed into 8
- 30 g butter
- 20 ml neutral oil
- 150 g smoked lardons
- 250 g button mushrooms, quartered
- 3 shallots, chopped fine
- 500 ml dry Riesling
- 200 g crème fraîche, 30 percent fat
- 1 egg yolk
- 1 lemon
- Flat parsley, chopped
- Salt and white pepper
The skills inside
Reducing a sauceBraisingSweating aromatics: soft, never brownedThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · egg · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Colour the chicken skin side down in the butter and oil over moderate heat until pale gold only, lifting it out before the butter smells nutty; a dark crust muddies a white braise.
- Sweat the shallots and lardons in the same fat until the shallot is glassy, add the mushrooms and cook until they squeak and have given up their water.
- Pour in the Riesling, scrape the pan clean and reduce by a third, until the smell loses its raw alcohol edge.
- Return the legs, then the breasts twelve minutes later, and hold the pan at a bare tremble until the thigh joint runs clear and reads 74C (165F).
- Lift the chicken out, stir in the crème fraîche and reduce until the sauce coats a spoon, then pull the pan off the heat and whisk in the yolk slaked with a spoonful of the hot sauce. Sharpen with lemon, scatter parsley.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Braising 39 recipes
- The pieces went into the liquid already deep brown on their faces, and the pot floor gave up its fond to that liquid rather than keeping it.
- The liquid comes partway up the pieces and stays there for the whole cook (not submerged, not run dry), and it never boils: the surface trembles and no more.
- It went long enough for the collagen to convert: a fork twists in it with almost no resistance, and the piece still lifts out whole rather than falling into shreds.
- The liquid has become a sauce: it has body, it coats the back of a spoon, and it tastes concentrated rather than thin and washed out.
- The meat is moist and seasoned through to its centre, not dry fibres sitting inside a good sauce.
Where it goes wrong The oven or the burner ran too hot and the liquid boiled, so the fibres tightened and squeezed their moisture out: it shreds dry into a thin greasy liquid, and more time makes it worse rather than better.
Reducing a sauce 95 recipes
- A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
- Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
- The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
- Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
- Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.
Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chardonnay (village Burgundy)
- Also Right
- Chenin Blanc
- From the Taps
- Bière de garde
- Zero-Proof
- Verbena iced tea
Chicken is wine’s most agreeable partner. Match the SAUCE, not the bird: cream to oak, tomato to Sangiovese’s acid, herbs to Loire whites.
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